The Extraordinary Statelessness of Deepan Budlakoti
3
the dying days of the Harper government, specifically targeted Canadian-born
individuals convicted of certain offences against the state (Government of
Canada, 2014a).3 Such reforms are significant insofar as they introduce new
mechanisms for producing de facto statelessness among the Canadian-born.
As explored in this article, there are other, less scrutinized mechanisms in
Canadian citizenship law (such as the “diplomatic exception” to jus soli), and
administrative practice that can strip the citizenship of Canadian-born
individuals in a political climate where citizenship deprivation becomes
increasingly normalized as part of the larger trend towards “securitization” of
citizenship.
In this article, I pursue a sociology of statelessness by examining its
localized production and connections to a broader (and in some instances,
transnational) network of social and material relations. I do this through a
case study of Canadian-born Deepan Budlakoti, who at age 22 was informed
that he was in fact not Canadian, and lacking any other citizenship, was
rendered stateless. I utilize Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as an analytical
guide for exploring how Budlakoti’s citizenship was extinguished.
The article is organized to, first, discuss the scholarly contribution of a
sociology of statelessness to current debates on this most abject of statuses.
Here, I examine the potential relevance of ANT to provide conceptualization
of deprivation of citizenship, and its particular bearing on Budlakoti’s
translation from a Canadian birthright citizen to a stateless person. Second,
the article briefly addresses some dimensions of contemporary statelessness
in Canada, including its context of production through reforms in citizenship
revocation, its prevalence and the consequences for those holding this abject
legal status. Third, I explore the Budlakoti case to reveal the networked
production of statelessness. Here legal documental networks were central in
creating the lived status of citizenship only to be replaced by another network
of documents and other forces, which expunged that citizenship and produced
statelessness.
In the fourth part of the paper, I focus on how the government has utilized
a listed exception in the Canadian Citizenship Act to jus soli citizenship,
exempting the children born of foreign diplomats and their employees, to
negate the two decades of Budlakoti’s government-assisted identity as a
Canadian citizen. Finally, in the conclusion, I reiterate the social justice
implications of the networked extinguishment of Budlakoti’s Canadian
3
Until recently, the Canadian-born have largely been secure in their citizenship status whereas
there has been a long-standing tradition of revocation of citizenship for the foreign-born. Indeed,
the grounds for revocation have undergone a process of expansion and contraction. Since 1868,
grounds have expanded from misrepresentation or fraud during the process of naturalization, to
“disloyalty to his Majesty” in 1919 to grounds of severe criminality in 1920 (Anderson, 2008, p.
85). In order to limit the discretionary powers of the government and promote the equality of all
citizens, the 1976 Immigration Act made false representation or fraud during application for
citizenship the sole ground for revocation (Anderson, 2008, p. 85).
Studies in Social Justice, Volume 11, Issue 1, 1-26, 2017
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