Immigration and criminalization in Canada: Assessing the current situation
The intersections between immigration and criminalization are numerous. Almost 20 years after the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) came into force in Canada, and in the wake of various key Supreme Court decisions, there is a need to take stock of this issue. The article offers a typology of existing intersections, along with an analysis of recent developments. It discusses the following issues: 1) the formal criminalization of certain migration strategies (the use of criminal offences listed in the IRPA); 2) the implications of a criminal record for immigration plans (inadmissibility for reasons of criminality); 3) procedural criminalization through the use, in immigration law, of institutions and practices traditionally associated with the criminal justice system (immigration detention); and 4) the policing and control of immigration status (collaboration between police forces and the Canada Border Services Agency). In the first three instances, the article also discusses recent key Supreme Court decisions: Appulonappa and B010 (2015), on the criminalization of irregular entry, Tran (2017), on exclusion for reasons of criminality, and Chhina (2019), on access to habeas corpus for people in immigration detention.