by Liette Gilbert and Luisa Sotomayor

Non-status people face a socio-legal precariousness that contradicts the promises of an inclusive city. Marking Toronto’s tenth anniversary of its “sanctuary city” policy, our research assesses the progress and potential of social planning and municipalist agendas to support irregularised residents. Drawing from interviews with service providers, city officials, and non-status citizens in Toronto, we propose a decolonial politics of urban citizenship recognition we call “non-status citizenship”. This concept addresses specific paradoxes related to irregularisation, access, jurisdiction, and regularisation. By framing our discussion around these paradoxes, we highlight the discomfort and transformative potential of non-status citizenship for immigration regimes in sanctuary cities. We argue that recognising non-status citizenship goes beyond notions of urban citizenship to claim formal recognition and security, which resolves the four paradoxes theoretically, politically, and practically. We also emphasise the role of cities in expanding service delivery and calling out the failure of planning across levels of government.

Introduction

In July 2023, asylum seekers from African countries were forced to sleep on Toronto’s sidewalks outside of an overfull shelter referral centre. The moment was a test for the City of Toronto, whose sanctuary city policy states that “all residents have full rights to access all city services and city-administered services without fear, regardless of their documentation status” (Toronto City Council 2017). The City defended that the lack of financial support from higher levels of government for shelters and settlement services had forced it to make “difficult decisions in response to unprecedented demand for emergency shelter” (City of Toronto 2023). Toronto’s $34 million budget for shelter services—usually offering 500 beds to refugee claimants—was clearly inadequate, with 2,900 asylum seekers needing sheltering (City of Toronto 2023). In response to this humanitarian crisis, a coalition of Black-led community organisations provided short-term emergency shelter in two local churches. Crisis workers started an online crowd-funding initiative to provide water and food, and some staff of social service agencies made temporary spaces for newcomers in their own living rooms (Gibson 2023). Newly elected Mayor Olivia Chow turned to the federal government for financial assistance. Ottawa responded with $100 million, leaving the Province and the City to find additional money to address the unsettled shelter issue (Swadden 2023).

The turning down of refugees from Toronto’s shelter system was, in the words of Aiken, “a failure of all three levels of government … a failure of planning” (in Duggan and Aiken 2023). Despite the lack of affordable housing affecting many residents in the city and the rising level of people on the move globally, planning measures and budgets are simply not in place (ibid.). Not only is sanctuary policy rendered unworkable by welfare austerity, but immigration and citizenship regimes are increasingly discordant with the reality of millions of people forcibly displaced worldwide with no legal access (Dauvergne 2008; Duggan and Aiken 2023).

As Toronto marked the tenth anniversary of its “sanctuary city” policy, originally known as “Access to City Services for Undocumented Torontonians” or “AccessTO” (City of Toronto 2013, 2017), and updated in 2017 to the “Toronto for All—United as an Inclusive Sanctuary City” strategy (Toronto City Council 2017), our research examines the progress made and the potential of social planning and municipalist agendas to assert local autonomy from national immigration regimes to support the needs of irregularised residents. Despite Toronto’s sanctuary policy, non-status individuals continue to face a socio-legal precariousness that challenges the ideal of an inclusive “sanctuary city”. Our contribution highlights the incomplete realisation of the sanctuary city policy and the unfulfilled potential of regularisation, stemming from the paradoxical nature of citizenship’s inclusion by exclusion. We assess how social insecurity remains a persistent and prominent feature of everyday life for irregularised people, despite access to some services and ongoing demonstrations of solidarity.

In this article, we propose that a daring reconsideration of the relation between “status” and “citizenship” is required to fulfil sanctuary city mandates. We therefore offer a new decolonial politics of urban citizenship recognition that we call “non-status citizenship”. This concept builds directly on the claim for urban citizenship based on residence/domicile within the city, emphasising a local scale of belonging (Bauder 2014; Varsanyi 2006) where non-status people, as residents, should have access to the same rights as their status counterparts. Urban citizenship acknowledges that the city is the primary scale where everyday life unfolds and serves as a site of contestation where claims are formulated and negotiated (Holston 2019; Sassen 1998). We align with Darling’s (2017:189–190) view that presence is a “demand for both participation and mobility that may be enhanced through the negotiations of urban life”. The politics of presence is thus understood as “a matter of social fact rather than legal status” (Nyers 2010:137). However, urban citizenship does not challenge the suspension of status or the persistent insecurity faced by irregularised individuals, which is imposed by the nation-state (Bauder 2014; McNevin 2006). While municipal sanctuary policies provide some capacity to live in the momentary present, they offer no control for any near- or long-term future (Brun 2015).

