In Canada’s liberal dream, the law extends its benefits to everyone. But the law also determines who is included in that “everyone.” Migrant workers, long welcomed in Canada for their labour, are often excluded from both workplace protections and basic social benefits such as health care, income assistance, and education due to their lack of permanent status.

Enforcing Exclusion recasts what migration status means to both the state and to non-citizens. Through interviews with migrants and their advocates, Sarah Marsden shows that migrants face barriers in law, policy, and practice, affecting their ability to address adverse working conditions and their interactions with institutions such as hospitals, schools, and employment standards boards. In documenting the impact of precarious migration status on people’s lives, Marsden questions the adequacy of human-rights-based responses in addressing its exclusionary effects.

Sarah Grayce Marsden's profile page

Sarah Grayce Marsden is an assistant professor in Thompson Rivers University’s Faculty of Law. Her research focuses on migration, labour, and social justice. She has published articles in the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, and the Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal, among others. She has also co-authored a clinical legal text, Clinical Law: Practice, Theory, and Social Justice Advocacy (with Sarah Buhler and Gemma Smyth).

Although this book takes an anthropological approach and focuses on precarious migrants in Canada, its interdisciplinarity makes it relevant to a broader audience. Through testimonies and life stories, it provides a much-needed account of how immigration laws and policies foster the exclusion of migrants in their daily lives. It will be enriching for anyone researching immigration law and policy from a legal or political perspective, as well as for anyone studying the anthropology and sociology of migration.

Oxford Law Review

Enforcing Exclusion should be on every immigration lawyer’s bookshelf.

Canadian Law Library Review