Fearing the immigrant: Racialization and urban policy in Toronto, By ParastouSaberi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2022. 304 pages. $29.00 (paperback). ISBN: 9781517909840

Reading Parastou Saberi's Fearing the immigrant: Racialization and urban policy in Toronto was a somatic experience as her arguments regularly moved me to smack my desktop and bellow a guttural “YES!” The book offers an intricate critique of what is marketed as progressive and innovative: place-based policy on poverty reduction. Using a genealogical method, Saberi leads the reader through various manifestations of place-based policy in Toronto, including neighbourhood poverty reduction approaches, community policing programs, and architectural revitalization initiatives. Accompanying policy tools and administrative procedures branded as equity-focused, participatory, and empowering are revealed as political. This includes mapping and index development to categorize and measure space to identify problem zones, divvying up population groups to target those at risk who need treatment, and whole-of-government networks and partnerships to build allies on the ground who can access and speak for the people. At the core of Saberi's argument is that these seemingly benevolent spatialized policy designs, tools, and procedures are in fact rooted in a fear of the radicalized immigrant and are used to pacify non-white working-class residents to maintain the capitalist imperialist order. Place-based policy is not an apolitical response to an empirical problem, but a productive exercise in problem-shaping and world-making that has particular effects: the preservation of existing systems of power. This is crucial to pay attention to for those concerned with social justice, because place-based policy is a trend in policymaking in multiple domains. For instance, place-based policy on aging targets older adults deemed risky (i.e., costly) to the health care sector and subjects them to active aging ideas and programs intended to ensure they stay productive/contributing and healthy/economical. While framed as empowering, this approach distracts from systemic oppressions that intersect to create health inequalities, shames aging, and in so doing limits an alternative politics based on the right to age (Joy, 2018). Place-based policymaking too often gets dismissed as unimportant by political geographers, who see the trend as a small-scale approach to addressing big material problems, or even distracting from them. Political scientists may not even notice the trend or consider it meaningless given the pervasive methodological nationalism in the discipline. Fearing the immigrant moves us through this inertia and is an important interdisciplinary work. Saberi carefully illustrates that the politics of place-based policy cannot be assessed through a singular scale of analysis, academic discipline, or timeline. Toronto's suite of place-based policies stems from a geopolitical fear of the radicalized racialized body becoming a threat to the city, the nation, and the capitalist imperialist way of life considered foundational to peace, order, and good governance. Saberi reminds us that this is the longstanding logic of colonialism, which strategically erases the historical and everyday violences of this way of life and blames the non-white working-class body for its inability to integrate; the neighbourhood of concentrated poverty for failing to provide opportunity and safety; and the architecture of the high-rise tower for causing social atomization. Such blaming is not direct, it is subtle and manipulative, hidden in the language of policy buzzwords. Here, the book does not cite critical scholarship on the social construction of policy problems and tools (see Bacchi, 2012; Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2007), which may have been useful to deepen the urban policy analysis and promote cross-fertilization between political geography and policy studies. Surprisingly, and brilliantly, Saberi draws on international relations as she equates place-based policy to neocolonial security tactics of counterinsurgency through humanitarianism, which target people and places deemed risky to the existing geopolitical order. This seemingly altruistic approach often requires placing and promoting allies on the inside. In Toronto, Saberi details the role of the United Way as an inside political actor partnered with the City of Toronto in place-based policymaking and implementation on poverty reduction. This is an organization that defies the liberal binaries of state/civil society/private business and has intersecting interests in system maintenance. Fearing the immigrant reveals why dismissing philanthrocapitalist NGOs and local government in political analysis is a form of system maintenance in and of itself. While some readers might be disappointed that Fearing the immigrant does not outline an alternative to status quo place-based policy, it does offer crucial ingredients to get us there. The main strength of this book is to highlight to critical scholars and activists that we are not always engaging in productive critique. We need to be careful about what we dismiss as unimportant and symbolic, and what and who we understand as progressive. We need interdisciplinary agendas in critical urban policy study that conduct both ideological and material analyses of power and that are plural in scale, agency, and timeline. We also need to study and work with current and historical movements that offer radical alternatives to the status quo. In the last chapter of Fearing the immigrant, Saberi acknowledges that the study of urban resistance is a much-needed complementary exercise to this critical work. I have no doubt that readers will be moved to heed this call.

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