Non-status citizenship affirms the enactment of urban citizenship while challenging the conditions and legal contours defined by the nation-state. It insists on formal recognition to alleviate the “dangers and hardships that arise on account of insecure citizenship and immigration status” (McNevin 2012:179). At first glance, non-status citizenship appears as an oxymoron, but we intently present it as a provocation in discussing the promises of the inclusive sanctuary city. Admittedly contradictory, non-status citizenship underscores the paradox of people navigating both extra- and intra-territorial norms, resisting exclusion through their presence, albeit precarious and vulnerable. Our proposition of non-status citizenship parallels McNevin’s (2012:166) argument that “undocumented citizens … be recognised in formal terms as well as more modest negotiations with the institutions and relationships that shape community and civic engagement”. However, we also recognise that many documented citizens experience their citizenship as marginal, precarious, and disenfranchised. Political belonging has long been contested in Canada—as in the case for example of “non-status” Indigenous people (unrecognised by Canada’s colonialist “Indian Act”). Non-status citizenship challenges the state’s categorisations aiming to bridge different struggles towards inclusion and justice.

Toronto’s settler-colonial history and its role within the Canadian immigration landscape underpin our focus on this city. Toronto was initially settled on lands of the Haudenosaunee, Anishnabeeg, Huron/Wendat, Métis, and Mississauga peoples—for whom Toronto/Tkaronto continues to be a place of encounter despite the violence of colonisation and land dispossession. The formation of the settler-colonial state was closely tied to a Canadian regime of racial and propertied citizenship, where the capacity to appropriate land, as a white person, was a legal precondition for citizen-subject status (Bhandar 2018). In the 21^st century, Toronto has emerged as one of North America’s fastest-growing urban regions. Its global functions and economic vitality are primarily sustained by substantial and highly diverse immigrant populations, with 29.5% of new immigrants to Canada choosing to settle in the Toronto area (Statistics Canada 2022). However, notions of citizenship, borders, and sovereignty that sustain Canada’s immigration regime remain complicated by the violent legacy of colonisation and the timid acknowledgement of Indigenous land rights, treaties, and covenant agreements predating the settler-colonial state (Ellermann and O’Heran 2021).

Non-status citizenship offers a decolonial politics by: (i) asserting presence/residence while directly challenging the national/colonial construction of immigration differentiations; (ii) showing the local mismatch between formal citizenship and the current reality of people on the move urgently calling for a more dynamic view of citizenship; and (iii) overturning the exclusionary norms by making claims not only associated to rights but also to status (Isin 2020). We recognise that there are, however, larger decolonial issues linked to place-based, and by extension land-based, belonging when considering Tkaronto’s disquieted settler-colonial history. If immigration and citizenship scholars are to take place-based residency/inhabitance seriously, we must recognise the land we are settling on. While non-status citizenship highlights a decolonial ethics of belonging, it is limited in addressing the dispossession of Indigenous people by the settler-colonial state. It does, however, heed the call to close the “immigration–Aboriginal parallax gap” (Bauder 2011) by challenging the “racializing and colonizing practices and systems of thought that fix racialized immigrants and Indigenous peoples into similar categories within the (white) Canadian geographical imaginary” (Stanley et al. 2014). Migrant justice activists, and particularly the No One Is Illegal network, have led the reimagining of institutions and relations that are central to the decolonising project by demanding inclusion and fostering solidarity. The “no one is illegal” claim is at its core a “systemic critique of border imperialism” (Walia 2013:13) inspired by borderlands as settler-colonial interpretative devices of illegalisation (Anzaldúa 1987), and the mutually reinforcing anti-immigrant xenophobia, white supremacy, and settler colonialism (Smith 2013). Recognising that “no one is illegal” foregrounds “policies that illegalize human beings are legal and moral fictions” requiring undoing (Walia 2013:15). The activist slogan “no one is illegal on stolen land” provides solid grounding for challenging “status” categories and undoing broader dispossessive colonialism. While our reconceptualisation of non-status citizenship does not directly address Indigenous politics of self-determination, it serves nevertheless to question power relations shaped by capitalist and colonial logics—and the logics of the settler state.

Our explorative contribution to undoing “status citizenship” by arguing for non-status citizenship is grounded in empirical evidence. We draw from 21 interviews conducted in 2022 and 2023, mainly with service providers (15), city officials (1), and non-status citizens living in Toronto (5). Service providers included frontline workers (4) and leadership staff from neighbourhood health centres (2), staff from community centres offering services oriented to attending immigrants from Southeast Asian countries (1) and LGBTQ+ non-status citizens (1). Other participants were from a university offering a “sanctuary scholars” access programme (1), staff working in legal clinics (2), paralegal professionals (2), and immigration consultants (2). Additionally, we conducted in-depth interviews with non-status citizens, four of whom were women (some interviews took place in-person in a downtown public library, others via Zoom—with camera off). Each of our non-status research participants had distinct personal stories of falling into the grey zone of non-status citizenship, typically due to circumstances beyond their control. Given the lack of official data on irregularised citizens, interviews with non-status persons and service providers were the best means to capture the complexity and precarity of non-status trajectories (Goldring et al. 2024) and to expose everyday struggles and structural constraints. The non-status people we interviewed generously shared their stories of “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” (Bayat 2013: 33) and of the everyday created by their necessity to survive (see the Appendix for a list of interviews).

