Aunties, Cops & Border Agents: Everyday Bordering of Noncitizen Children and Their Families through Canada's Child Welfare Systems

Background

Canada’s Child Protection System (CPS) remains a site where Black and racialized immigrants encounter disproportionate surveillance as racial “others” who are deemed a threat to their children and “Canadian norms.” (Adjei, 2018; Mohamud et al, 2021). While CPS has a dual mandate to protect children from abuse and promote child well-being, the adversarial investigatory structure of CPS and limited resources to address chronic needs (Haight et al., 2017) means that CPS workers are primarily focussed on preventing child maltreatment. Building upon previous scholarship on CPS’s differential response to racialized families, this paper examines CPS’s dual mandate as a site of everyday bordering for immigrant families. Yuval Davis and colleagues (2017) argue that everyday encounters with social workers construct boundaries of social, political, and spatial belonging between the imagined collective identity and gendered, racialized, and immigrant "others." Applying José Medina's (2012) conceptualization of racial ignorance, we consider how CPS workers passively and actively regulate immigrants through both the assessment of risk for child maltreatment and when providing support to immigrants through “voluntary” agreements.

Methods

This paper is part of a research collaboration among social work academics with first voice, child welfare and legal advocates in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Toronto, Ontario, the largest and most diverse cities in Canada. To understand CPS’ dual mandate when working with non citizens, we conducted 43 in-depth interviews with front-line workers and supervisors working in CPS or a community-based immigrant serving organization. Using critical discourse analysis methods (Gee, 2014; Lazar 2007) we analyze language in use in the transcribed interview data and field notes to consider how assessment for risk for child maltreatment is represented in relation to workers’ ways of talking about systemic inequities faced by immigrants who have a precarious status.

Results

Our analysis considers forms of passive and active forms of "racial ignorance"(Médina, 2012), and moral injury (Haight et al., 2016) among CPS workers who are often uncertain about the immigration status of children and youth they work with, have limited resources to support immigrant children who are excluded from accessing vital health and social services, or who view immigration concerns as outside their mandate.

Some visible forms of precarious status, however, notably shape CPS's differential response. Unaccompanied minors, who are seen as deserving of services, enable workers to fulfill their role in ensuring child well-being, whereas to resettled refugees are commonly viewed as in need of interventions to teach appropriate parenting in accordance with Canadian laws. Instances where immigrant parents seek out CPS assistance during times of insecurity, furthermore, can result in prolonged surveillance or loss of custody, highlighting the long-term consequences of family policing under CPS's dual mandate.

Conclusion

In the context of a growing immigrant population, systemic racism and exclusion faced by immigrants with precarious status not only complicates, but potentially augments the carceral dimensions of CPS’s dual mandate. Understanding immigration status as a determinant of well-being, therefore, is fundamental to ensuring a child’s best interests, while preserving fundamental rights to family unity as a human right.