Season 4, Ep. 6:

Below, you find links to all of the research referenced by our guests, as well as other resources you may find useful.

Media

Close-up on Canada. (Oct 12, 2022). How similar are Canada and the US when it comes to immigration policy? Podcast.

Books

Alexander, L. (2011). The chronicles of Prydain (Vols. 1–5). Henry Holt and Co.  (external link) (Original works published 1964–1968)

Bloemraad, I. (2006). Becoming a citizen: Incorporating immigrants and refugees in the United States and Canada (external link) . Univ of California Press.

Bloemraad, I. (2022). Claiming membership: Boundaries, positionality, US citizenship, and what it means to be American (external link) . In Permitted Outsiders (pp. 23-45). Routledge.

Bloemraad, I. (2004). Who claims dual citizenship? the limits of postnationalism, the possibilities of transnationalism, and the persistence of traditional citizenship (external link) . International migration review, 38(2), 389-426.

Fielding, H. (1996). Bridget Jones's diary (external link) . Viking.

Ferrante, E. (2015). The Neapolitan novels (external link)  (A. Goldstein, Trans.; Vols. 1–4). Europa Editions. (Original works published 2011–2014)

Academic Works

Bloemraad, I. (2015). Theorizing and analyzing citizenship in multicultural societies (external link) . The Sociological Quarterly, 56(4), 591-606.

Bloemraad, I. (2018). Theorising the power of citizenship as claims-making (external link) . Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(1), 4-26.

Bloemraad, I., Harell, A. & Fraser, N.A.R. (2024). Categorical inequalities and Canadian attitudes toward positive and negative rights (external link) . Canadian Journal of Political Science, 57(2), 231–253. 

Bloemraad, I., Silva, F., & Voss, K. (2016).  (excel file) Rights, economics, or family? Frame resonance, political ideology, and the immigrant rights movement. (external link)  Social Forces, 94(4), 1647-1674.

Cheong, A. R. (2022). Deportable to nowhere: Stateless children as challenges to state logics of immigration control (external link) . positions, 30(2), 245-275.

Cheong, A. R. (2023). Theorizing omission: state strategies for withholding official recognition of personhood (external link) . Sociological Theory, 41(4), 377-402

Cheong, A. R. (2025). Racial exclusion by bureaucratic omission: Non-enumeration, documentary dispossession, and the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar. (external link)  Social Problems, 72(2), 341-357.

Cheong, A. R., Gaucher, M., Li, J., Nedoshytko, S., Chai Yun Liew, J., Contreras-Chavez, A. M., ... & Brush, D. (2025). Unpacking ‘birth tourism’: incidental citizenship and the diverse migration and reproduction trajectories of nonresident mothers in Canada (external link) . Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 51(17), 4299-4319.

Cheong, A. R. (2025). Who counts as a stateless person? Nation-statist logics and the liabilities of potential citizenship elsewhere. (external link)  Ethnic and Racial Studies, 48(4), 883-905.

Voss, K., Silva, F., & Bloemraad, I. (2020). The limits of rights: claims-making on behalf of immigrants (external link) . Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(4), 791-819.

Maggie Perzyna  

Welcome to Borders & Belonging, the podcast that explores migration through bold research, new ideas and stories that connect those findings to the real world. This season, we're talking with migration scholars whose ideas have left a lasting mark on the field. Then we dig deeper to uncover the past that brought them here, the turning points, lived experiences and insights that shape the theories redefining how we understand mobility, borders and belonging. Each scholar has been asked to nominate an up-and-coming researcher whose work they admire. In the chat, established voices and emerging thinkers come together in conversation to explore the connective tissue between the past, present, and future of migration studies. From the personal to the political, from theory to practice, these conversations uncover not just what our guests study, but how their lives and work have helped shape the field and where they see it heading next. 

Maggie Perzyna  

When we talk about citizenship, we usually think of passports and legal status, but what happens when people start claiming belonging before they're officially recognized? Irene Bloemraad is Professor of Political Studies and co-director of the Centre for migration studies at the University of British Columbia. She's a leading voice in the study of migration and citizenship and has helped shape how we understand these bottom-up efforts to belong and be heard. For Irene, the path into migration research doesn't just start with academic curiosity, it starts with a move her parents made. That choice shaped not just where she lived, but how she came to understand place and identity.

Irene Bloemraad  

It's interesting again to think about migration and how that choice, my parents' choice was so formative for my own life, because if we'd gone to Australia or Texas, I assume I would be a somewhat different person. I don't know exactly how or in what ways, but the fact that they stayed in Canada and the fact we moved to Saskatchewan, clearly has, you know, influenced how I think about things and the kind of work I do.

Maggie Perzyna  

To understand how Irene sees movement and identity, you have to go back to where her story begins.

Irene Bloemraad  

So, I was actually born in Europe, in Spain, though I do not speak Spanish. I do not hold Spanish citizenship. My parents are not Spanish, so it was an accident of geography that I was born in Spain. My dad was a geologist, and so as part of his work, he and my mother moved around quite a bit.

Maggie Perzyna  

After spending time in England, Irene's family made another move, this time to Canada. It wasn't meant to be permanent, but it shaped everything that came next.

Irene Bloemraad  

We moved to Canada because my parents wanted to get a little bit more stability, since they had a young family, but the assumption back then was that it would be temporary, yet again, my father was working for an American corporation, and so the assumption was that we would probably end up in the United States. And you know, clearly that kind of experience of migrating, even though it was in my earliest years, has shaped the fact that I really care about, am passionate about migration.

Magdalena Perzyna  

When Irene's family moved to Canada, they settled in Saskatoon, a place that didn't feel especially diverse at the time. She didn't realize her new environment would play a significant role in shaping her career.

Irene Bloemraad  

You know, Saskatoon at that time was a city where I think about a quarter of the population was Indigenous, but it was pretty residentially segregated. And then the vast majority of the rest of the population had various European roots, so was white. Some first generation, some second, some third or fourth, but it was not a particularly diverse place on migration. And so, my high school, when I think back to it, you started to see the transformation of Canadian immigration policy. So, when we think about Canadian immigration policy being very European-centric through to the 60s and into the 70s. By the time I was going to high school in the 80s, you started to see people whose parents were born in India, in Bangladesh, there was a woman in my class who was a refugee from Kenya. There was another refugee from Laos. But at the time, you know, we were going to school, we were teenagers, we were young. I don't think I appreciated that. I was sort of at the cutting edge of new migration, especially in a place like Saskatoon. But now thinking back to it, you know, I wonder what role that might have played also in my research interests.

Maggie Perzyna  

All the moving around gave Irene plenty of new experiences, but it also came with its own set of challenges. Even then, there were hints of the direction she might follow one day, though not necessarily the ones her parents imagined.

Irene Bloemraad  

So, my first language was Dutch, but because we moved around so much, you know, living in Spain and then England and then Greece, my language development was a little bit delayed. I didn't speak as early as some kids, and I don't think I read quite as early as kids, either. But as we know from the research, people who grow up in multilingual households or have ability across languages, they actually are quite good at language once they sort of catch up. And so, once I was able to start reading, which is probably in grade two or three, I always had my nose in a book. So, potentially, my parents might have seen me as someone who would end up as a librarian or, you know, in some kind of writing profession that would have been probably my mother. I was also quite good at math, and so my father had aspirations for me, like maybe a lot of immigrant parents, that I should be an engineer or a doctor. I don't think I ever had that aspiration, but I think he would have probably preferred if I had ended up in the hard sciences rather than the social sciences.

Maggie Perzyna   

Even with her head always in a book, Irene wasn't exactly dreaming of academia. Like most seven-year-olds, she had a very different idea of what her future might look like.

Irene Bloemraad  

I have a vague memory that in grade two in Toronto, we had to make a drawing of, like, what career we wanted in the future. And you know, grade two, you're what, you're seven years old. And I think there was the the usual sort of teachers and nurses and firefighters and the rest of it. And for some reason, I did Rockstar. And so I drew some picture of myself with a microphone singing, which, looking back at it, is hilarious, because I have no musical ability or talent whatsoever. I failed miserably at piano lessons. I can't sing at all. My family winces whenever I try to sing. So, I'm not sure where that came from. I don't think my parents would have thought that that would be my future career.

Maggie Perzyna  

Irene didn't become a rock star, but she did step into the spotlight in a different way. Teaching came naturally. She started with swim lessons and math tutoring and then kept going. Every chance to teach she took.

Irene Bloemraad  

It was potentially possible to have predicted that I would end up in some kind of teaching role, albeit a professor, even early on, because I have long had an affinity for teaching in various ways. And so this would be more when I was in high school, but I was a competitive swimmer, and I taught swimming, and I was reasonably good at it, because I really enjoyed sort of instructing. And like, swimming instruction is not rocket science, but it's fun to like, give people the confidence that they can float and blow bubbles and actually get through the water. And then I also ended up as sort of a side job tutoring. So, as I mentioned, I was good at math, and one of my teachers in high school recommended me as a tutor for a fellow student who was struggling, and then I developed like a little business on the side.

Maggie Perzyna  

Irene's influence also goes beyond the university classroom. She has held talks for students in grade four and for residents of retirement homes. For her, it's all about encouraging and cultivating curiosity, regardless of age.

Irene Bloemraad  

I actually taught adults who were for various reasons, had not finished high school and were trying to get their high school diplomas at an older age. And it was interesting, because I was young, I was like 16, 17, and I was teaching these people who were at least ten, sometimes, you know, twenty years older than me, but I really enjoyed that spark of comprehension, or like, when people got things. And so, I give you that background because one of the reasons I try to do public presentations to very diverse audiences, is I get immense pleasure when I see people have an "aha moment" or, like, make a connection that they'd never made before. I'm personally super curious. I've cultivated curiosity in my own kids, and I just love sparking curiosity. I like doing that with all kinds of different audiences, and I see it as a skill set to be able to communicate with people where they're at and so if that means they're in grade four and they're 10 years old, or if that means that they're in a senior residence and they're 84 years old, I just think it's a lot of fun trying to figure out how to communicate to people in different walks of life, different ages.

Maggie Perzyna    

Irene didn't head into migration studies with a grand plan. The path came together slowly, shaped by curiosity and a mix of early experiences. For a while, she imagined her future looking very different. 

Irene Bloemraad  

I would say that my pathway into migration studies and being a university professor was sort of more a slow build up relationship. You know, if you want to make “aha moments" equivalent to like love at first sight, there was none of that. It was probably more like, you know, a friend that you slowly decide that you have a more deeper relationship to than you initially thought. But my life could have taken a lot of different pathways. While I was doing actually my undergraduate degree at McGill in political science, I was contemplating two different careers, neither of them in higher education. So, one career that I was contemplating was journalism. I had worked a number of summers as a freelance journalist for the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, which was the local newspaper in Saskatoon. And I really enjoyed that work. It fed my curiosity. It allows you to cover lots of different stories. It was writing, which I really enjoyed. And the second career path that I considered very seriously was working for government. I care a lot about policy, and I think policy affects people's lives. I had worked previously as a tour guide in Parliament. I was in political science, and so moving into Canadian government in some capacity, seemed a really interesting option. And in particular, I was interested in the Foreign Service. So, thinking about my migration background, the fact that we had moved around, that was something I found attractive.

Maggie Perzyna    

The Irene people know today brings a vast list of accomplishments and experiences to any project she takes on, but what she might be most proud of is the role she's played in growing her academic community.

Irene Bloemraad  

I would certainly like to be remembered as someone who was a institution builder. Someone who created spaces and structures and programs that brought together an interdisciplinary group of people to talk through migration, and that could be, for example, in the work I've done, co-directing the Boundaries Membership and Belonging Program for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. That could be, you know, being co-director of the Centre for Migration Studies at UBC, or the six, six years, seven years that I ran the Summer Institute for Migration Research Methods, where we brought in, you know, 20 to 30 young scholars, graduate students and early career PhDs, to talk about how to do migration research. And in all of those spaces, what I was hoping to do was to bring together people who are curious, who are interested in dialogue and to learn from each other.

Maggie Perzyna    

For Irene, nurturing young scholars means more than guiding their research. She pushes for excellence but also teaches the value of caring for your health, your relationships, and the life beyond your work.

Irene Bloemraad  

I'm a pretty you know, demanding mentor in terms of making sure your work is really good and helping you to get it published. But also, someone who has continuously told people that their lives go far beyond their professional careers and so that people need to make choices that work for their families, their responsibilities, their sense of obligation to parents and spouses and children. And especially, I think, at the very highest reaches of academia, the most competitive places in the United States, maybe less so in Canada, it is hard to be that well rounded person, you know, if you think of sort of the ultra competitiveness of some different industries, academia can sometimes feel like that, though maybe not quite as intense. And so, I would hope that people would remember that I always talked about the importance of mental and physical health, finding space for social relations beyond the university, that those would be the things I think, that I would hope people would remember.

Maggie Perzyna  

We've already heard from Irene Bloemraad. Now joining the conversation is Amanda Cheong, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. Thanks so much for joining me today. 

Irene Bloemraad  

Thanks for having us. 

Maggie Perzyna  

So excited to be here. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Irene, let's start with your core idea. What does it mean to think of citizenship, not just as a legal status, but as a process of claims making?

Irene Bloemraad  

I think a lot of people, when they think of citizenship, might think of in the Canadian context, their Canadian passport. And you know, maybe another time when people really think about citizenship is when we have elections, and there's a distinction between Canadian citizens who are allowed to vote and other people who don't have that right to vote. In this sense, citizenship is understood as this legal status or a set of rights. We probably need to remember that those two things don't always go together. So, just because you have citizenship doesn't mean you have all rights. So, you know, in Canada, if you're under the age of 18, you can't vote even though you have citizenship, and a lot of our laws and protections apply to everybody, even if you don't have citizenship. So, we have rights and we have status, but this idea of claims-making pushes that conversation further. It connotes a sense of membership and a sense of standing legitimacy in a society, and I think that distinction is signaled in the way we talk. Let me take as an example citizenship in the United States. So, some people might say I'm a US citizen, but they might also say I'm an American. And I don't think those two things necessarily mean the same thing in all contexts and to all people. So, someone might be a US citizen and have that passport, but not fully feel American because they're an immigrant, they still have a sense of belonging for their homeland, but they also might not be treated fully as an American. And so the interactions we have with others really implicates our citizenship and our membership. And then alternatively, you know, someone might not hold the legal status of a US citizen, but they might still feel American, believe that they uphold the values of being American, they act and they go about their lives as American, this disjuncture between legal status and rights on one hand, but then how you're treated, how you feel, the legitimacy you get from others. That's what I mean when I talk about claims making.

Maggie Perzyna    

Right. So, you both explore the idea of citizenship as something that people do, not just something that they have. What does that look like in everyday life? Amanda?

Amanda Cheong  

This idea that citizenship isn't just a status that the state unilaterally imposes from the top down, helps us think about citizenship as a contested, ongoing political project that people from the bottom up can engage in to shape the meaning of citizenship through the kinds of demands that they make. I work primarily with stateless people who I collaborate with, and I focus on in my research. And by stateless, I mean people who have no citizenship of any state in the world, but just because they don't have formal political membership doesn't mean that they don't have any political consciousness or agency. So, I have been thinking about what this looks like on the ground and how I can capture it. A couple of years ago, I gave this keynote at the Museum of Vancouver for Asian heritage month, and I reflected on how Canadian citizenship has been this hard-fought right for historically excluded racialized minorities in our country, and that it's something that we lay claim to through these seemingly small and mundane actions in our everyday lives. For example, speaking your mother language in public space, that's an act of citizenship, or packing a thermos of rice for your kids' school lunch, that's an act of citizenship, growing Chinese vegetables in your backyard, like my aunties are really good at doing, that's an act of citizenship. By saying this, I'm not suggesting that these everyday acts are by any means sufficient for securing full and substantive equal membership for Asians and other racialized minorities in Canada, but I think that we too often ignore the work of people who lack these conventional forms of political and economic and social power. And I think that there's just something really moving and subversive about -like I give the example of how my parents like to fry gallons and gallons of shallots outside in their stove in their backyard, and it smells amazing, and the smell wafts around the neighborhood, and it permeates the area around us, and it makes this place feel a little bit more like home in the way that they envision it. And so, these little acts might not seem like they matter, but it's important to remember that it's only a few decades ago that many of these acts would not have been possible for a really large portion of our Canadian population today. And so, it's in these small, everyday acts of citizenship that we can continue to honour the legacies of the generations before us who made it possible for racialized minorities to claim belonging here in Canada, and how we can continue to protect and make space for those still to come.

Maggie Perzyna  

Irene, what do you think?

Irene Bloemraad  

So, one of the things that I really love about Amanda's work and her focus on stateless people is it helps us ask a big question about what is the power of citizenship? And then I would say something that we don't often ask in sociology, is that morally right? And I think citizenship has done a lot of good in some ways. I think a lot of people who are born into citizenship, which is the vast majority of Canadians, you're born in Canada, and you just get citizenship without ever having to ask for it or think about it. It's just, you know, handed to you. It's sort of fundamentally unfair, right, like it's fundamentally unfair that just because of an accident of birth, that you manage to be born in a place with reasonably clean water, good air, a system of law, safety, good education, access to health care, and someone born in another country, places where people didn't choose to be born, they were just born there. And your life chances are really, really different. And then when you add to that, stateless people, it's very fundamentally unfair. And so, this idea of citizenship as a power, it can be both positive and negative, and so that's why I just I really love Amanda's research, because it lays bare this power and sort of the fundamental injustice behind it.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, Amanda, your story really starts at home. You discovered that your parents were stateless while you were born a Canadian citizen, what was that like, and how did it shape the way that you think about belonging and citizenship?

Amanda Cheong  

Yeah, my Canadian citizenship, it means it means everything to me and my family and so I'm a second-generation immigrant settler. I was born into a family that has a lot of stateless, formerly stateless immigrants from a country called Brunei Darussalam, where Chinese minorities are predominantly excluded from citizenship, and that lends to the majority of them being stateless. And stateless people in Brunei are not allowed to own a passport. They can't own property. They can't own businesses, and they also bequeath their statelessness from generation to generation. But because I was born in Canada, I am myself, this beneficiary of this arbitrary and unearned privilege of birthright Canadian citizenship. One of my favourite photos of me is I'm a two year old at my parents' naturalization ceremony, and I find this photo so absurd because I'm this barely sentient blob of a human being, and yet I'm the one who gets to welcome my parents into the fold of the Canadian political community, even when it's my parents who did the hard work and who made the effort and the sacrifices of immigrating to Canada in the first place. And for my father, who was classified as stateless on his Canadian record of landing, that was his very first time being recognized as a citizen of a country. And the thing is, I didn't know what statelessness was until I was well into my undergraduate degree, and when I found out that there's millions of people who experience this, it blew my mind. But my first family is so nonchalant and dismissive about it, like the discrimination and the exclusion that they endured growing up, and this major sacrifice that they made to leave their home and their family and everything they knew behind to start this new life halfway across the world in a country they've never been to, they think it's not a big deal, and I found that to be so shocking, like, if I was in that position, I would never shut up about it. I realized, as I looked more into it, that statelessness is, you know, it's not just a type of legal marginalization, but academically, there's not very much written about statelessness, certainly not from the perspectives and lived experiences of people who are going through a life of being stateless, and so what I want to do is use this platform to document the lives and the perspectives of stateless people and to honour the incredible journeys and the sacrifices that they've made, and to share this knowledge creation platform that I've been given as a member of university with stateless people and other legally marginalized communities through partnering with them in my research.

Irene Bloemraad  

You know, Amanda listening to you, I'm reminded my mom. I was talking to my mom this weekend, and she was reminding me that it was 50 years ago that my family came to Canada. We were not stateless. We came with Dutch citizenship. But I have one of those naturalization pictures too, with the Mountie in the background and a cake and all the rest of it. Though, in my case, my parents became naturalized, then I automatically got Canadian citizenship because they did, because I was, I think I was 12 at the time, and so as a minor, you just automatically got it. But for my parents, when they became Canadian, they lost their Dutch citizenship, and then through just an accident of the weird laws around citizenship, I kept my Dutch citizenship because citizenship was imposed on me by my parents in Dutch law, and so I actually still hold Dutch citizenship, though my parents lost theirs. It's such a weird world out there in terms of the legal frameworks of citizenship. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Absolutely. Irene in your work, you've seen people push for rights and recognition often before they even have legal citizenship. What kinds of actions or strategies stand out to you as powerful ways that people claim belonging or make their voices heard?

Irene Bloemraad  

Yeah, so a lot of my work recently has been in the United States. So, I did a project where we talked to about 200 people, about half of them were immigrants who were born in Vietnam, China or Mexico. And then we also interviewed their US born children, and we asked them these questions about, you know, what does US citizenship mean? And then what does being American mean? One thing that came out really strongly is that there is, maybe not surprisingly, but a multitude of different ways that people make claims for being a citizen. And for the teenagers that we spoke to, many of them hadn't really asked this question before. So, when we said, you know, like, what does it mean to be a US citizen? They were like, well, I was just born here, but when pushed, they would sometimes give us sort of standard civic inclusion kind of answers. So, I think this is maybe stuff that they heard at school. So, they would say, well, being a good citizen is like cleaning up the park, voting, making sure your voice is heard. And then the parents would say, also a variety of different things. They would say, you know, being a good citizen is being law abiding, working hard. What's so fascinating is, if you focus on that, like working, making sure your kids go to school, being a good parent. That one I heard very frequently, that is something that lots of people can do, irrespective of what their legal status is. What was really fascinating is there were some kind of behaviours or actions or attributes that might put immigrants or people born in another country, let's say, outside of the circle of membership. So, you know, sometimes people would talk about the ability to speak English or their accent, and so that's a little bit harder. But many, many of the things people talked about that's accessible to many, many people, and that's where you see this claims-making, where there's the legal citizenship, and then there's membership in sort of a more robust way.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, I think that feeds in really nicely into my next question, Amanda, you've described a slow denial of citizenship. So, what's happening behind the scenes? What do you mean by that?

Amanda Cheong  

A lot of my research is devoted to unearthing the power and the politics embedded in these seemingly mundane forms of bureaucracy and paperwork and birth certificates are not something that that maybe a lot of people in Canada might pay attention to a lot. It might be something that people take for granted. Certainly, I took my own birth certificate for granted growing up. But in fact, one in every five children under the age of five around the world, that's over 150 million children have not been registered at birth, and that's a staggering number of people who have trouble proving their identities, proving that they even legally exist as persons. And what I found is that, though civil registration is supposed to be this inclusionary project, governments have this interest, ostensibly, of counting every single person that comes into being on their territory, because it's important for informing how they formulate policies, collect taxes and perform other the essential tasks of governments. And so it's supposed to be this universal inclusionary project, but this inclusionary ideal comes under threat because CRVS (Civil Registration and Vital Statistics) systems are the fundamental building blocks for administering what is fundamentally an exclusionary project of citizenship, but this act of recording a birth or other event, vital event, has profound socio-legal implications. They construct official knowledge about vital matters such as where you're born and who you're born to, and so states use this information to determine who gets to be a citizen at birth and who does not. And what I argue is that who ends up being counted is an inherently political choice. It's not a technical matter, and that these choices can be made in ways that omit unwanted populations from the nation by depriving them of the documentary means to prove their legal personhood. And so, contrary to a lot of the mainstream discourse within the development sectors, families don't go unregistered because they're ignorant or because they're illiterate and can't fill out forms themselves, or because governments lack the infrastructural or the technological means to register them. We have to think about the political power of birth registration and how governments might selectively wield their recognition to include and exclude particular populations.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, in your work, you both push back against simple ideas of diversity, whether it's seeing people as just ethnic categories or assuming undocumented people have no voice. What do you consider the most important finding or insight from your work? Irene?

Irene Bloemraad  

I'd like to highlight two things. So, first of all is the agency that people have who are not citizens, to make claims for membership. I really want to underscore that people can make claims to belonging and inclusion through everyday actions and sort of being part of a community. At the same time, this is sort of the fundamental tension of citizenship. Legal status really matters, and it matters not just for the passport. It matters not just for voting, but it matters in how other people see you. I've done a series of survey experiments with Allison Harrell at Université du Québec à Montréal, and we find that Canadians and so this is this is not about the United States anymore, but Canadians, will assess people's rights, whether they're civil rights related to being stopped arbitrarily by the police, or social rights in terms of getting government assistance if you're going hungry, people assess those rights differently if someone is portrayed as a citizen or they're portrayed as someone who's out of status. So, if we go back to that fundamental sort of idea of human dignity and equality that you know, all humans might and should have, Canadians too make a status differentiation where they think that citizens have sort of more rights, or more robust rights, than people who are out of status. And so, citizenship is both the door that opens, agency, belonging, resources, sense of community, but it's also, it can be very restrictive and in fact, harmful for people who are seen as outside of that circle of membership.

Maggie Perzyna  

Amanda?

Amanda Cheong  

Ten years ago, I was at the first Global Forum on Statelessness held in The Hague, Netherlands, where the former head of international protection for the UN Refugee agency said that quote, "it is an anachronism that we have in the 21st Century people who fall outside the realm of nation states." And what I'm trying to show in my work is that these discourses are not only inaccurate, but they can be harmful to the communities that they are describing. The stateless people in my life and my work. they're not lost or clueless about where they belong. On the contrary, they have very strongly rooted convictions about their attachments to their lands and their communities and their cultures. These people who have been abjectly politically excluded nevertheless exercise their political agency, sometimes in very spectacular ways, even though they have no formal political membership. And another thing that I want to show in my work is that statelessness isn't some legal anomaly or a technicality, but that statelessness is a major consequence of our modern-day practice of violently dividing the world's humanity.

Maggie Perzyna  

Irene, your work has been foundational to how we understand the dimensions of contemporary citizenship. So, the interplay between legal status, rights, participation and a sense of belonging. What are you learning from Amanda's work that's pushing our theoretical understanding of citizenship forward?

