State of imagination: embodiments of immigration Canada

This paper investigates Romanians' immigration to Canada after the fall of the communist regime, focusing on the case of applicants under the 'skilled workers and professionals' category. The empirical study of Canadian immigration policy constitutes the ground for a critical analysis of the nature of the state and modalities of state power. Selecting candidates for immigration involves a refined politics of making subjects, whereby the state is 'effected' through disciplinary inscriptions on migrants and projects of the self, materialized in extraterritorial social spaces, and objectified in a form of governmentality over 'external populations'. It also opens a space to explore the workings of the self in a globalized world. Rights to international mobility may generate not only hybrid sorts of legal subjects incompletely and imprecisely tied to two states, but also highly reflexive individuals, performatively enacting themselves as subjects of policies, discourses, and knowledges from positions of ontological and emotional liminality.