In the following sections, we develop our inquiry by focusing on distinctive paradoxes related to (i) irregularisation, (ii) access, (iii) jurisdiction, and (iv) regularisation—as a theoretical opening to challenge liberal sanctuary policies of inclusivity and solidarity. By framing our discussion in terms of paradoxes, we wish to highlight both discomfort and the potential of transformation of what might be perceived as tensions or contradictions. Insights of these paradoxes not only elucidate tensions but also, we hope, contribute to fostering a paradigmatic shift from national exclusionary to inclusionary ontologies. We start with debunking irregularisation, which is too often seen as a personal failure to qualify and, therefore, disqualifying one’s right to have rights, restricting and denying non-status individuals’ access to rights. We then examine the boundaries of “sanctuary” access and jurisdictional divisions producing social exclusion. We conclude with the paradox of regularisation as a claim to the regime that excludes non-status citizens in the first place. Acknowledging the increasing role and locus of cities in claiming inclusion, our goal is to heighten the potential greater role of cities not only in terms of expanding service delivery but also in calling out the urgency of the “failure of planning” amidst all levels of government. In doing so, we briefly engage with current debates on new municipalism that have found on the municipal scale a strategic entry point for developing and enacting redistributive policies (Marquez 2023), urban solidarity, or even more radical emancipatory politics (Roth et al. 2023; Russell 2019). Such entry points may help to challenge some of the multi-scalar inequities and settler-colonial logics at the roots of the crisis of migrant irregularisation in cities like Toronto. We join Coutin and Nichols (2024:1595) who suggest the notion of “adminigration” as a way to explore the “governance of immigrant community members through city-level policies and programs, whether or not these explicitly focus on immigrants”.

The Paradox of Irregularisation

It is estimated that at least 500,000 non-status people live in Canada (Goldring et al. 2009; Government of Canada 2022a; RCMP 2007), a majority likely in Toronto, but there is no official demographic data collected and therefore no accurate data on this population. But we know that this population experiences insecurity daily and that their forced invisibilisation benefits the exploitation of their labour and living conditions (Goldring et al. 2024). Non-status people do not meet immigration or refugee admissibility criteria or fall out of status for different reasons: people overstay their initial entry conditions, their visas expire, their refugee claims are denied, policy changes and processes are delayed, work permits for temporary programmes are relinquished because of abuse. Yet, as time passes, “irregularised” migrants become paradoxically yet marginally part of society as “non-status citizens”. Irregularity, as both Isin (2008) and De Genova (2004) remind us, is produced through regularity. Nyers (2019) succinctly captures the process of irregularisation as the making and unmaking of people into irregular citizens. Migrants do not arrive at a border as irregular; they are made “irregular” by power relationships invested in, and beyond, that border. As Pallister-Wilkins (2022:6) argues in their work on mobility, irregularity is also “the outcome of particular stories, political decisions, and the everyday work of border guards, local government officials, transport officials, landlords, healthcare workers, teachers and a host of other people who help to make borders an everyday, material reality”.

However, while a national/legal regime can forcefully impose the modalities of citizenship, it does not fully have control over the subjectivity of people because, as Nyers (2019) argues, the space of irregularity is a space of politics. To describe how excluded people manage to participate in society, albeit precariously, Nyers (2019) draws on Isin’s (2008:39) conception of “acts of citizenship” defined as “those acts through which citizens, strangers, outsiders and aliens emerge not as beings already defined but as beings acting and reacting with others”. Acts of citizenship not only emphasise a relational framework but also focus on the performative dimension of citizenship, highlighting process rather than status, constitutive rather than institutional politics, and everyday living (Isin 2008; Nyers 2019). Therefore, while irregularity is normatively seen as a transgression of the rule, it also holds the promise of difference, resistance, and change.

As shared with us by a Black woman from the Caribbean and a migrant rights activist, “non-status citizen” of Toronto for over a decade:

In her experience, Toronto’s current promise of “sanctuary” and “inclusivity”, i.e. the wood she holds to, is at odds with the “quicksand” of sociolegal irregularity imposed by Canada’s immigration regime. The hope of regularisation is the “wood” she holds on to. Despite the feeling of being stuck, her tenuous hope “allows for everyday practices” and maintains a “temporal sense of potential” for the future (Brun 2016:394). Although imbued with uncertainty, this quote demonstrates “agency-in-waiting” as a “capacity to act in the present” despite the “unpredictability of the future that is inherent in protracted uncertainty” (Brun 2015:24, 31; see also Biorklund 2023). Claiming the right to be here is certainly one of the quietest and most powerful acts of non-status citizenship. Still, such acts imply rejecting irregularisation while navigating the everyday with forced invisibility, reaching out for services in a context of insecurity, challenging various social norms, making a living informally, or even participating in public demonstrations to demand regularisation. All of those acts of survival pose a constant risk of detention and deportation.

