Collection consists of research, scholarship and publications by faculty and graduate students affiliated with the School of Public Policy and Administration.
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Browsing Research and publications by Subject "Research Subject Categories::SOCIAL SCIENCES"
(Studies in Law, Politics and Society, 2013) Soennecken, Dagmar
While many consider court involvement in immigration matters a given, in liberal nation-states, there is actually a substantial degree of variation. This chapter revisits two “critical junctures” in the early immigration histories of Canada and Germany to show that institutions and policy legacies are not just historical backdrop, but actually shaped the strategies of political actors, subsequent institutional configurations, and policy options for long periods of time, thereby revealing unintended consequences, as well as alternative paths that the involvement of the courts (and other actors) could have taken.
Although refugees are protected by a myriad of legal norms, this article shows that the domestic process of determining who is awarded this status has become more and more managerialized, even in a country like Canada, which has generally been considered a leader among refugee-receiving countries. This privileging of efficiency-based standards has gradually sidelined an earlier push to judicialize refugee determination procedures to the extent that access to the courts for refugees more generally is now considered problematic and ultimately suspect. The article uses historic institutional tools to highlight the critical role that the external, political environment has played in gradually managerializing refugee determination procedures.