Abstract
There is limited research into the situations of people living with precarious status in Canada, which includes people whose legal status is in-process, undocumented, or unauthorized, many of whom entered the country with a temporary resident visa, through family sponsorship arrangements, or as refugee claimants. In 2005, a community-university alliance sought to carry out a research study of the lived experiences of people living with precarious status. In this paper, we describe our negotiation of the ethics review process at a Canadian university and the ethical, legal, and methodological issues that emerged. Although being able to guarantee our participants complete confidentiality was essential to the viability of the project due to their vulnerability to detention or deportation, we discovered that the Canadian legal framework limited us to being able to offer them confidentiality “to the fullest extent possible by law.” One way to overcome this conflict would have been through the construction of a Wigmore defence, in which we would document that the research would not be possible without assurance of our participants’ confidentiality. Such a defence would be tested in court if our research records were subpoenaed by immigration enforcement authorities. Rather than take the risk that this defence would not be successful and would result in our participants being deported, we altered the research methods from using multiple interviews to establish trust (which would have required that we store participants’ contact information) to meeting participants only once to discuss their experiences of living with precarious legal status in Canada. Our encounter with the ‘myth of confidentiality’ raised questions about the policing of knowledge production.
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Notes
This is particularly important given numerous examples of violations of children’s rights that were presented at the recent international conference on undocumented migrants (Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants 2009).
Please note that in this paper we are not reporting on the results of the two studies regarding the actual experiences of participants but rather on the research-related issues; for those discussions, please see Bernhard et al (2007) and Young (2005; forthcoming).
The Tri-Council consists of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), which are the three major funding bodies for research in Canada.
Subsequent to our experience in 2005, there have been several related projects approved by the ERB.
The challenges of those working with immigrants with precarious status can be compared to the challenges faced by researchers working with drug addicts, individuals who provide assisted suicide, and interventions aimed at male clients of prostitutes, the so called ‘john’ schools, whose research participants might be of interest to various authorities. In these sensitive cases, the protection of the researchers’ sources is paramount to thorough data collection.
This is the wording around confidentiality that all Canadian university ethics boards recommend for informed consent documents.
These are journals that recruit experts in the field to review manuscripts without knowing who wrote them. Authors are then either rejected or required to make changes to their manuscripts in accord with these reviews. The anonymity of both authors and reviewers ensures that the process is fair and scientifically rigorous.
Without permanent resident status in Canada, students are required to pay international student fees to attend post-secondary school. These high fees would effectively exclude such students from continuing their education after high school.
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Bernhard, J.K., Young, J.E.E. Gaining Institutional Permission: Researching Precarious Legal Status in Canada. J Acad Ethics 7, 175–191 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-009-9097-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-009-9097-9