Chivalry, ‘Race’ and Discretion at the Canadian Border

A thorough-going ambiguity surrounds the very meaning of racial profiling at the border. This ambiguity, including in particular the slippage between race/nationality, effectively enables both official denials of racial profiling as well as the continued play of racialized risk knowledges at the border. In this paper, we take this ambiguity seriously and trace the dynamic and heterogeneous configurations of racialized knowledges that constitute border risks and that shape the broad discretion of frontline border control officers in Canada. This discretion, emboldened by the crime-security nexus, is itself shaped by a protectionist logic that represents the nation as ‘damsel in distress’, border officers as her guardians and the border as the thin blue line in need of constant vigilance.