Regulating Spousal Migration through Canada's Multiple Border Strategy: The Gendered and Racialized Effects of Structurally Embedded Borders

As part of emerging scholarship on border governance, this article examines how discourses of “fraud” in Canada merge with public management techniques to produce structurally embedded borders. We focus on regulatory changes introduced between 2010 and 2014 that aimed to deter and punish people who participate in “marriage fraud.” We then present the gendered and racialized impact of antifraud regulations through a case analysis of the implementation of Conditional Permanent Resident status (PR) from 2012 to 2017, which required some newly sponsored spouses and partners to remain in a conjugal relationship with their sponsor for two years after immigration. Our analysis of parliamentary proceedings illustrates how public management logics and the use of new digital technologies are mobilized to expand border enforcement practices internally and outside the territorial boundaries of the nation. We argue that despite the repeal of conditional PR in 2017, the deterrence of marriage fraud through structurally embedded borders continues to regulate racialized immigrants in exclusionary ways that disproportionately impact women.