Every year, over 1.3 million people apply to visit, work, or settle in Canada and discover that their future rests in visa officers’ hands. How do these officers decide who gets in? Seeking answers to this question, Vic Satzewich gained access to eleven overseas visa offices. Points of Entry reveals immigration officers in action as they determine credibility and risk. Contrary to popular opinion, individual bias rarely enters into their decisions. Instead, a combination of experience, organizational culture, and accumulated local knowledge shapes their decision to issue a visa or dig deeper into some people’s stories and histories.

Vic Satzewich's profile page

• Winner, John Porter Award, Canadian Sociological Association

Vic Satzewich is a professor of sociology at McMaster University and the author of a number of books and articles, including Racism in Canada (Oxford University Press Canada). He is also co-editor of Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada (UBC Press). He is past president of the Canadian Sociological Association and was awarded its Outstanding Contribution Award in 2007.

This carefully researched and well-written book makes a major contribution to the field of immigration policy and its implementation.

CHOICE, February 2016

Satzewich’s first-hand account of the inner workings at the Department of Immigration is not merely timely, it is excellent. Satzewich visited 11 Canadian visa offices abroad, interviewed 128 staff and witnessed 42 interviews with immigrants. It was unprecedented access … Points of Entry is crisp and compelling, written with objectivity and an extraordinary eye for detail. To read it is to understand why Syrian boys died on a beach, and why politicians lament that “doing the right thing is not always easy” — and then feel slightly ashamed.

Blacklock's Reporter, September 2015

Points of Entry is a well-written, accessible volume. It makes transparent the formerly hidden exercise of decision making on the part of Canada’s admissions officers and, in so doing, challenges an often critical literature that has presumed entry bias without the test of evidence.

BC Studies

Points of Entry is an ethnographically rich study which brings to life, at times sympathetically, the remote experiences of immigration officers. While offering an entree to the broader implications of how discretionary powers and the organizational culture of visa offices oscillate alongside experiential accounts of racism within Canada’s immigration system, the study also calls for further research into the motivations and intentions of immigration officers.

International Journal, Vol. 71 No. 4, December 2016