We insist on the precarity of irregularity because of the unknown of everyday living created by the constant threat of deportation (i.e. being returned to a so-called proper place) as the externalising technology of national sovereignty. Yet, for many irregularised people, the combined internalising dynamic of irregularity produces a systemic invisibility that subjects people to local norms while often operating outside the norms and profiting on precarity and devaluation (living in place while out of place). Non-status citizenship highlights the paradox of people coping with both the norms of extra- and intra-territoriality, resisting exclusion with their presence (albeit precarious and vulnerable) and requiring rights/access. Claims for basic rights have been linked instrumentally to the discourse of “rights to the city”. However, our non-status citizenship claim is better representative of political subjectivities required to produce Lefebvre’s (1968) right of no exclusion in urban society. Lefebvre’s (1968) right to the city has been mobilised to enable claims to the city; claims to access and improve services is certainly justified but we revert to Lefebvre’s original conceptualisation of right to the city as right to difference, i.e. right to not be excluded and to fully participate to renewed urban society. As stated by Faret et al. (2021:433):

Urban planning practices juggle economic development and social justice, often embodying a fundamental tension. Stein (2019:26) captures this succinctly, arguing that a “planner’s mission is to imagine a better world, but their day-to-day work involves producing a more profitable one”. Planning politics arise from two interrelated yet oppositional processes—one technocratic promoting growth (development) and capitalism, and another striving for emancipation. While planning theory and practice have begun to address diversity (through contested participatory processes), planning often remains exclusionary despite its best intentions. This is illustrated by the fact that, in Ontario (and Canada more generally), planning theoretically focuses on land “uses” rather than users. Yet, in practice, many marginalised individuals often face “people zoning” that restricts access to certain public spaces (Rady and Sotomayor 2024) or residential areas (Angel and Sotomayor 2021). There are no safe or public spaces for irregularised migrants, whose mobility is highly constrained despite their forced invisibilisation. They are excluded from society even as they participate in it.

Municipal planning has played a modest role in enabling non-status citizens to belong “as users” and to perform their citizenship, irrespective of legal status. However, this progress has been limited over the last decade, raising the question: what is the “sanctuary city” waiting for to enhance its solidarity efforts? Going back to the overloaded shelter system and the influx of African asylum seekers, along with ten years of advocating “access for all”, the urgency at both local (and global) levels has surpassed state inertia. The paradox of irregularisation lies in the reality that people are residing and present, yet rendered precarious by administrative and legal constraints that failed to plan and respond to current migration realities. This protraction of uncertainty in non-status citizens’ daily lives underscores the failures of planning (Duggan and Aiken 2023), of political recognition, and of institutional action. It highlights the contradiction between non-status and citizenship while legitimising the need to recognise non-status citizenship.

The Paradox of Access

As Canada’s first “sanctuary city”, Toronto ensures access to key municipal services for residents regardless of immigration status. Emerging from activism and mutual aid networks, the sanctuary city designation is generally seen as innovative and inclusive, although its implementation varies and is imbued with many promises (Atak 2019; Bagelman 2013; Bauder 2017; Darling and Bauder 2019; Hudson et al. 2017; Humphris 2020; Nyers 2010). Sanctuary policies aim to facilitate fuller participation in everyday life by providing access to city services, yet often face challenges when reporting to immigration enforcement remains legally mandated by higher government levels. This is not to say that the discursive power of “sanctuary city” has no value. The AccessTO policy sought to offer services without requiring proof of status by any of the 40,000+ municipal employees. Implementing this policy included internal reviews, training for frontline staff and managers, new requirements for community service agencies funded by the City, and public education. Basic services offered by the City include emergency shelters, libraries, parks and recreational facilities, as well as preventive public health and emergency/police services. Many of these services are delivered by municipal departments in partnership with community service providers but are regulated by provincial and federal governments (Aery and Cheff 2018). Although the City of Toronto’s (2022) website lists accessible services, knowing exactly what risk such programmes might entail remains a concern for many non-status people. However, access to services often remains basic, and city authorities, despite facilitating some access to their services, have—as in the case of Toronto—been frequently collaborating with border agencies notably through their police services (Hudson 2019; Hudson et al. 2017; Moffette and Ridgley 2018). Toronto Police Service, although municipal employees, have consistently invoked their discretionary powers to cooperate with the Canada Border Services Agency which certainly raised serious doubt about the capacity of the City and its sanctuary policy to honour their promises (Hershkowitz et al. 2020; Moffette 2021). Quite the contrary, for many non-status citizens, the police persistently embody fear of detention and deportation. Accessing police services is uncommon given this known collaboration, especially that many racialised non-status people are already more exposed to police powers as likely subjects of banal-yet-consequential street checks. For a non-status person, an un/wanted altercation with police quickly translates into alerting the Canada Border Services Agency, detention, and deportation.

Access to other municipal services is safer yet limited. Non-status residents access basic healthcare services such as vaccination, sexual health, dental health, tuberculosis and harm reduction through Toronto Public Health (Aery and Cheff 2018). Basic healthcare is provided by the provincial government via decentralised community health centres with walk-in clinics. The City funds many social services through grants to service agencies, and “not inquiring about status” is expected. Community health centres, funded by the City, serve specific areas, with frontline workers trained to serve non-status clients in various languages with equity and sensitivity. The “access for all” policy relies on these frontline workers maintaining confidentiality by not asking for status. Such confidentiality has long been part of social services practices (Fox 2023). This practice enables them to address basic health needs and develop longer relationships. As the executive director of a community health centre explains, “the value added for the walking clinic model is that we … deal with their immediate concern, but then we will try to get them connected to ongoing primary care, particularly if they’re showing some level of medical complexity” (Interview, 16 May 2022).

