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This dissertation examines how and why status-excluded (undocumented) migrant youth in Canada – Canada's “Dreamers” – are systematically precluded from accessing postsecondary education and pathways to permanent residency. Its central thesis is that status-excluded youth are not people who have simply “fallen through the cracks”. Rather, they are produced, regulated, exploited, and expelled through what I term a regime of “xenoracial capitalism” – a system of accumulation in which immigration law functions as a primary constitutive site of intersecting colonialisms, racialization, and capitalist labour extraction. The dissertation develops a tripartite methodological framework. Legal-historical analysis traces the evolution of Canadian migration law from its origins in imperial mobility rights through the era of white settler nationalism and into the neoliberal present, revealing status-exclusion as a persistent and largely intentional shadow policy. A law and political economy framework, grounded in xenoracial capitalism and decolonial theory, situates contemporary immigration law as structurally organized around profit-making (through exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion) and race-making (through stratification, segregation, and sacrifice zones). Qualitative empirical research, drawing on semi-structured interviews with twenty-two current and former status-excluded youth aged 18–35 and five expert stakeholders, grounds abstract claims in lived collective experience. The empirical findings reveal how status-excluded youth navigate an immigration status pyramid defined by pervasive chutes (mechanisms where people lose status) and few, fragile status ladders. These in turn normalize conditions of discriminatory tuition fees, wage theft and labour exploitation, precarious housing, criminalization, and deportability. Early 21st century regulatory developments, including the Canadian Experience Class and Post-Graduate Work Permit, transformed ostensible pathways into gauntlets towards PR that hyperexploit migrant workers and students by concentrating power in the hands of employers and schools. Recent legislation such as Bill C-12 indicate that status-excluded people is now firmly entrenched as a shadow policy that organizes the mass production of an invisibilized, racially stratified lower-caste population. The dissertation concludes by charting three normative legal-political horizons that undermine xenoracial capitalism: regularization and status for all; internationalist worker organizing; and decolonizing migration through engagement with Indigenous legal orders and sovereignty. Together, these challenge liberal human rights framings and demand structural transformation of the xenoracial capitalist order.

This paper examines historical and contemporary trends in Canadian international student policy through the lens of racial capitalism, arguing that current policy facilitates a significant neocolonial wealth transfer from Global South families to Canada through processes of expropriation, exploitation, and expulsion. It argues that discriminatory tuition fees effectively function as “education head taxes”, which extract billions of dollars annually from international students. Meanwhile, “gauntlets” to permanent residency have emerged in an immigration landscape where working class migrants have narrower options to regularize, creating a system of labour exploitation where student-labourers face precarious conditions and structural indebtedness. Finally, the constant threat of expulsion through loss of status and deportation is used to discipline labour and enforce nationalist segregation of labour and education markets. Within all three of these processes, race-making and neocolonial relations play a central role in justifying differential treatment, curtailing solidarity, and limiting potential policy changes to curtail abuses.

On the anniversary of the Nakba, Asians in Canada must reaffirm solidarity with Palestinian brethren

This article delves into the recent efforts of Asian migrant massage and sex workers in the Town of Newmarket, Ontario, and their struggle against a recently amended Personal Wellness Establishments (PWE) By-law. It starts with a historical overview of municipal licensing schemes and legislated migration controls in Canada, used to justify increased surveillance, control movement, and deny Asian women entry into Canada, before illustrating the enduring impacts on Asian migrant workers today. It concludes by emphasizing that migrant sex workers, often depicted as voiceless and nonconsenting victims, take leadership and have agency in defining their own struggles and authoring possibilities to resist.

The Supreme Court has chosen to exclude from intervention the voices of those directly impacted. This exclusion rehearses Canada’s longer history of excluding sex workers.

