Non-citizenship as practice: The case of precarious lives of asylum-seeking mothers in Quebec


Övgü Ülgen, Université du Québec à Montréal

In 2017, there had been an increase in the number of asylum seekers coming to Canada, to a large extent to Quebec, Manitoba and British Colombia, that became a public concern through social media coverages, triggering an interest in researching this mobility (Lawlor and Paquet 2022, Zahid 2023, 10). In 2017, more than 18,000 asylum seekers among over 20,000 claimed asylum in the small town of Lacolle, Quebec (Duncan and Caidi 2018). In 2017-2018, according to data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), 54,660 people applied for asylum in Quebec and the majority of them came from Caribbean, Latin America and Africa (Hanley et al. 2021, Cénat, Charles, and Kebedom 2020). Asylum seekers in Canada live in conditions of precarity marked by the absence of permanent residence, work and residence permit, and citizenship rights such as access to public health assurance (Goldring, Berinstein and Bernhard 2009, 240-241). Since they have no recourse to human rights protections available to permanent residents and citizens following their exile, asylum seekers, especially asylum-seeking women, offer an interesting case study to explore how they experience human rights violations at the hands of the neoliberal state (OECD 2023). The significance of racialized motherhood and what mothering exercises constitute have extensively been studied and debated in the literature (Suerbaum and Lijnders 2023; Erel 2002; Collins 1994, 2000; Scheper-Hughes 1992; hooks 1991). As an analytical tool to investigate through gender lens, on the other hand, the concept of legal precarity has remained marginal and contested in academic discussions, which is a limit and a resource for further explorations (Suerbaum and Lijnders 2023, 196). In the Canadian literature, previous studies have focused on detention of asylum-seeking children and adults through post-migration stressors and housing problems and economic hardships that asylum seekers and refugees encountered (Cénat, Charles, Kebedom 2020, Cleveland et al. 2018, Goldring and Landolt 2013, Kronick, Rousseau and Cleveland 2015, Rose and Ray 2001). However, little is known about the relationship between motherhood, single motherhood in particular, and immigration in Canada that begs for further investigation (Lam, Collins and Wong 2020, Zhu 2016). In order to fill this gap in the literature and given the fact that the majority of the participants of this study were single mothers, this article aims to answer the following questions: To what extent asylum-seeking mothers’ status affect their labour market participation and what is the impact of this status on their well-being in Quebec? What strategies do these mothers, especially single mothers, develop for their own survival and how can we make sense of their agency within the framework of a system that marginalizes them? The article explores the interplay between motherhood and post-migratory trajectory of asylum-seeking women through factors such as legal precarity caused by unemployment and hurdles to access to health services, linguistic identity, resilience, and resistance within neoliberal multiculturalism and racial capitalism. The results discussed in this study were collected as part of a larger project examining the experiences of asylum seekers in the labour market, parents’ and children’s psychological wellbeing, networks, and how they met the challenges of isolation in Quebec. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and questionnaire with 12 asylum-seeking mothers who participated in the principal project followed by two focus groups with 16 actors from two school service councils, the article shows that despite Canada markets itself as raceless society open to immigration, its asylum policies employ a gendered racializing logic that hierarchizes its population along non-citizenship and that these divisions can be seen in labour recruitment practices, access to health services and linguistic discrimination.

Non-presenting author: Université du Québec à Montréal

This paper will be presented at the following session: