Evaluating private refugee sponsorship and its potential for global refugee policy.

As a leading country in global refugee resettlement, Canada operates a unique program that allows private groups and individuals to sponsor refugees. This innovative approach has received growing international attention, but there remains a need for a more expansive understanding of the sponsorship framework and its potential implications within Canada and across the world. Strangers to Neighbours explains the origins and development of refugee sponsorship, paying particular attention to the unintended consequences and ethical dilemmas it produces for refugee policy. The contributors to this collection draw upon law, social science, and philosophy to bring a more robust and objective perspective on Canada’s historical experience with sponsorship into wider conversations about the refugee crisis and resettlement. Together, they present recent cases that exemplify how the model has been applied and how it functions, while also analyzing the challenges that emerge in host-sponsor relations. This volume further examines how sponsorship.

has been implemented differently in countries such as the United States and Australia. The first dedicated study of refugee sponsorship policy, Strangers to Neighbours assembles leading scholars from a range of disciplines to consider whether Canada’s system is indeed a sustainable model for the world.

Shauna Labman is an associate professor of human rights at the Global College, the University of Winnipeg where she also serves as CIC Faculty Representative. She writes extensively on the relationship between resettlement and asylum. She is co-editor of Strangers to Neighbours: Refugee Sponsorship in Context (MQUP 2020) and the author of Crossing Law’s Border: Canada’s Refugee Resettlement Program (UBC Press, 2019).

Rachel McNally is a Ph.D. Student in Political Science at Carleton University. Her research focuses on refugee resettlement and sponsorship. She is also a Project Officer with LERRN, the Local Engagement Refugee Research Network.

Craig Damian Smith is a Senior Research Associate at the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Migration and Integration at Ryerson University. His research focuses on global migration governance, irregular migration, and refugee integration. Learn more at www.craigdamiansmith.com.

Sabine Lehr is Private Sponsorship of Refugees Manager at the Inter-Cultural Association of Greater Victoria. She currently serves as chair of the Canadian Refugee Sponsorship Agreement Holders Association’s Council. She is a past member of the Executive Committee of the Canadian Council for Refugees and has represented Canada at the Annual Tripartite Consultations on Resettlement as part of the Canadian NGO delegation for the past four years.