Downwardly Global

Front matter

D DRAR RDLY

LALAIE AMEERIAR

"GLOBAL =-= and Citizenship in the

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

INTRODUCTION I

ONE. BODIES AND BUREAUCRACIES 25 TWO. PEDAGOGIES OF AFFECT 53 THREE. SANITIZING CITIZENSHIP 75 FOUR. RACIALIZING SOUTH ASIA 101

Introduction

The Sanitized Sensorium

The fluorescent bulb flickered as it always did, emitting an unrelenting, low, and persistent buzzing that filled the space. The windowless room and harsh institutional lighting made all the participants feel uneasy. Everyone shuddered and fidgeted—physical manifestations of the anxiety, panic, anger, fatigue, and desperation that filled them. As the class got under way, some participants taking notes and others seemingly distracted, a cascade of proscriptions filled the room: “Don’t show up smelling like foods that are foreign to us” “Don’t wear a shalwar cameeze,’ “Change your name if it’s hard to pronounce,’ and “Don’t wear a hijab if you want to get a job.” This was the core curriculum (and moral imperative) delivered to a room full of professional Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi women seeking work in Toronto. I looked around at the fifteen participants in this government-funded workshop, trying to gauge their reactions. The instructions seemed astonishingly dissonant for a workshop aimed at foreign-trained professionals with advanced levels of education, skills, and experience.

The strangeness of it all was not lost on the participants. As one attendee, Saima, remarked to me later, “It’s different back home. At home there’s more importance stressed on qualifications.” I met numerous Pakistani immigrant women like Saima in settlement-services agencies, many of whom were unemployed or underemployed. The majority of these women lived in relative poverty in government housing projects in peripheral parts of the city. Despite having migrated as “skilled workers?! most of them will never enter their chosen fields again. In fact, 44 percent of the Pakistani population of Toronto lives below Canada’s low income cut-off.” And yet, in this pedagogical effort to facilitate their entry into the workforce, immigrant women were subjected to intimate instructions concerning their sartorial and hygiene practices. Rather than the skills-focused conversation the participants had expected, they received a barrage of regulatory proscriptions aimed at the immigrant body.

This unemployment workshop took place in a government-funded, privately run settlement-services agency for new immigrants that specifically worked with South Asian women, and that I will call “the Center.” It was located in a small building in the emerging Little India—or Little Pakistan, depending on whom you ask—in the West End of Toronto. The neighborhood was economically marginal and populated by a large immigrant community because of the availability of difficult-to-find low-cost housing there. The main street was filled with small Indian and Pakistani restaurants, grocery stores, dollar stores, and a storefront mosque. Many of the city’s settlement services were located nearby, but the center of the social world for many Indian and Pakistani women was the Center. Women sat in the waiting room, much like a doctor’s office, but one that opened up to the rest of the Center. The large storefront windows in the waiting area put the attendees on display for anyone passing by. Counselors had their offices in cubicles that dotted the space, which ended in a large fluorescentlit back room where classes and workshops were held. As a first stop for many new immigrants, settlement agencies provide services ranging from help finding a home, to understanding healthcare, to unemployment workshops. Such agencies and organizations form part of the bureaucratic matrix put in place to settle new immigrants. More than one hundred of these settlement-services agencies in the greater Toronto area are aimed at “immigrant integration” —a catchphrase the federal government uses in its emerging agenda for managing immigrants. These centers are a critical site for examining the interface between immigrant bodies and bureaucratic structures.*

These South Asian nonprofit organizations also actively participate in numerous cultural festivals that take place throughout the city during South Asian Heritage Month, which happens every May in Ontario. I attended these festivals throughout my time in Toronto, sometimes participating as a volunteer with South Asian organizations and sometimes as a consumer, drinking mango lassi and eating chicken tikka masala and samosas under the blazing sun of a Toronto summer. South Asian cultural festivals are staged throughout the city and display a commodified form of culture, including dance performances, art, and mehndi parlors; cooking demonstrations; and stalls selling clothing, jewelry, and food, all presenting a simulacrum of South Asia. The festivals attempt to engage the senses: the sight of beautiful sari fabric, the sounds of Bollywood music, and the smells of pan-Indian food fill the air. But in other contexts, like those discussed in the employment-training event, these same exotic markers of difference are a barrier to employability and even citizenship. How can this be reconciled with the fact that at the cultural festival, which is also situated squarely within the state’s practice and logic of multiculturalism, these same people are encouraged to highlight their difference? Here, the smell of citizenship changes.

The classroom encounter, the cultural festival, and Pakistani women’s downward mobility all provide a meaningful introduction to the issues this book explores. They help demonstrate how integration in Canada represents not the erasure of all differences, but the celebration of some alongside the eradication of others. Publicly and internationally, the Canadian nation-state has built a reputation of openly abdicating its right to impose a single culture on its citizens. However, in reality, culture is in fact a primary domain of action on the part of the state. The Canadian nation-state relinquishes cultural imperialism and celebrates multi-ness through cultural festivals or state-sanctioned forms of difference, yet uses semi-governmental agencies to impose a particular Canadian mode of bodily comportment on new immigrants. This dual mode of interpellation puts immigrants in an impossible situation in which they must sometimes suitably display their Otherness, but otherwise cannot be culturally different. In the Canadian multicultural state, an implicit process of moralizing is taking place through a politics of multiculturalism that simultaneously attempts to produce, celebrate, and erase differences. These performances have lasting effects, conditioning immigrants to understand themselves as Other.

This book theorizes what I call the “sanitized sensorium” as a means to understand the ways that foreign bodies become legible and recognizable through particular kinds of sensorial and affective registers. The sanitized sensorium signals the forms of embodiment (smell, appearance, and bodily comportment) necessary for inclusion in the public sphere of multicultural Toronto. The daily practices in agencies such as the one described above serve to construct a sanitized body, and sensory perception becomes a crucial means by which that body is judged. The imagined smelly, sweaty, unhygienic immigrant body is central here. In these contexts, many senses are engaged, but in this book I focus primarily on sight (appearance and dress)

and smell (bodily odors). These processes are located within intersensorial junctures and thus concern the kinds of affects that such bodily differences evoke for workshop leaders, potential employers, and the larger Canadian public. But rather than just smelling or seeing, this book is also concerned with the experience of being seen and smelled in a particular way. Immigrant women, too, have their own sensorial experience of difference and Otherness. While many of the ways the sanitized sensorium operates has to do with perception, this book also explores how these women perceive themselves in light of their racialization and interpellation as immigrant women. This work then makes central the affective encounter between immigrant women and the greater public to examine the spaces in which race and citizenship are made. The sanitized sensorium contains within it both the promise of citizenship and the damage done to it by the threat of alterity.

By bringing together anthropological debates concerning multiculturalism and the anthropology of the senses, this book examines the sanitized sensorium to understand how the same sensorial phenomena (smells, tastes, forms of dress, and embodiment) can be a means of both exclusion and inclusion, signifying both racialized Otherness and belonging. The way the liberal multicultural state manages these sensorial phenomena is an important part of its so-called project of immigrant integration. Taken together, the economic marginalization of Pakistani Muslim immigrant women and the state’s presumed solution to that problem render a landscape of downward mobility built on a terrain of bureaucratic entanglements and multicultural ideologies. Since the 1970s, there has been a large-scale migration of professionals from Asia to North America, facilitated by the easing of immigration regulations and the implementation of a points system that favored professional skills when granting visas to incoming immigrants. Unfortunately, and somewhat paradoxically, these global processes have contributed to increasing social inequality. Skilled immigrant workers are drawn into the global economy with the promise of upward mobility, but most often end up downwardly mobile and unemployed or working in survival jobs. Put simply, while the Canadian government actively recruits professionals from abroad, and the economy relies on such immigration for growth, once in Toronto immigrants are often unable to find work in their fields.

For a city that prides itself on multicultural inclusion, the unemployment and underemployment of highly skilled foreign workers have become an immense social problem, earning its own moniker in daily news accounts and government think tanks as “the foreign-trained-professionals problem.” The government, public, and media have been immersed in the very vocal and ongoing debate around this unemployment, recognized most readily on the global stage through the gendered stereotype of the Indian taxicab driver who was a “doctor in his home country.’ But the fact that this is also a crisis for highly skilled, professional women is often overlooked in Canadian public discourse on the problem. When I asked who is to blame for the foreign-trained-professionals problem, the most commonly stated answer was bureaucracy. As the narrative goes, the federal government regulates immigration, while the provincial government regulates labor, but there is little coordination between the two. Thus, skilled immigrant workers are admitted with little consideration of provincial labor-market needs; further, upon arrival they enter a local bureaucratic system that rejects their foreign credentials. This macro understanding of bureaucracy fails to take into account just how intimate and personally targeted this social problem can be.

The experiences, perceptions, and frustrations of Pakistani Muslim immigrant women in Toronto reveal these otherwise-occluded dimensions of multiculturalism and governance. Seemingly small sites like employment counseling centers and cultural festivals reverberate with larger issues, as the women in this study encounter a Canadian society rife with contradictions: It famously promises immigrants universal inclusion while it actually practices differentiated exclusion. It deploys racial projects yet disavows them. And it denies them meaningful state action against discrimination, yet uses the powers of state licensing to deskill them from professional careers and compel them to become service workers. These are not merely the personal problems of one aggrieved group. They are part of a pattern in metropolitan countries where the unfettered movement of capital across borders requires the denial of racial distinctions in order to assert the universality of the market and its subjects, while it also exploits racial differences to make surplus profits. At the same time, to maintain the political coherence of nations that were founded through settler colonialism, new racial identities and hierarchies must proliferate constantly. In the end, the race (or gender, or cultural difference) of aggrieved people is used to scapegoat them for the failures of neoliberal programs. Their unemployment is not understood as a failure of economic or immigration policy at the state level, but rather as a failure of the immigrant workers themselves.

This book brings together the political economy of labor regimes with intimate affective economies to examine how they have become mutually constitutive features of late capitalism. What I describe in this book is a global story, a story of immigration; but it is also a story of racialization and gendering in the context of state-making and national identity. In this context, the binding of smells, habits, and bodily gestures to skilled immigrant professionals is not exclusively about molding foreign bodies to the demands of late capitalist production; it is a state-based naturalization of immigration policy. The practices of agencies such as the one described at the beginning of this introduction ultimately contradict Canadian models of multiculturalism by teaching a Canadian mode of bodily comportment to new immigrants, thus reinscribing colonial notions of the uncivilized and wild Other in need of domestication. Though the specter of the state looms large, the responsibility for becoming settled, and becoming Canadian, now lies with the individual and her body. As I demonstrate, the practice of multiculturalism as it pertains to the integration of foreign labor and bodies is ultimately not about getting employers or the larger public not to discriminate; rather, it is about making oneself into someone who will not be discriminated against. This phenomenon contributes to the changing character of the Canadian multicultural state, which focuses on culture while ignoring the real material interests of minority groups. Paradoxically, then, liberal Canadian governance in the postcolonial, globalized world continues to attempt to colonize and discipline the immigrant brown body.

Cartographies of Downward Mobility

Asma was in her early thirties and had been living in Toronto for two years when we first met at the Center. Her brother, who was also in Toronto and formerly worked as a computer scientist, was working at Value Village, a used clothing store similar to Goodwill. She was a lawyer, but had not worked as one since she arrived. She often hung around the Center and was known as nervous but kind; every time I encountered her she expressed interest in helping me with my project. She had attended unemployment workshops for about eight or nine months, but was unable to find work. Eventually she gave up looking for something in her field and started taking various survival jobs, such as cashiering, as they arose.

Focusing on the intimate spaces in which this unemployment or underemployment occurs, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in various sites throughout urban Toronto.° I spoke with immigrant women like Asma in a range of regulated professions (those in which a license is required to work) including medicine, engineering, law, and education.’ Through this research I learned that it is highly unlikely that any professional would be able to work in her field without returning to school for extensive reeducation, but many do not have the resources to do so. Asma was heading down the typical track that skilled immigrant workers are often forced to travel: she entered the country under the skilled-worker class, her foreign credentials were then misrecognized or not recognized at all, and eventually she began taking survival jobs. The women’s stories you will read here are typical not only of Pakistani women but also of immigrant professionals from other countries, although the ways the sanitized sensorium operates here is particular to Pakistani women.

The impact of this problem is troubling for men and women, but the state, the market, and even scholars have a blind spot when it comes to the experiences of women, which prevents us from fully understanding how this downward mobility operates. For instance, the kinds of work opportunities typically available to women earn them less money. Thus, if women are funneled into feminized jobs that pay less, despite the fact that they entered the country with the same professional credentials as men, then the liberal rhetoric of “equal pay for equal work” does not apply. In the United States context, a study using census data from 1950-2000 found that occupations began paying less once women entered them in large numbers (e.g., professions including housekeepers, designers, and biologists). This phenomenon works the other way as well, as evidenced by the field of computer programming. When more men entered the profession, it began paying more and became more prestigious. Thus, this process of transnationalism not only de-skills professional Pakistani Muslim women but also serves to gender them as workers. Accounts of their experiences provide an intimate look at how global processes impact women’s individual lives.

Pakistani women in Canada have very high rates of unemployment (20 percent) and part-time employment (36.3 percent), and very low rates of participation in the labor force (below 50 percent). By comparison, only 10 percent of those listing “European” as their race/ethnicity were living below the low income cut-off, and for some European groups the figure was only 5 percent (Ornstein 2006: 72)? Immigrant women aged twenty-five to fifty-four had much higher unemployment rates than both immigrant men and Canadian-born women (Chui 2011: 24). Immigrant women of color only make 48.7 cents for each dollar that a white, male immigrant makes (Block and Galabuzi 2011: 12). In 2006, immigrants were more likely to have a university education than Canadian-born women and men; however, the unemployment rate for recent immigrants (2001-2006) was more than double for those born in Canada (Zietsma 2006). This unemployment is particularly pressing in Canada, which has the highest immigration rate in the world. It is projected that by 2020, 100 percent of the net growth of Canada’s labor force will be due to immigration, and by 2030, 100 percent of Canada’s net population growth will be due to immigration.”

In the context of multicultural Toronto, South Asian immigrants have been the largest minority group since 2006," and thus are key players in the politics and practice of multiculturalism. In some ways they are an indicator of its successes and failures, and they are often invoked in government brochures as the success story of multicultural integration. But in contrast to the highly mobile South Asian high-tech workers that often underpin accounts of globalization and upward mobility, 44 percent of the Pakistani population of Toronto lives in housing projects on the city’s periphery, meaning they fall below Canada’s low income cut-off.” Different segments of the Pakistani community, including officials in the Pakistani embassy, members of the Canada-Pakistan Business Council, and local community workers and members, each (and independently of one another) reported to me rates of poverty at 80 percent. This varies dramatically from the state’s official figure, which is significant on its own, but the community’s perception that nearly twice as many live in poverty indicates an even more overwhelming sense of social decline. Regardless of the discrepancy, it is unquestionable that the economic and political conditions of Pakistani immigrants in Toronto contradict the state’s rhetoric of equality within a model of difference.

These figures offer a glimpse into what has become a national concern. Foreign-educated immigrants earn over two billion dollars less than their Canadian-born counterparts do, mainly because they end up working below their educational and skill level.'? Nonprofit agencies and government offices commonly acknowledge that it is very unlikely new Canadian immigrants will ever use their educational training again.“ According to Statistics Canada, fewer than 25 percent of foreign-trained professionals in 2007 were working in their professions. Many authors have documented the ways foreign credentials and work experience become devalued, while others have considered the particular obstacles women encounter (Akbari

1999; Basran and Li 1998; Bauder 2003; Chakkalalkal and Harvey 2001; Ng 2006). However, what remains largely unacknowledged within this scholarship and within governmental agencies is the correlation between the nature and availability of jobs for highly trained immigrant workers, and the sustained perception that those workers are unsuited to such employment because of their foreignness.

Within Canadian vernacular practice, South Asians are called “visible minorities.” According to Canadian sociologist Himani Bannerji (1993), the term visible minority emerged when Canadian immigration policy was reformed in the 1960s and 1970s. The concept developed from the federal Employment Equity Act, which defines visible minorities as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in color.” According to Statistics Canada, “The visible minority population consists mainly of the following groups: Chinese South Asian, Black, Arab, West Asian, Filipino, Southeast Asian, Latin American, Japanese and Korean” (Statistics Canada 2009b). Bannerji (1993) argues that unlike the sister term, people of color, used in the United States, visible minority translates color into visibility, stressing both being non-white and politically minor actors. While the categories of “immigrant women” and “third-world women” are part of Canadian political-cultural language, “visible minority” emerged as the most common descriptor.

The race politics of the term have not escaped international scrutiny. In 2013, the United Nations Council on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination asked Canada to “reflect upon its use of the term visible minority,’ because it was perceived to be outdated and discriminatory.” In Toronto, I found that local community activists and organizers work with the concept of “racialized persons” in an attempt to draw attention to the process by which visible minorities become understood as racially Other. This rhetorical shift is described as a form of resistance to the term “visible minority,’ which activists understand as a state-produced category of belonging that centers a white subject to the exclusion of nonwhite people. In this book I use the term racialized person rather than visible minority, in an effort to move away from the language of state institutions and to align my critique with the concerns raised by activists and nonprofit workers. It is an important move as well because the term “racialized person” draws attention to the class dimensions of the processes of racialization, particularly in the case of foreign-trained professionals, which reconfigures their socioeconomic status and makes them downwardly mobile.!

I encountered this process during my time in Toronto. While doing research, I traveled by subway to both ends of the city—Scarborough to the east and Mississauga to the west—where many Pakistanis lived in government housing projects. In 2002, the Metro Toronto Housing Authority (MTHA) merged with other public-housing providers to form the Toronto Community Housing Corporation. The MTHA was established in the 1950s to house the economically marginal in an effort to eliminate the development of slums. Now the largest social housing provider in Canada and the second largest in North America, Toronto Community Housing accommodates 164,000 low- and moderate-income tenants in 58,500 households in 360 high-rise and low-rise apartment buildings in the city.” However, there is still an intense shortage of affordable housing, evidenced by the fact that as of July 2014 there were 170,000 people on the waiting list for Toronto Community Housing. Increasingly, within government housing projects there is a hierarchy whereby nonwhite people live in the more secluded, less safe, peripheral projects. In an interview with the Toronto Star, Abdul Sheikh, president of the Scarborough Muslim Association, said that poor immigrants have very few housing options because they cannot provide local references for employment or past rentals. He cited ten apartment complexes in Scarborough in which Pakistanis and Indians form the majority of the tenants. In one, elderly and disabled tenants were trapped when the elevator was out of order for a month.”

In Toronto as it is across the globe, poverty is highly racialized and spatialized. According to a study conducted by Michael Ornstein of the Institute for Social Research (Isr) at York University, all twenty of the most economically disadvantaged ethno-racial groups in the Toronto census metropolitan area (CMA) are non-European (Ornstein 2006). According to Ornstein’s study, more than half of the Bangladeshi, Somali, Afghan, and Ethiopian populations live below Statistics Canada’s low income cut-off. The gap between those of European and non-European descent has been increasing over the past thirty years,” and the racialization of poverty has simultaneously increased; fourteen of the top twenty most economically marginal population categories have poverty rates between 30 and 40 percent (Ornstein 2006: vi). Ornstein puts the numbers in perspective: “For groups with 20 or 25 percent of people below the poverty line, we have to think in structural terms: about kids not completing high school, the low level of the minimum wage, the expense of good daycare, the problems of finding a job that uses their skills and credentials, the very high cost of housing and our governments’ retreat from social housing over the last twenty years, and the effects of discrimination.” As of 2012, the poverty rate for racialized Canadians was three times that of other Canadians (19.8 percent versus 6.4 percent). Despite all these facts including evidence of the racialization of poverty, the Canadian model of multiculturalism has been acclaimed as an international success story.

Sensing Multiculturalism

This book offers an ethnographic analysis ofa multicultural state in crisis.”

Since September 11, 2001, and in response to the intensification of anti- Muslim sentiment and violence against Muslims throughout the Western world, political leaders of purported multicultural states have attempted to understand the position of Muslims in the imagined West. Heads of state and citizens alike in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Canada (to name a few) are currently struggling to place minority culture within the politics of multiculturalism, identity, and difference. In 2009, French President Nicholas Sarkozy declared that the Islamic burqa was “not welcome?” while in October 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the attempt to build a multicultural society in Germany “has utterly failed.’ In February 2011, during a security conference in Munich, British Prime Minister David Cameron argued that the United Kingdom needed a stronger national identity to prevent extremism, saying, “Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism?”

essentially calling for a return to a Westernized, patriarchal vision of citizenship.

