Xenoracial Capitalism and the Status-Exclusion of Canada’s ‘Dreamers’

Abstract

This dissertation examines how and why status-excluded (undocumented) migrant youth in Canada – Canada's “Dreamers” – are systematically precluded from accessing postsecondary education and pathways to permanent residency. Its central thesis is that status-excluded youth are not people who have simply “fallen through the cracks”. Rather, they are produced, regulated, exploited, and expelled through what I term a regime of “xenoracial capitalism” – a system of accumulation in which immigration law functions as a primary constitutive site of intersecting colonialisms, racialization, and capitalist labour extraction. The dissertation develops a tripartite methodological framework. Legal-historical analysis traces the evolution of Canadian migration law from its origins in imperial mobility rights through the era of white settler nationalism and into the neoliberal present, revealing status-exclusion as a persistent and largely intentional shadow policy. A law and political economy framework, grounded in xenoracial capitalism and decolonial theory, situates contemporary immigration law as structurally organized around profit-making (through exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion) and race-making (through stratification, segregation, and sacrifice zones). Qualitative empirical research, drawing on semi-structured interviews with twenty-two current and former status-excluded youth aged 18–35 and five expert stakeholders, grounds abstract claims in lived collective experience. The empirical findings reveal how status-excluded youth navigate an immigration status pyramid defined by pervasive chutes (mechanisms where people lose status) and few, fragile status ladders. These in turn normalize conditions of discriminatory tuition fees, wage theft and labour exploitation, precarious housing, criminalization, and deportability. Early 21st century regulatory developments, including the Canadian Experience Class and Post-Graduate Work Permit, transformed ostensible pathways into gauntlets towards PR that hyperexploit migrant workers and students by concentrating power in the hands of employers and schools. Recent legislation such as Bill C-12 indicate that status-excluded people is now firmly entrenched as a shadow policy that organizes the mass production of an invisibilized, racially stratified lower-caste population. The dissertation concludes by charting three normative legal-political horizons that undermine xenoracial capitalism: regularization and status for all; internationalist worker organizing; and decolonizing migration through engagement with Indigenous legal orders and sovereignty. Together, these challenge liberal human rights framings and demand structural transformation of the xenoracial capitalist order.