Refugee Claimants’ Settlement Trajectories: Exploring How the Context of Reception Shapes claimants’ Work of Status

Canada has felt the increasing pressure to accept refugees, especially as record numbers of migrants began claiming asylum at unofficial land border entry at Roxham Road in 2017. The analysis examined interviews with sixteen Roxham Road refugee claimants and forty professionals and volunteers who interacted with refugee claimants in Quebec, Ontario, Michigan, and New York State. Relying upon assemblage thinking, the analysis compared the same context of reception (CoR) at different temporal periods to show how the CoR shaped claimants’ Work of Status (WoS) and their Precarious Legal Status Trajectories (PLST). The findings exposed how the CoR became increasingly chaotic overtime. This increased claimants’ experience of bureaucratic violence when attempting to navigating barriers to service and justice. The findings also exposed how street-level actors, guided by humanitarian and feminist ethics of care attempted to organize chaos produced by increasingly illiberal immigration policies and practices through everyday acts of support and advocacy. The discussion considers how this chaos contributes to the narrowing of migrants’ rights, and although street-level actors offer vital material support, it still serves to sustain increasingly illiberal immigration structures, policies, and practices.