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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2015
Immigration Law has as its primary subject the stranger: the outsider who is under no obligation of allegiance to the state, who is not represented in its political processes, and whose needs and interests are, in most situations, accorded less concern than those of people who already participate in the social and political life of a community. The immigrant stranger may, of course, appear in a variety of guises. He may be a wealthy entrepreneur or investor who belongs to another political community but who chooses to emigrate to advance his own or his family’s well-being. Alternatively, the stranger may be a person who has experienced life solely within the confines of a community that is plagued by economic deprivation. Such a person may be crippled by physical and emotional need or cultural fragmentation. His search is for a new social environment in which, it is hoped, these constraints will not be present in such exaggerated or severe measure. Sometimes the needy stranger will be seeking an immediate escape from a political regime which offers her no protection or which aims at her very destruction, and sometimes she will be searching for deliverance from the incessant, limbo-like tedium or the multitude of unspeakable terrors to which one is exposed in a refugee camp. Whatever the guise in which he or she appears, the stranger is someone with whom the modern political state must come to terms. He or she cannot be ignored.
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2. Part I of the Constitution Act 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (U.K.), c. 11 (hereinafter Charter).
3. R.S.C. 1985, c. 1–2 (as amended) (hereinafter, Immigration Act).
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5. Thus, while a legal positivist who identifies the criteria of membership to be unsettled would hold that extra-legal criteria will be the proper source of determinations of membership, non-positivists may believe that interpretive methodology can be utilized to construct the legal principle which applies. This difference in approach lies at the heart of the Hart-Dworkin debate. See Hart, H.L.A. The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961)Google Scholar and , “The Model of Rules I” in Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press, 1978)Google ScholarPubMed
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39. See Employment and Immigration Canada, “Women at Risk—Procedures and Guidelines” Operations Memorandum, IS 361, 20/4/1988; and Refugee Perspectives 1987–1988 (Ottawa: Employment and Immigration Canada, 1987) at 7.
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