 Emine Fidan Elcioglu and Tahseen Shams*. 2023. "Brokering Immigrant Transnationalism: Remittances, Family Reunification, and Private Refugee Sponsorship in Neoliberal Canada." Current Sociology. 72(5): 890-908.. *equal co-authors
Much scholarship celebrates immigrant transnationalism as a story of refugee agency, portraying cross-border ties as self-directed acts of resilience. This article complicates that view by showing how Canada’s private refugee sponsorship program empowers ordinary citizens—often with no refugee background themselves—to broker, and sometimes constrain, refugees’ connections abroad, encouraging family reunification while discouraging remittances. By revealing how “care” becomes a site of control, the piece unsettles the assumption that transnational practices are driven solely by migrants or refugees themselves. |
