State-controlled refugee protection in Canada has gone through paradoxical developments in recent decades. While refugee rights have expanded, access to these rights has tightened. Previously unrecognized groups – such as women experiencing gender-based violence and LGBT populations – are now considered legitimate refugees. Yet, the implementation of stringent administrative measures has made it harder for refugees to secure protection.

Refugees Are (Not) Welcome Here explores how refugee claims are processed within a complex and contradictory regime that is stretched between the separate fields of law and bureaucracy. Azar Masoumi draws on archival and media sources, interviews with people in the field, and organizational data to map the arrangements that allow the Canadian system to sustain itself, in spite of and through its internal paradoxes. In doing so, she explains why state-controlled refugee protection persists despite its many failures to protect refugees, not only in Canada but globally.

This rigorous study deftly argues that the paradoxical interplay between refugee law and the claim-processing bureaucracies of the state is symptomatic of a larger illogic: reliance on the exclusivist mechanisms of the nation state to ensure the universal application of rights. Ultimately, Refugees Are (Not) Welcome Here illuminates just how this paradox has turned refugee protection into an unfulfilled promise.