CRS/CERLAC Seminar: On the move in North America: Asylum seekers in Canada, the US and Mexico

This panel brings together scholars researching recent movements of asylum seekers across North America, exploring the connections between policies in Canada, the US and Mexico. These policies risk increasing precarity and vulnerability among migrants, some of whom are from North of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras), with others having transited through these states from further afield. The panel is a collaboration between CERLAC and CRS. It is the first in a series of events exploring the movement of migrants and asylum seekers in this region, which is one of the most pressing humanitarian crises in the Americas today. A public event on the same topic will be held at the Toronto Reference Library in the evening on March 11, followed by a full day of workshops at York University on March 12.
Tanya Basok is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology at the University of Windsor. Over the past thirty years, she has conducted research on Central American refugees in Costa Rica, Mexican migrant farm workers in Canada, and “transit” migrants in Mexico. She is a co-author of Rethinking Transit Migration: Precarity, Mobility and Self-Making in Mexico (2015) and numerous articles in the area of migration and refugee studies.

Craig Damian Smith is the Associate Director at the University of Toronto’s Global Migration Lab. He has conducted several years of fieldwork about migration, displacement and integration throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Western Balkans, and Europe. His current SSHRC-funded research looks at the emergence of irregular migration systems to Canada and their effects on Canada’s domestic politics and international relations.
Lunch will be available