Fast Refugee Protection: Temporality and Migration Control

This article explores the temporality of migration control through an analysis of refugee claim processing in Canada. I draw on organizational reports, commissioned studies, media reports, interviews and archival data to argue that time is a key technology of state-controlled migration regulation. I show that temporal technologies have long been used to both control the access of migrants and the labour of civil servants. Furthermore, I show that procedural temporalities have been consistently manipulated to reflect and facilitate growing restrictionism in Canadian migration regulation. In short, I suggest that migration regulation regimes devise and use temporal technologies to block, deter or delay access to rights to unwanted and unauthorized migrants, and to reduce the cost of doing so where possible.