In a global era marked by surging racial nationalism and penal populism , anti-racist and decolonial research, education, and training has been under increasing threat in academia across the world. Popular use of the universalizing language of liberal internationalism as the dominant frame in discussing these developments leaves gaps in our understanding as to what areas of academic freedom are under the greatest threat, why they are under threat, what levers of sanction and discipline are used to suppress certain areas, and for what ends. Such a frame risks contributing to overly abstracted conceptualizations of academic freedom (and unfreedom) that are unmoored from the realities of how power operates in educational institutions and attendant maldistributions of who can in fact claim and be protected by academic freedom and who cannot.In this article, I put into conversation three very different jurisdictional contexts where nationalist backlash to, and suppression of, anti-racist and decolonial education and scholarship is occurring. Specifically, it examines American anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) campaigns, Chinese suppression of scholarship critical of its ongoing colonial suppression of non-Han native peoples in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), and Israeli suppression of scholarship critical of its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories through the case study of the ‘Spiro scandal’ at the University of Toronto (UofT) Faculty of Law. No good politics of academic freedom can emerge without centering an analysis of broader societal power and subordination. This is particularly true in the areas of national security and anti-racism, which form both distinct grounds for legal and political intervention in academic freedom. A national security threat engages certain types of legal grounds, particularly domestically (e.g. carceral responses to perceived counterterrorism, separatism, and extremism threats) while anti-racism justifies other types of intervention (e.g. civil rights complaints, removing of curriculum, firings, cutting funding) and can operate powerfully on a transnational level as well. I highlight three common elements in a transnational blueprint that can be observed in the creation, justification, and operation of selective nationalist attacks on academic freedom in anti-racist and decolonial education. My highlighting of these common elements are not meant to suggest any sort of equivalence between their operation, historical context, and/or relative severity, but rather to advance our collective understanding of the distributive nature of academic freedom politics and its relationship to power, race, and colonialism. Unpacking these campaigns transnationally complicates and unsettles the dichotomy between authoritarian and liberal populist censorship, giving us a more nuanced foundation by which to protect academic freedom and knowledge production in the service of racial justice and collective liberation.

The recent deaths of migrants trying to cross the Canada-U.S. border through Indigenous territory highlight the history of colonial dispossession that the border represents.

In a global era marked by surging racial nationalism and penal populism , anti-racist and decolonial research, education, and training has been under increasing threat in academia across the world. Popular use of the universalizing language of liberal internationalism as the dominant frame in discussing these developments leaves gaps in our understanding as to what areas of academic freedom are under the greatest threat, why they are under threat, what levers of sanction and discipline are used to suppress certain areas, and for what ends. Such a frame risks contributing to overly abstracted conceptualizations of academic freedom (and unfreedom) that are unmoored from the realities of how power operates in educational institutions and attendant maldistributions of who can in fact claim and be protected by academic freedom and who cannot.In this article, I put into conversation three very different jurisdictional contexts where nationalist backlash to, and suppression of, anti-racist and decolonial education and scholarship is occurring. Specifically, it examines American anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) campaigns, Chinese suppression of scholarship critical of its ongoing colonial suppression of non-Han native peoples in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), and Israeli suppression of scholarship critical of its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories through the case study of the ‘Spiro scandal’ at the University of Toronto (UofT) Faculty of Law. No good politics of academic freedom can emerge without centering an analysis of broader societal power and subordination. This is particularly true in the areas of national security and anti-racism, which form both distinct grounds for legal and political intervention in academic freedom. A national security threat engages certain types of legal grounds, particularly domestically (e.g. carceral responses to perceived counterterrorism, separatism, and extremism threats) while anti-racism justifies other types of intervention (e.g. civil rights complaints, removing of curriculum, firings, cutting funding) and can operate powerfully on a transnational level as well. I highlight three common elements in a transnational blueprint that can be observed in the creation, justification, and operation of selective nationalist attacks on academic freedom in anti-racist and decolonial education. My highlighting of these common elements are not meant to suggest any sort of equivalence between their operation, historical context, and/or relative severity, but rather to advance our collective understanding of the distributive nature of academic freedom politics and its relationship to power, race, and colonialism. Unpacking these campaigns transnationally complicates and unsettles the dichotomy between authoritarian and liberal populist censorship, giving us a more nuanced foundation by which to protect academic freedom and knowledge production in the service of racial justice and collective liberation.

Newmarket’s draconian use of bylaws and licensing to target and displace Asian massage workers risks taking us back to a racist past in Canadian history, where Asians were seen as moral threats.

<div> While human rights remains the predominant lens used to analyze the Chinese government’s recent intensification of surveillance, incarceration, and contr

As a direct response to the extensive and ongoing police violence experienced throughout these past two years of struggle in Hong Kong, there has been an increasingly widespread understanding of the police force as structurally undemocratic, unaccountable, and subservient to the interests of elites. This has also led to the articulation by the protest movement of a “sixth demand”— to disband the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) altogether. The remarkable uptake of this demand sparked debate around exactly what dissolution of the HKPF would entail. Would it be reconstitution and reform? Or a more radical type of abolitionist politics? In grappling with this question, we encourage Hongkongers to engage with diverse decolonial and abolitionist struggles across the globe, along with existing and ongoing proto-abolitionist practices at home.

<div> This report examines the Canadian government’s repressive and carceral approach to human trafficking, which has created what the authors describe as an &