Although multiculturalism is often touted as the foundation of Canadian society, it has never been an entirely coherent category, existing more as rhetoric and ideology than in policy and legislation. Canada was the first country in the world to adopt multiculturalism as an official policy, in promotion of Prime Minister Trudeau’s “just society.” Multiculturalism broadened the definition of Canadian citizenship by outlining a more inclusive model. However, when Trudeau first introduced it in 1971, multicultural policy did not have any enabling legislation. When it was eventually passed in 1988, the Canadian Multiculturalism Act outlined the tenets of multiculturalism, including to “promote the understanding that multiculturalism reflects the cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society and acknowledges the freedom of all members of Canadian society to preserve, enhance

INTRODUCTION II and share their cultural heritage””” The Department of Canadian Heritage further asserts, “Multiculturalism is a central feature of Canadian citizenship, in which every Canadian has the freedom to choose to enjoy, enhance or share his or her heritage, and the federal government has the responsibility to promote multiculturalism throughout its departments and agencies” (2007). Rather than a feature of Canadian society, multiculturalism became central to it.

Multiculturalism is a process, rather than an already determined social fact. Therefore, I do not use the terms “multiculturalism, “difference,” and “identity politics” interchangeably. Instead, multiculturalism is understood as a state policy that directs social practices and interactions between diverse actors including governmental workers, nonprofit workers, and immigrant workers. These issues are examined from four perspectives: global trends of transnational labor migrations in late capitalism, the national context of a politics of multiculturalism, the local context of Toronto immigration policy and the foreign-trained professionals problem, and the everyday life experiences of Pakistani immigrants living in Toronto. These areas allow for an exploration of the relationship between processes of globalization and transnationalism and processes of subject formation and belonging.”®

Until the 1960s, Canadian immigration policy was designed to create a “white settler” population, admitting those mainly from Britain, Europe, and the United States (Stasiulis 1999).? In the 1960s, there was a shift from assimilationist strategies—known as the anglo-conformity model, in which some immigrant groups were denied entry because it was believed they could not assimilate—toward the model of integration that prioritized preserving culture, known locally through the metaphor of the “mosaic” and later the “salad bowl.” In a single generation, the city of Toronto was transformed from the “Belfast of the North” to one of the most racially and ethnically diverse cities in the world.*° In 1998 it adopted the motto “Diversity Our Strength.”

Scholarly writing about multiculturalism in Canada (outside of Québec) can be divided into three broad categories: multiculturalism as serving assimilationist goals, multiculturalism as a tool that co-opts the real interests of Canada’s minority groups, and multicultural policy as meeting the needs of minority groups (Abu-Laban and Stasiulis 1992). The second category is crucial for my analysis here in its suggestion that multicultural policy focuses on culture while ignoring real material interests. For instance, Kogila Moodley argues that the ideology of multiculturalism focuses on the expressive parts of culture (such as food, clothing, and music), and therefore is not threatening because it “trivializes, neutralizes and absorbs social and economic inequalities” (1983: 326). The public discourse of multiculturalism acknowledges inclusion and creates a body politic that imagines itself to be accepting and tolerant of cultural difference, while in reality it ignores how immigrant bodies are being raced, gendered, sexualized, and then excluded on the basis of those differences. Within a structure of racial inequality, the inclusion of expressive parts of culture is contextually specific and occurs in tandem with economic marginalization (or exclusion).

This is clear in the operationalization of the sanitized sensorium. Cooking smells, for example, are acceptable in certain contexts and not others. A recent example in the province of Québec illustrates this. While in some ways Québec forms a kind of exception in the context of Canada, in that it is both inside and outside of the state project of multiculturalism, this rhetoric is not unfamiliar in national debates concerning immigration. In 2o11, the city of Gatineau published a “statement of values” to try to help newcomers integrate. The councilor for cultural diversity, Mireille Apollon, a Haitian immigrant herself, said, “We receive immigrants from diverse horizons and cultures . . . behaviors aren’t uniform around the globe. There can be irritants”?! The document outlined a range of behaviors and expectations, including the importance of punctuality, that bribing officials is not okay, that violence is not justified even in “safeguarding honour,’ and that children should not be subjected to forced labor. Under “hygiene, cleanliness and quality of life,” it suggests that it is important to curtail smells like “strong odors emanating from cooking”? Here, citizenship and legibility are encoded in bodily comportment ranging from a diverse series of factors including punctuality and smell, demonstrating the ways that the sanitized sensorium mediates belonging. Building on the work of scholars who have focused on the role of smell in excluding immigrant bodies (Manalansan 2006; Ong 2003; Walcott 2003), this example demonstrates the ways that food smells become signifiers of difference; they represent the uncontainable and unfamiliar, becoming indicative of an immigrant community's inability to assimilate.