Community health clinics can make referrals to City-funded agencies and other services following the same “don’t ask, don’t tell” protocols. However, non-status citizens face barriers when needing specialised or emergency care, such as lab work, specialists, surgeries, or paramedical care. Access to these services is limited and dependent on the availability of discretionary funds at health centres, often leading to long wait times. As a non-status citizen shared, access is unpredictable:

Unpredictability, waiting lists, and delays are just one side of the coin. The other side is inevitably debt, especially if emergency medical treatment is required beyond what the community health centre can support, forcing a non-status citizen to pay out of pocket, often for years. The same non-status citizen confided:

Access to Toronto’s emergency shelter system is crucial for non-status citizens. An immigration consultant noted that “most of my clients have used [the shelter system] at some point” (Interview, 31 August 2022), highlighting frontline workers and interagency referrals as essential social infrastructure for non-status persons. However, access to municipal services is limited by the capacity of municipal apparatus and partnering organisations, with policing being a significant concern (see Hudson et al. 2017; Moffette and Ridgley 2018).

Non-status people (and their family members, whatever their status) “live in constant fear of detention, deportation, and surveillance by the authorities” (Nyers 2010:132), which restricts their social and spatial interactions. This includes building friendships, peer relationships, or finding a life partner. As a non-status citizen, who immigrated legally under the Canada Live-In Caregiver Program but lost their status due to their sponsors’ negligence in the process, told us, “since I became undocumented, I don’t want to bring anybody into my mess” (Interview, 12 September 2022). Interestingly, while most people’s sense of isolation was amplified during COVID-19, the same non-status citizen told us that they felt the pandemic had “actually helped … because nobody questions why you’re not going anywhere. It helped me a lot just to say: ‘You can wear a mask anyway’ because it is the pandemic, right?” Similarly, the fear of being in the “spotlight” or having questions raised by peers about their future was shared with us by a 19-year-old non-status student who arrived in Canada aged three, grew up in the Greater Toronto Area, and attended schooling without having to reveal her status. In her words:

Non-status citizens go to great lengths to remain invisible. However, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy poses challenges for the municipal apparatus. This protocol is weak if municipal workers and partner agency staff cannot maintain consistency. As a former councillor and proponent of the 2013 “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy expresses:

The paradox of access is that basic services often fall short, and the social solidarity of frontline workers is limited by inconsistent policy awareness among municipal employees and staff of funded agencies. Despite the opening of various municipal services enabled by sanctuary city policies, access to basic services remains limited and non-status people remain vulnerable due to insufficient resources, uneven institutional awareness, and jurisdictional constraints. Additionally, pejorative discourses of migrants as threats to national boundaries and identity, and at the very core of the sanctuary policy, people’s invisibility and absence of demographic data on non-status migrants further hinder service provision. The risk of deportation looms large, as accessing basic services can inadvertently involve non-status migrants in a “deportation apparatus” extending beyond immigration authorities (e.g. social workers, shelters staff, school administrators, or teachers) (Nyers 2010:133).

Enacting sanctuary policy in what skaidra (2022) refers to as “private deputized sovereignty”, one could argue that the incomplete (and perhaps impossible) institutional solidarity in the large municipal and partnering machine means that access to services and social rights are governed through invisibility and confidentiality—where risk remains the constant “subterranean carceral” condition of access (Bagelman and Kovalchuk 2019). Non-status citizenship advocates for greater and safer access to services and challenges differentiated access and services underlying constant risk and vulnerability.

The Paradox of Jurisdiction

Sanctuary city policies are enacted, at best, as oppositional practice to nation-state authority by providing partial and limited suspension of immigration law and enacting a temporary “relief” space for services (Sotomayor and Gilbert 2022). Still, such policy does not change immigration law and regime, provide regularisation, or fully alleviate the everyday vulnerability of irregularised people. In Canada, the federal government retains full authority over immigration control and citizenship while immigration-related integration services are devolved to provincial/territorial and municipal governments. More specifically, the provincial/territorial levels are responsible for funding services while the municipalities (often via community agencies) dispense such services. This tension between the cities’ concern with residence (jus domicile) and the state’s focus naturalisation (jus solis) is what has been termed the “local turn of migration” (Baumgartel and Miellet 2022; Manfredi-Sánchez 2020).

The problem for non-status people is not only their unease in interacting with governmental authorities for fear of being detained and deported—but also the fact that limited services are dispersed across various departments, forcing non-status people to negotiate various governmental bureaucracies to understand eligibility for services. Municipalities are legislatively enabled by the province, so a city like Toronto, despite its inclusiveness intention, is financially and legally bound by upper levels of the government’s eligibility criteria. Immigration services being split across three governmental jurisdictions creates considerable problems of coordination. Many frontline services participants that we interviewed noted how governmental jurisdictions limit access to deeply needed services beyond what municipalities can provide. As Paquet et al. (2022:95) argue:

Municipal capacity to deliver is often stretched, as seen in the shelter system in the summer of 2023. While the City of Toronto provides temporary housing access through shelter programmes, there are serious time, space, and condition limitations for non-status residents (and families). Services that might appear to the public as municipal, such as public housing under Toronto Community Housing, are inaccessible to non-status citizens because the provincial government imposes eligibility criteria to access those services. But even for services available to non-status citizens—and where staff may have received non-status solidarity training—there is always a risk of access being compromised.

