Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Two examples fill out on the one hand the Canadian state's attempt at
containment and control and on the other the striving of the entrepreneur
to evade such an unwelcome regimen. The residence requirement within
Canada as a necessity for citizenship eligibility - part of the state's 'regime
of localization' - has proven a barrier to astronauts absent for long periods
to manage a business in East Asia. If a permanent resident does not main-
tain residency in Canada for at least 183 days in a 12-month period, there
is a risk, under the Immigration Act, of losing permanent resident status,
and a greater risk of an unwelcome interrogation by airport immigration
officers. Astronaut businessmen of course would normally be outside
Canada longer than this time period each year running their overseas enter-
prises, and therefore would be at risk of losing status.
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Loss of status would
terminate progression to citizenship, the goal of the large majority of mil-
lionaire migrants. A
Sing Tao
story in 2000 suggested that comparatively
longer residency requirements were contributing to declining immigration
from Hong Kong, with Canada falling into an unfamiliar third rank that
year behind numbers entering the United States and Australia. The
World
Journal's
Taiwanese-Canadian audience were informed that extended resi-
dency would cramp the highly mobile lifestyle of business immigrants, par-
ticularly those in the investor stream. An immigration lawyer opined that
'they might not choose Canada' as a result (
World Journal
1999). An end
run around this limitation for some astronauts has been to enter the United
States from Canada as a visitor and use an American airport as a point of
trans-Pacific departure and re-entry, so that immigration authorities do not
record absence from Canada. This practice became familiar enough that it
caught the attentive eye of
Ming Pao
, whose report documented the exist-
ence of drivers who would collect astronauts from the Seattle airport for
$150-$200 and bring then across the border as if they had been short-term
visitors to the United States, thereby concealing an absence of 3-4 months
outside Canada on business ventures (Cheung 1999).
A second point of resistance to bureaucratic surveillance has occurred in
acquiring the necessary business for those in the entrepreneur stream.
Establishing a business soon after landing and subsequently reaching a
stage of commercial maturity so that terms and conditions can be removed
less than two years later imposes a huge burden. In our interviews with
entrepreneurs it soon came to light that some of them were cutting corners.
The informal economy offers a refuge for ethnic entrepreneurs to evade the
regulatory arm of the state (Kloosterman et al. 1998), but with the addi-
tional expectations and monitoring schedule of the BIP, evasion was more
challenging. The expected investment in a business was $150,000 for entre-
preneurs, but through informal means and at some risk of disclosure it was
possible to reduce that cost and establish a more predictable route to busi-
ness success and the lifting of terms and conditions.
