Few Rights, Many Responsibilities: A Discourse Analysis of Non-Citizens' Social Rights in Canadian Public Policy

Purpose: The goal of this study is to understand how social rights are constructed for non-citizens who have precarious migratory status. While Canada has historically welcomed immigrants for economic, family and humanitarian reasons, a growing proportion of people living in Canada have precarious migratory status including: refugee claimants, temporary workers, and nonstatus residents (Bernhard, Landolt, & Goldring, 2009). Precarious migratory status invokes uncertainty in the right to permanently reside in Canada, while restricting the social entitlements a migrant can claim from the state (e.g. housing, social assistance, healthcare). This work builds upon scholarship on the uneven claims to citizenship and related social rights for minoritized populations including indigenous groups, racialized minorities, and women. The outright exclusion of immigrants, contributes to issues of poverty and inequality; and is thus a pressing social justice concern.

Study Objectives: Our research questions explored: (1) What social rights are constructed for immigrants with precarious status vis-ŕ-vis citizens?; (2) What are the dominant discourses and implicit meanings of the discourses framing the social rights of this population?; (3) How do discourses from one policy arena correspond to or differentiate from discourses in other policy arenas?

Methods and Study Design: Using methods of interpretive discourse analysis we analyzed federal, provincial and municipal public policy documents. We examine the expression of social rights that pertain to the domains of education, childcare, income assistance programs and access to safety and police protection. Our interpretive methodology draws upon Derrida's (1982) focus on deconstruction and Foucault's (1979) notions of normalization and regulation. We retrieved and analyzed legislative texts (e.g. Canadian Human Rights Act, Ontario Human Rights Code, City of Toronto's Declaration of Non-discrimination Policy) using an iterative series of coding in relation to our analytic frames: market citizenship, social rights, and securitization.

Findings: Our findings expose rifts in policy in relation to social rights for immigrants with precarious status vis-ŕ-vis citizens and permanent residents. Layers of restrictive criteria based on migratory status limit access to social services with regard to perceptions of this population as deficient market citizens. Exclusion was most often framed in terms of protecting national ‘health, safety and security'. Our analysis illustrated myriad tensions: between rights and (market citizenship) responsibilities; between the various levels of governance in the articulation and interpretation of social rights; between the valued economic contribution of immigrants, who were also postulated to be criminal and thus a threat to national security. We also noted contradictions in defining membership based on residence, citizenship, or notions of humanity.

Implications: Amidst economic and political pressure to restrict social entitlements overall, it is imperative that social workers across national contexts to organize to develop individual, organizational, and policy alternatives to the redress the current state of injustice facing migrants with precarious status. We argue that a new framework is needed to conceptualize rights based on personhood versus citizenship, given our transforming (post)welfare state and its central foci on market citizenship and securitization.