Non-status people might have access to employment centres through the City’s Employment & Social Services. Still, they do not have access to provincially funded social assistance programmes that require proof of status. Non-status people are forced to financially support themselves with (often multiple) exploitative jobs and work conditions with no legal recourse. This situation was made worse during the COVID-19 pandemic because “they have to continue working” (Paquet et al. 2022:93).

As mentioned, non-status citizens do not have access to publicly funded health care but can access basic services. Some service provider participants, however, commented on the gap between frontline workers’ approach to non-status clients’ care, and the often ambiguous “high administration messaging” that, depending on provincial politics, may turn to a mandate of limiting service to non-status citizens or even reporting of non-status citizens to border enforcement agencies.

Access to public education is generally available to non-status children in elementary and secondary schools governed by local school boards in collaboration with the City of Toronto and under the provincial Ministry of Education. Children under 18 can technically attend public school regardless of their or their parents’ immigration status. However, provincial rules prohibit children with temporary visas, multiple entries in their passports, or those in the country for six months or less from registering schooling. These children are considered visitors and may be forced to stay out of school for a year before becoming eligible. But what happens after 18 and for post-secondary education? As a participant reacted, “we think Toronto is a sanctuary city, at least our kids can go to school here, but no, there are all kinds of other barriers … So it is an uphill battle” (Interview, 13 August 2022). Perhaps where the City of Toronto best supports its non-status population is through its library system, which offers open access to knowledge, internet, printers, English courses, informative talks, community events, and career workshops. Many participants highlighted the library’s importance, and coincidently, many of our interviews with non-status citizens took place at their local library branch. The City library system could become a more important node of service, notably when it comes to legal clinics. Community legal clinics are crucial for non-status and other vulnerable persons facing evictions, job loss, domestic violence, and other conflicts on which non-status people may always be on the most precarious side. However, in 2019, the Ontario conservative government under Doug Ford cut the legal aid budget by 30% ($133 million), arguing that the federal government should fund immigration and refugee-related legal services. This has impacted access for recent immigrants and others with precarious status in Toronto (Hasham 2020).

The hierarchy of intergovernmental orders creates complicated political relations. In declaring itself a sanctuary city in 2013, the City of Toronto sought to redefine intergovernmental collaborations and partnerships to deliver immigration and settlement programmes better. The City argued it is the closest level to residents, where everyday/performative citizenship and subjectivity are best negotiated. This negotiation, however, took place in a particularly politically complex context of local pro-migrant advocacy incubating under a more progressive mayor, David Miller (2003–2010). It then gained the municipal support of a conservative government led by Rob Ford (2010–2014) under a liberal provincial jurisdiction (transitioning from D. McGuinty [2003–2013] to K. Wynne [2013–2018], first female Premier of Ontario and first openly gay premier in Canada) and the federal conservative government of Stephen Harper (2006–2015) known for its anti-migration record. The three levels of government rarely aligned politically—particularly regarding immigration and settlement services.

The paradox of jurisdiction arises from the mismatch between municipal service provision and the control over funding and immigration status held by provincial and federal governments. Entering agreements with upper levels of governments means entering their constitutional realms of legality—leaving out the inclusivity of all residents and entering the uneven terrain of social rights and the national immigration litmus test of illegality, criminality, and morality. The paradox of jurisdiction not only exposes the limits of institutional and governmental solidarity across levels of governments, but it also shows that the municipal rhetoric of inclusivity does not always align with the eligibility frameworks of the upper level of governments. While the “access for all” policy might challenge services governance, it does not disrupt the established order of service eligibility and immigration law. While many cities and their network of service providers and advocacy organisations have recognised their strategic responsibilities in the “local turn of migration”, their voices are only faintly heard by other levels of government. The paradox of jurisdiction is that the current mode of governance through the hierarchy is not very agile, and waiting time, backlogs, and status quo too often impact service access and delivery and too often reaffirms exclusion—and deportation remains the sword of Damocles in this system. Moreover, governing through jurisdictional hierarchy sustains normalisation and avoids opening a space for equality and regularisation of status. As part of the sanctuary policy, the municipal plea to establish a regularisation programme for undocumented residents was never taken seriously by federal instances. Yet municipal and community advocacy for non-status regularisation has created a small crack in this hierarchical order of migration and the fixity of jurisdictional relationships—kept open by the need for more resources to enable a modicum of citizenship and regularisation. The key question here becomes what role can the municipal government and its community collaborators play in reconfiguring a space where migration policy better reflects migration realities.

Debates on municipalism as “the democratic autonomy of municipalities … over political and economic life vis-à-vis the nation-state” (Thompson 2021:317) often take sanctuary policies as examples of the type of urban solidarities needed across society and state to build municipal democratic autonomy and contest decades of government austerity and neoliberal urbanism. Such a vision of democratic city-making invokes a new spatial imaginary of the commons, where municipalities move beyond hierarchal and competitive relations toward more open and cooperative governance centred on empathy and care (Russell 2019; Thompson 2021). The slogan “democracy begins where you live” (cited in Rubio Pueyo 2017:20) has characterised the widely celebrated new municipalist movement in Europe and has spread to new cities. In the case of Toronto’s sanctuary policy, however, non-status migrants are wrapped up in paralysing and intractable tensions, revealing the limits of municipal solidarity and progressive local autonomy in the settler-colonial state.

