Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This research examines the marginalization of non-citizens in Canada and the United States. The project is comparative in nature, and extends research on recent shifts in US immigration policy. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act cut the welfare benefits of US citizens and immigrants, reduced benefits that non-citizens could claim, gave state and local governments the authority to determine eligibility for public benefits, and facilitated the criminalization, deportation and expedited removal of non-US citizens. The Act represented a convergence of crime and immigration policies. These polices were extended in 2001 with the passage of the USA Patriot Act which confers to the government broad authority to detect, exclude, prosecute and detain undesirable foreigners in the investigation of terrorism. Again, those experiencing the full force of these measures were non-citizens. Both the mass incarceration of criminal offenders and the broader detention of immigrants emerge from negative perceptions of the welfare system, racial prejudice, hysteria about people seeming inassimilable, and economic expedience. Increasingly, the immigration system functions to socially control through confinement and deportation of the unpopular, the different and the powerless (see Kanstroom, 2005; Miller, 2002; Cole, 2002). Recent research (Pratt, 2005) and policy developments (Bill C-11 and Bill C-36) in Canada indicate a similar trend. Non-citizens have become the principle targets of enhanced security measures, and the association between crime (and terrorism) and new immigrants and refugees has become entrenched. This research compares the evolution of this trend and assesses its implications for Canada and the United States.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: There has been a veritable cottage industry examining comparative electoral systems in developed democracies. The primary focus of this literature generally evaluates the respective merits of representing the majority vs "as many people as possible" (Lijphart). Surprisingly, however, very little attention has been directed toward the effects on democratic performance in those countries where parties have been excluded from representation and/or governance.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The Principle of Competitive Exclusion, first articulated by Gause in 1934, states that two species or populations cannot inhabit the same niche: one will consistently out-compete the other. The logistic equations that describe such interaction present only one possibility for coexistence, that being when the density-dependent mechanisms of one population become activated before the inter-group competition eliminates the other.
This paper finds that r-strategies (reproductive strategies), which have driven competition for the Holy Lands since before World War I, may be diminishing in significance. Likewise, the question of K has all but been resolved: while options in dividing this land include the Bantustan approach (which exists presently) and the bi-national one-state approach – which may in fact be the reality in some distant future – the two-state solution is what is proposed in all credible peace proposals today.
It is in considering the analysis based on the á- and â-driven aspects of the logistic equations that one finds the biological approach provides insights not explored in other models. The findings suggest that, in examining these competition coefficients – areas in which a competitive advantage is held by one population over the other – that density-dependent mechanisms come to the fore, allowing for coexistence of both populations.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: “And therefore it belonged to the Commonwealth (that is, to the sovereign only),” Hobbes wrote, “to approve or disapprove both of the places and matter of foreign traffic.” State responses to international migration and ancillary flows are reshaping the politics of
belonging and exclusion in ways that only interdisciplinary collaboration can begin to map. This paper argues that new virtual technologies that states are adopting to control “foreign traffic” on the margins are rapidly being deployed for maintaining order in the
mainstream. Overlapping flows of international migration, human trafficking, sophisticated drug and weapons cartels, and mobile terrorist cells – to name just a few – have converged to raise the importance of the migration-security nexus, prompting huge
public investments in new technologies that link the state to the flesh of its subjects. Body metaphors have long been used to “embody” the state in visceral language. Liberal states, in response to new security challenges, have now begun adopting new information technologies, such as biometrics, that codify and archive bodily and behavioral features of individuals. This return to the body – albeit in digital form – as a site of state control shifts into reverse the logic of Hobbes’s “Artificial Man” as a metaphorical body of words and images. What we are witnessing instead is the transubstantiation of the word, the body metaphor, back into the flesh. The emerging Virtual Leviathan reduces immigrants and citizens alike to “datamigrants” – flows of code – thus ushering in a new
stage in the evolution and intensification of cybernetic state control and new grounds for the politics of belonging and exclusion.