| Abstract | This article situates the dominant discourses of ‘global citizenship’ employed in North American universities to internationalize the curricula, drawing in part on evidence from one Pacific northwestern Canadian university in the post-September-11 context of recent restrictive immigration policies, anti-terrorist measures and evocative Cold War memories. Far from weakening the Canadian nation-state or jettisoning neoliberalism, it argues that authoritarian post-Fordism constitutes a supra-juridical state that offers fewer social services but governs with more entrepreneurship through its globalization, immigration and ‘national security’ policies. The article shows how the post-September-11 changes to Canada's immigration and refugee legislation from 1978 to 2001, write evocative fears about ‘terrorists’ and ‘invading immigrants’ on the national body politic. These changes provide literal and metaphorical transnational, economic and socio-legal mobility with substantive and specific human rights to those prospective immigrants deemed ‘highly skilled global citizens’. Yet, such policy efforts and legislation also reproduce the exclusions and differential hierarchies of gendered, classed, ableist and racialized notions of skill, flexible work and vulnerable or unobtainable citizenship for those it deems ‘non-immigrants’, migrants or non-citizens. The conclusion asks: Is ‘global citizenship’ an oxymoronic slogan; a well-meaning but naïve equation of transnational mobility or ‘belonging’ with formal legal substantive citizenship and human rights; or an opportunity to claim democratic praxis through a decolonized curricular, pedagogical and educational policy?
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