The role of municipal services cannot be denied but is not extensive either. Solidarity is here expressed based on access to services, but beyond the obvious actions of planning’s duty to invite participation, expand services, or lobby for more social development (and resources), how can “wooden twigs” be created across governmental jurisdictions so that non-status citizens can step out of the irregularised quicksand? With the powers of immigration and citizenship held at the federal level, non-status citizenship can only be realised in the current system through regularisation.

The Paradox of Regularisation

In August 2022, a coalition of “status for all” migrant activists petitioned the federal government to grant permanent residency to an estimated 1.7 million migrants with precarious status, including the estimated 500,000 irregularised individuals. Nearly 10,000 Canadians signed the petition, and about 500 civil society organisations supported the call for migration justice. Large solidarity demonstrations across Canadian cities raised public awareness. As one migrant rights activist noted, “they wait for political windows of opportunity with the different levels of government and strategise towards potential gains” (Interview, 12 September 2022). A non-status interviewee, participating in these demonstrations, acknowledged that while amnesty might not be universal, they had little left to lose.

Regularisation reverses irregular status, granting permanent residency and eventual citizenship, which can lead to better employment, healthcare, and housing. Status foremost means escaping the well-founded fear of reprisals, termination, eviction, and deportation—and enabling being reunited with their families across borders. As the most basic recognition of belonging, regularisation can potentially alleviate the fear of deportation and the spiral of precarisation. Regularising 500,000 residents could contribute at least $1.1 billion to the public purse through taxes from previously untaxed employees (Migrant Rights Network 2022).

There have been previous migrant regularisation campaigns in Canada, but never at the demanded 1.7 million scale. The largest programme goes back to 1973, when 39,000 non-status citizens were regularised. Canada’s regularisation campaigns granting permanent resident status have historically been either by country of origin (usually based on a moratorium on removals for countries deemed insecure or unsafe, as in the case of 900 Algerians in 2002 or 4,000 Haitians in 1981) or by occupational sector to fill particular labour shortages (as in the case of 500 construction workers in the Greater Toronto Area regularised in 2021). Regularisation is implemented using strict criteria (criminality, residency, medical health, etc.). Most recently, a regularisation programme was established for the so-called Guardian Angels, i.e. refugee and undocumented healthcare workers who provided “exceptional” essential services during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2021. The campaign granted permanent citizenship to 239 principal applicants (out of 978) (Government of Canada 2021). This programme, however, excluded the vast majority of racialised, low-waged, non-status workers in care services whose “exceptional” yet disposable contributions to the pandemic crisis were not as visible.

Currently, the sole legal option to regularise one’s status is the extremely narrow “Humanitarian and Compassionate Grounds” programme (only 3% of all permanent residents in 2021) (Government of Canada 2022b). The programme is highly discretionary as applicants need to prove themselves as “being established or settled in Canada”. It is well known in legal circles that the federal jurisdiction tends to favour humanitarian applications of persons that can present themselves as seemingly “deserving” when “integrated into society”. But there is a profound contradiction here—not only because non-status isolation prevents “integration”, but also because reaching out for any basic service or governmental assistance may actually diminish the chances of a favourable decision. So, legal aid providers might need to recommend status-seeking clients facing precarious economic conditions not to access services or assistance as it may diminish their chances to demonstrate their deservingness and integration into Canadian society and to obtain a positive decision on their “humanitarian and compassionate” case application. As a paralegal professional explains, “even if a non-status citizen is currently in subsidised housing, which they got because of prior status (which they then lost), they may want and try to move out to improve the outlook of their file” (Interview, 13 July 2022).

Yet, while regularisation is needed, the precarity of non-status citizens is built and sustained as a constant feature of everyday life that even basic services and the promises of status cannot instantly alleviate—after having been confined to the margins of society for so long. Compounding the differentiated treatment to different non-status cases is a question posed by a non-status citizen and long-time activist for migrant rights, which is, how exactly will their opportunities and everyday life change with regularisation after having put on hold their plans and ideas of a future for so long—and after having lived at the margins for so long. Will they finally “feel like they belong”? As a non-status citizen told us:

The paradox of regularisation is that regularisation or citizenship programmes offer a very limited pathway to people who have been excluded. Regularisation programmes have only occasionally granted status to particular individuals under specific conditions, underlining that not all non-status people are equal and equally admissible to such programmes. Asked about the probability of a full regularisation programme for all migrants, an immigration consultant recognises “that it’s not going to be what we want … it will likely exclude the most vulnerable people” (Interview, 31 August 2022). Limited programmes of regularisation unmake and remake status—individually and collectively. Still, the lack of options, the burden of proof of “deservingness” and the low success rate confine non-status citizens to remain without status. Moreover, non-status isolation renders any appearance of belonging and integration difficult, and their solidarity in claiming status for all remains an act of citizenship. Non-status people are asked to demonstrate integration despite their experiences of invisibility and precarity. Given the programme limitations and by fear of exposure, very few non-status residents apply to the “Humanitarian and Compassionate Grounds” programme, de facto relegating regularisation to the rare occasional amnesty programmes. As Pallister-Wilkins (2022:39) writes, “[h]umanitarianism promotes neoliberal solutions based on an entrepreneurial individualism that contributes to an overall invisibilising of structural inequalities … humanitarianism masks as much as it illuminates”.

