Moral Panic and Embodied Threat: The Discourse on Criminal Deportation and Youth Experiences of Violence in Canada

Bill C-43: Faster Removal of Foreign Criminals Act enacts changes to deportation policy that can be expected to intensify the threat of deportation for racialized youth, their families and communities members, and to exacerbate existing social divisions in Canada. This paper argues that these changes to Canadian deportation policy advance to new heights the criminalization and alienation of Blackness while maintaining a national mythology of a benevolent and humanitarian nation. This paper conducts a critical discourse analysis of the major House of Commons political debates on Bill C-43, which adapts and applies the moral panic framework and folk devil figure from Hall and others (1978), revealing the ways in which they are employed within the Canadian discourse on deportation. The debate is analyzed in light of an extensive literature review that explores the history of criminalization of immigrants and prior deportation legislation in Canada. This analysis reveals how prominent tropes of the benevolent and multicultural Canadian state, and the demonized figure of the criminal immigrant are invoked across party lines to reignite a moral panic around immigrant criminality. By bringing together activist and academic anti-racist and anti-oppressive theory, the paper opens new pathways to understanding the complex socio-historical factors that operate within and emerge from these debates. It puts this discussion in conversation with an interdisciplinary archive including diasporic thought and critical prison studies, which usefully analyze the interconnectedness of racism, incarceration, and displacement, an analysis which I extend to deportation. In addition, critical border studies are mobilized to locate the criminalization of immigrants in the context of the restriction of Canadian borders. Building on the work of McKittrick (2006) on Black geographies, the paper coins the concept of "alienation" to describe the psychic and physical displacement experienced by racialized subjects in Canada, through social, cultural and political dispossession, incarceration, and finally deportation. Grounded in the socio-historical context of colonization, conquest and racist immigration policy, this work destabilizes the national mythology that displaces and criminalizes Blackness in Canada by tracing the roots of systemic violence in the Canadian nation state and unsettling it as the basis of permanent removal of racialized subjects from national borders.