Building whose capacity? Investigating Canada’s extraterritorial campaign against human smuggling

Guest post by Corey Robinson. Corey Robinson is a Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Before starting at Glasgow in 2023, Corey was a Lecturer in International Relations at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. His work has appeared in Third World Quarterly, Geopolitics, International Political Sociology and Security Dialogue and in several scholarly volumes. This is the fifth post in the Border Criminologies' Global Compacts Thematic Series. 

In recent years, human smuggling has become the subject of considerable media attention and policy concern. In Canada and elsewhere, the politicised debate about irregular migration has taken centre stage amid alarmist claims about the global migration ‘crisis’ and the state of ‘chaos’ at the border. Not surprisingly, public discussion about human smuggling is overwhelmingly fixated on the physical space of the border, at sites of irregular border crossing, such as Roxham road and the border territory of Akwesasne along the St. Lawrence River. 

Yet, much of the political energy and resources devoted to controlling irregular flows have been focused far beyond the Canadian border, in places hidden from public view. Although the territorial border plays a crucial role in limiting mobility, as David Fitzgerald explains, most migration control, whether by land, air, or sea, occurs discreetly and at a considerable distance from the national territory. Indeed, Canada’s campaign against human smuggling has quietly expanded to new frontiers, through extraterritorial efforts that extend border enforcement to countries in Southeast Asia and West Africa. Here, the Canadian government enlists international organisations from the UN, particularly the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to build the capacity of local governments to interdict refugees and other migrants attempting to reach migrant receiving countries in the Global North. Capacity building—the coordination of transgovernmental networks, training and technical assistance, the dissemination of knowledge and norms and investment in equipment and infrastructure— offers a means of bolstering the state’s capacity to monitor and intercept migration flows at a distance.

As Nicholas Micinski and Philippe Bourbeau note in their contribution to the Special Issue in Geopolitics, the Global Compacts include mandates to build the capacity of governments, particularly in countries perceived to lack the bureaucratic resources and expertise to effectively manage migration. Canada, a ‘champion country’ for the implementation of the Global Compacts, has funded a range of capacity-building activities across the Global South. However, in my article I reveal how, under the banner of building capacity to counter human smuggling, Canada has engaged in interdiction practices that externalise international protection and undermine principles of responsibility sharing outlined in the Global Compacts. Capacity building, what Micinski and Bourbeau call a mode of ‘intervention-lite’ by the Global North in the Global South, enhances the capacity of affluent states to remote control migration. Far from being politically neutral, these seemingly technical, depoliticised interventions reinforce the structural conditions that produce displacement. 

It is worth noting that Canada’s international partners in the global fight against smuggling in Southeast Asia—Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam—are not signatories to the Refugee Convention. The most pernicious forms of migration controls, as Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen and James Hathaway argue, rely on collaboration with governments with poor human rights records, in countries with little political will or ability to uphold refugee rights. Despite the protection concerns raised by subcontracting interception to third parties in the region, internal government documents I obtained through access to information requests highlight the perceived ‘success’ of capacity building interventions. For example, according to internal accounts, in July 2011, bilateral collaboration and intelligence-sharing prevented the Alicia, which carried 87 passengers from Sri Lanka, from departing for Canada from Indonesia. According to UNODC’s reporting, after being intercepted by Indonesian authorities, the passengers refused to leave the ship until they received assurances about access to refugee protection.

Internal documents from Global Affairs Canada describe the interdiction of the Alicia as a positive example of cooperation that helped to maintain ‘Canada’s national security against the mass arrival of illegal migrants by sea.’ However, the passengers’ pleas for protection suggest that Canada and its delegates interdicted would-be refugees under the pretext of combating ‘illegal’ migration and human smuggling.

Instead of eliminating smuggling networks, Canada’s counter-smuggling campaign in Southeast Asia merely displaced smuggling routes for Sri Lankans to West Africa. In December 2011, Togolese authorities intercepted a smuggling attempt of over 200 Sri Lankan Tamil refugee claimants to Canada. After intercepting the passengers, Togolese authorities detained the group in a stadium in poor conditions in the capital of Lomé. In a report commissioned by the IOM-Ghana, the disruption of smuggling operations destined for Canada left the passengers ‘vulnerable to human rights abuses on the shores of the continent.’ I obtained internal assessments by IOM evaluators that describe the living conditions of Tamils stranded in West Africa on their way to Canada as ‘generally unpleasant, at best,’ noting that most migrants ‘were housed in overcrowded conditions, often under virtual house arrest with inadequate sanitary facilities and insufficient food. Those who dared to complain endured threats. There were also reports of beatings.’

Despite these refugee protection concerns, internal assessments frame these projects through a securitised narrative of pre-emptive risk management. In this view, capacity building measures successfully ‘increased awareness of the threat, enhanced the ability of border officials to identify and prevent human smuggling’ and helped to disrupt human smuggling attempts ‘before illegal migrants reach our shores.’ However, the portrayal of asylum-seeking as ‘illegal’ obscures the causal dynamics that generate irregular migration. As Nancy Hiemstra and other critical migration scholars argue, the ‘illegalisation’ of would-be refugees is an artefact of the state-manufactured regime of displacement. ‘Illegal migration’, as Catherine Dauvergne explains, is the product of legal prohibition and migration controls.  

While the Canadian government insists that its capacity building initiatives are consistent with Canadian human rights standards and obligations under international law, it is well established that asylum seekers have to enlist smugglers to reach protection. As the scholar of international refugee law Guy Goodwin-Gill explains, signatories to the Refugee Convention are not permitted to exclude refugees from accessing international protection on account of their ‘illegal entry’. This includes instances in which refugees enlist the services of smugglers to reach safe territory. Claims about illegal migration, in this sense, are misleading and criminalise people on the move for exercising their human right to asylum.

While this extraterritorial campaign against human smuggling began under the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, the geographical scope of these interventions has expanded under the current Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. From 2021-2023, extraterritorial anti-smuggling programs were extended to Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Turks and Caicos, Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Maldives, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Ghana and Nigeria through the Strengthening Transregional Action and Responses to the Smuggling of Migrants initiative, developed in collaboration with the UNDOC. 

In Canada’s extraterritorial crusade against human smuggling, the work of externalisation occurs not through a spectacular display of state power, but via the seemingly mundane, technical project of capacity building. In a discursive strategy that frames human smuggling as a security problem amenable to technical solutions, anti-smuggling policy rationalises interdiction and obscures the structural conditions of the deterrence regime that produce displacement in the first place. 

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