The paradox of regularisation is that it operates with clear political and legal boundaries, and despite the appearance of protection, for many, such campaigns reassert “illegality” and grind down hope. As Nyers (2008:133) remarks:

Regularisation simultaneously carries hope and control. Whether 500,000 non-status citizens will ever be regularised remains to be seen. In the current immigration regime, regularisation is the only way to formalise non-status citizenship and address its ongoing paradoxes. Regularisation short of status for all remains a system of governing through precarity and insecurity.

Conclusion

Non-status citizenship provides a framework for recognising individuals without formal status as integral to the community through their residency/inhabitation despite varying levels of vulnerability and instability. It exposes the paradox of navigating both extra- and intra-territorial norms, challenging exclusion through their mere presence. Embracing a decolonial politics of belonging (although limited in answers to questions of Land Back and Indigenous sovereignty), non-status citizenship also recognises the struggles of documented individuals who face marginalisation within the state’s constructs and the legacy of Canadian colonialism. While building on urban citizenship debates, this concept underscores its limitations, particularly concerning insecurity and deportation risks for illegalised citizens.

Non-status citizenship also aims to solve the paradoxical nature of precarious migrants’ socio-legal status as it plays out in the sanctuary city. At present, non-status people are caught in overlapping paradoxes of irregularisation, access, jurisdiction, and regularisation. We have illustrated how invisibility, hierarchy, and precarity are built and sustained as a constant feature of everyday non-status life despite some basic services and performances of solidarity and resistance. These paradoxes are resolved theoretically, practically, and politically through a recognition that non-status citizenship claims both formal recognition of presence and security. The paradox of irregularisation is that it is a construct resulting from the failure of planning and no longer aligns with the reality of global migration. Non-status citizenship resolves the paradox of access as it not only offers a wider range of services without conditions, but it does so without fear of being detained or deported. The paradox of jurisdiction highlights discordance between levels of governments and services that suggests a much-needed collaboration to address non-status citizenship. Here the urban level has certainly an increasing role to play, but must be given the political considerations to expand and fully realise their sanctuary policies. Finally, the paradox of regularisation insists that non-status citizenship represents a politics of redress to end exclusion and insecurity. The regularisation of non-status people is certainly a first good (and overdue) step, but dismantling the systemic incapacitation of migrants remains essential. Our intervention, therefore, calls for an abolitionist politics of criminalising and exclusionary immigration regimes increasingly unresponsive to the realities of migration. In calling for the recognition of non-status citizenships, we are arguing for the political agency of individuals whose lives are constrained by socio-legal systems entrenched in border control, policing, detention, and deportation. These systems not only perpetuate exclusion but also extend their punitive and exclusionary reach into vital spheres such as healthcare, employment, and education.

Admittedly, looking at non-status citizenship through the lens of irregularisation, access, jurisdiction, and regularisation raises more questions than answers, but nevertheless starts exposing some of the complexity and contradictions of citizenship amidst attempts to build municipalist policy. In the present structure of the immigration regime, the municipal level has a service delivery function and no major influential decision role. Moreover, the municipal stance against immigration laws that irregularise undocumented people is increasingly getting lost. Many so-called sanctuary policies have moved towards expanding solidarity with other marginalised groups. Paradoxically, this further invisibilisation protects non-status people from a policy spotlight while at the same time relegating their claim of visibility in the public discourse back to immigration and regularisation advocacy organisations and community networks that were the actual proponents of the municipal policy in 2013. Solidarity with non-status citizens is rendered invisible in urban space (as there are no arresting migrant caravans and bus loads in news reports) and in Canada’s multicultural ethos.

Trapped between/within borders, non-status migrants are constantly reminded of the bordering pressures of both state and non-state actors. They are particularly caught in the confluence of national obsessions over border control, right-wing populism politics (Rivero et al. 2022), demands of economic markets, media frenzy, austerity, and a profound incapacity of governments to overhaul restrictive immigration systems based on legalities that are today impossible and inaccessible for most migrants. There is certainly an urgency to debunk the myth of settler countries like Canada that migrants benefit from abundant social services when, in reality, they are holding on to the wood of hope in the quicksand of the tangled immigration regime. The problem is first and foremost also a problem of recognition and justice—recognising the failure of migration regimes and governments, recognising the risky temporality of being non-status, recognising the insecurity of precarity—and yet not letting go of hope. For non-status citizens, hope can only be performed with a degree of anxiety.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all participants to this research, and especially non-status citizens who generously shared their everyday experiences. We also express their gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions on earlier versions of the paper. We also thank the Antipode editorial team for their guidance and the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University for their research grant. We assume full responsibility for any errors presented in this paper. (Article originally published in Antipode).