Bordering by sleight of hand: rights, race, and the unmaking of Canada’s refugee protection system
Published In
International Journal of Refugee Law
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-2026
Subjects
Canada, rights, race, refugees, law
Abstract
This article analyzes the unmaking of Canada’s refugee protection system through a series of asylum reforms introduced between 2020 and 2026. It begins with the Covid-19 border closure in 2020, continues with the implementation of the Additional Protocol to the Safe Third Country Agreement in 2023, and culminates in the enactment of Bill C-12 in 2026. Drawing on an in-depth case study of an asylum seeker who was interviewed for this research, the analysis is anchored in E Tendayi Achiume’s theory of borders as sites of ‘jurisdictional conjuring’, where legal rights and obligations can be made to disappear, as if by magic. The article is structured around the three stages of a magic trick: the pledge, the turn, and the prestige. The pledge sets out the legal framework governing asylum at the Canadian border, focusing on the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement. The turn examines the effects of Canada’s pandemic-era ‘direct back’ policy, and identifies it as a form of legal sleight of hand that deferred protection, displaced legal responsibility, and obscured the racialized effects of the border closure. The prestige then traces the transformation of these temporary emergency measures into permanent laws and policies through the 2023 Additional Protocol and 2026 reforms enacted through Bill C-12. It foregrounds the racialized dimensions of these measures, to highlight their disparate impact on racialized asylum seekers from the Global South. More broadly, it argues that Canada engaged a legal sleight of hand to evade its legal obligations towards asylum seekers, while simultaneously obscuring the racial consequences of these policies. It concludes by calling for greater scrutiny of the legal fictions that sustain this system, and for renewed commitment to meaningful refugee protection under Canadian law.
DOI
10.1093/ijrl/eeag025
Citation Details
E. Arbel, "Bordering by sleight of hand: rights, race, and the unmaking of Canada’s refugee protection system" (2026) 38:2 International Journal of Refugee Law.