"This is how we keep our values alive": How Canadian Private Refugee Sponsors Make Sense of Challenges


Jennifer Peruniak, University of Toronto

Private sponsorship is an initiative that allows for refugees to resettle in Canada with support and funding from private and joint government-private sponsorship. “You are vulnerable by taking on the refugees” is a statement articulated by a sponsor, which encapsulates the highly intimate and complex dynamic within sponsorship. It requires an immense amount of time, energy, and care, taken upon by a group of people in order to help an unknown group of people in need. This paper analyzes 23 in depth semi-structured interviews with private sponsors of refugees in Ontario, these were conducted in person and on zoom before the COVID-19 pandemic. Interviews lasted between 1-2.5 hours. The sample includes a diverse mix of ages, gender, and educational backgrounds of sponsors. It examines the highly intimate relationship between sponsors and newcomer refugees as they aid in their settlement during their first 12 months in Canada. This research asks: how do sponsors navigate and cope with challenges of private sponsorship? It finds that sponsors navigate sponsorship through a white middle-class lens that idealizes Canada as a gift which they facilitate. Nguyen’s concept of the gift of freedom, whereby, liberal conceptions of freedom erase legacies of coloniality (2012), showcases the cyclical relationship between notions of gifts, and those who receive, are expressed through the triad of native/settler/alien. By studying how sponsors describe refugees, it reveals how such discussions contextualize broader discourse about Canadian landscape of immigrant and non-immigrant relations, underscored by power. The concept of Canada as a gift, one that is given or enacted upon by white citizens onto non-white immigrants, percolates beneath the surface of these interactions. Sponsors’ articulation of challenges highlights how the subjectivity of refugees’ post arrival, is viewed within a Westernized, Eurocentric lens. Findings indicate that sponsors enact their white middle class privilege within their actions toward refugees, which leads to tension within their relationship dynamic. Sponsors centre themselves within a perceived risk within the sponsorship relationship, despite refugees encountering greater personal, financial, and emotional risk through their experiences of migration. Thereby, despite their good intentions, sponsors who engage in this volunteer work reproduce white middle class understandings of how refugees should integrate, and thereby help reproduce, rather than mitigate inequality in Canada. Sponsors’ positions of privilege are fuelled by existing dimensions of power and are a site of power through which inequality is reproduced. Thus, intentions of individual actors to act on goodness do not combat the broader power structures. Logics of power are articulated through sponsors’ perceived challenges in the financial, cultural and gender dimensions. By examining the relationship between sponsors and refugees operating within an everyday realm, this paper shows how these intimate relations operate within a dialectic power structure that allow marginalized families to move across global space, but also reproduce the power of the white middle class in Canada. This research has important theoretical and policy applications for future private sponsors of refugees and adds nuance in understanding how these intimate dynamics operate.

This paper will be presented at the following session: