Bordering social reproduction: The welfare/immigration regimes of Quebec and Ontario in Canada

Abstract

This article makes three crucial, related arguments. First, most European analyses of immigration and social welfare fail to consider how these policies intersect to shape the social reproduction of populations, instead sticking to notions of welfare chauvinism, social citizenship, and deservingness. Second, welfare/immigration analyses are usually set at the national level, but subnational comparisons can challenge tidy welfare state regime categorizations, revealing both nuance and policy opportunities. Third, a focus on social reproduction regimes that includes welfare and immigration policies reveals how jurisdictions border the extraction of social reproductive labour, with impacts on who gets in and under which conditions, and on the distribution of paid and unpaid social reproductive work within immigrant and established families in Canada. Developing our feminist border analysis, we illustrate our approach through a comparative analysis of Quebec and Ontario to show how social reproductive borders extract care labour and from whom, under diverging policy regimes.