Irene Bloemraad  

And there's so much that I like about Amanda's work. I actually met Amanda first when she was a graduate student at Princeton, and I had an opportunity to read a paper she was working on as a student, which then later got published, which was about naturalization and how people become citizens in the United States. I think, as Amanda shows really powerfully, we're not talking about a few people who, just by some accident of borders moving, don't seem to have a passport. We're talking tens of millions of people, maybe more, and we learn that these are political choices, you know, choices that are explicitly being made, either on the ground by local bureaucrats who don't want to give documents to certain types of people, or by people in power who also make the same kind of choices. I think another thing that that's really important in Amanda's work is that so much of our migration scholarship is very global, North focused, and in a way that makes sense, but if we look at the places where the highest proportions of immigrants live that would be the Gulf states like there you have up to 70, 80% of people who live in some of the Gulf states being people born elsewhere. And so I really appreciate the work that Amanda has been doing in Malaysia and in other places where it forces us to think much more broadly than we have when we've been so focused on sort of Western countries, and then it raises interesting questions about whether citizenship is that the best way forward is, or maybe there's other ways of thinking about membership that we might want to consider if we open our viewpoints to other countries

Maggie Perzyna  

As we conclude we're trying something new this season, where we're trying to humanize our scholars a little bit, and ending off on a little bit of a light note. So, we're just going to do a really quick lightning round where I'm just going to ask you a few questions. And it's just like whatever comes to your mind, first, you can spit it out. Favourite book, Irene, I have to say, one of my favourite books as a kid was Lloyd Alexander's High King series. It was like fantasy five books. And so, when I think back to like books that made me laugh and cry and such, that is one of my books. I think I first read it when I was like nine or 10.

Amanda Cheong  

I love that answer. Amanda Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novel series almost caused me to not finish my dissertation because I was so addicted to reading them. But if I was to say a book that I love to reread, it would be Helen Fielding's, Bridget Jones' Diary. It's, my favourite comfort read.

Maggie Perzyna  

Amazing. What policy buzzword should disappear? Irene?

Irene Bloemraad  

Policy buzzword, oh, man, that's hard. I mean, this is not policy, but this is migration space. I really wish the word assimilation would just go into the shadows and take a long vacation.

Maggie Perzyna  

Amanda?

Amanda Cheong  

A frustration that we have with the discourse around birth tourism is how unrestricted you solely in Canada, has been described as a "loophole" that birth tourists are taking advantage of the so-called “loophole” in Canadian citizenship law when you know, if you are born on Canadian soil, it is perfectly legal that you are accorded Canadian citizenship.

Maggie Perzyna  

All right. And last one, what's one thing about you that we can't learn from your CV? Irene?

Irene Bloemraad  

Oh [laughs], there's all kinds of things there! When I was, I think I was 19 years old, I was going to school in Montreal, at McGill, and I came home for the summer, met up with one of my best friends from high school, and she convinced me to go skydiving. And one of the interesting things with skydiving in Saskatoon, at least at that time period, is you did it all by yourself. Like there was no..

Amanda Cheong  

What?? [laughs] 

Irene Bloemraad  

Yes. Like, I don't, I don't think that's legal anymore. 

Amanda Cheong  

You just jump out of a plane, alone?

Irene Bloemraad  

Yes, yes. And it was scary and exhilarating and, you know, kind of awesome. And so, I guess you wouldn't find that on my CV.

Maggie Perzyna  

Also a great name for your autobiography, Skydiving in Saskatoon. I love it. Amanda?

Amanda Cheong  

I'm a former world champion dragon boater.

Maggie Perzyna  

What?? 

Amanda Cheong  

I was previously on the Canadian national team in the under 23 category. 

Irene Bloemraad  

Oh, my that's really cool. 

Maggie Perzyna  

See these questions are good! Thank you so much for both taking the time and sharing your work and just being really awesome at the podcast.

Amanda Cheong  

Thank you, Maggie for facilitating this conversation. It's been really fun.

Maggie Perzyna  

Thanks so much to Irene Bloemraad and Amanda Cheong for joining me today, and thank you for listening. This episode was produced by Toronto Metropolitan University journalism student Kristian Cuarezma alongside executive producer Angela Glover. Special thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and CERC Migration for making this conversation possible. If you're enjoying Borders & Belonging, follow us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and share your thoughts with us on LinkedIn. For more on today's conversation, check out the show notes.