Middle class nation building through a tenacious discourse on skills: immigration and Canada

ABSTRACT

This article considers the discursive emphasis in post-1960s Canadian immigration policy on ‘skills’ in the context of adopting a formally race-neutral immigration policy, and embracing what has been called middle class nation building. Using policy documents and statistical information, it is argued that a clear preference for newcomers with ‘skills,’ has been sustained despite shifts in policy over time, because ‘skills’ serve as a floating signifier. The preference and morphing nature of ‘skills’ is exemplified in three distinct policy initiatives advanced by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau since assuming power in 2015: (1) the 2016–2017 Global Skills Strategy for temporary ‘skilled’ workers; (2) the Economic Mobility Pathways Project Canada undertook in partnership with UNHCR in 2018–2019 to facilitate the entry of ‘skilled’ refugees; and (3) COVID-19 pandemic developments which drew attention to ‘essential skills’ in services and care and facilitated a novel, albeit circumscribed, pathway to citizenship for some temporary workers and refugee claimants. Given Canada’s decades-long preference and global leadership in pursuing ‘skilled labour migration’ it is important to recognize the ways in which the legitimating of ‘skills’ amounts to a middle-class nation building that hides, and even reinforces, inequities in the Canadian and global contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Skills
• human capital
• immigration
• discrimination
• Canada

Since coming to power in 2015, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has frequently expressed its support for immigration and diversity. In the period in which his leadership overlapped with that of American President Donald Trump, these statements often took the form of colourful comparison. Such counterpoint was in clear evidence in 2018, on the eve of the US midterm elections, when Trudeau told an audience of women leaders in business gathered in Montreal that Canada’s immigration agenda put it in a favourable position in relation to its southern neighbour. In his words: ‘being able to get the top talent and draw on big pools of well-educated, ambitious, forward-thinking and diverse [people] is a hell of a competitive advantage that I don’t see the U.S. matching anytime soon’ (cited in CIC News 2018). In the period Trudeau has been in office, his government has also progressively increased immigration levels. Projected levels for the years 2022–2024 aimed at about 1% of the population annually, and numbers are higher than at any point historically (Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada 2022, 10). Such increases are only expected to plateau at 500,000 new permanent residents annually in 2026 (Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada 2023).

Of course, actual or projected levels for permanent residents do not tell the full story of immigration. Amongst real-world states Canada stands out not only for its welcoming (albeit selective) immigration policy, but its comparatively generous settlement services, pathways to citizenship, and an official policy of multiculturalism which reached its milestone 50th anniversary in 2021. Such features have put Canada at the forefront of an approach that has been variously dubbed as ‘middle class multiculturalism’ (Elrick 2021), ‘difference blind middle class nation building’ (Winter 2021, 290; see also Elrick and Winter 2018) or simply, and in keeping with the theme of this special issue, ‘middle class nation building’ (See Elke Winter 2024). Bringing together government documents and other primary and secondary sources, this article revisits the history of Canada’s ‘middle class nation building’ to underscore the tenacity since the 1960s of what I have called a ‘skills discourse’ in immigration policy (Abu-Laban 1998). Of course, the discourse and valuation of skills may come from a number of sources from business to scholars like economists (Nixon, 2923; McDonald and Worswick 2015). But its expression in policy is important. As will be shown, from a policy perspective ‘skills’ became the main ticket to entry into Canadian membership for immigrants. Since ordinary everyday Canadians are imagined as middle class, it is not surprising why the vast majority of Canadian-born and foreign-born citizens alike see themselves as middle class (Cazzin 2017).

In the Canadian context, where class-based differences were never how political parties defined major issues, electoral pitches have often promised to make things better for the middle class (Brodie and Jenson 1988). Being middle class carries the promise of upward mobility, in ways that seem less possible for those with a higher or a lower position. So entrenched are the positive associations of the middle class and its nexus with politics, that following the 2019 election Justin Trudeau went as far as to create a Minister of Middle Class Prosperity. Yet when asked, the newly appointed Minister of Middle Class Prosperity could not define the middle class much beyond people being able to ‘afford their way of life,’ and ‘send their kids to play hockey or even have different activities’ (Mona Fortier, cited in Curry 2019). The fact that so many people in countries like Canada and the United States believe (or are encouraged to believe) they are middle-class has long been critiqued by Marxist and critical scholars for masking and justifying economic inequities under advanced capitalism (Larsen 2016). The same critical lens should apply to ‘skills,’ for the same reason – that it masks and even justifies inequities.

The decided emphasis in post-1967 Canadian immigration policy on ‘skills’ emerged in the context of adopting a formally race-neutral immigration policy for the first time. Although changes in 1962 had eliminated many overt exclusions and also stressed skills, regulations still restricted the family sponsorship of non-Europeans and carried quotas on immigrants from India, Pakistan and Ceylon (Kelley and Trebilcock 2014, 320). As such, in 1967 ‘race’ was more decidedly swapped for ‘skill’ as the predominant organizing principle in determining who gets in. Specifically, the ‘skills’ criteria is applied to immigrants entering on economic grounds – as opposed to their eligible family members, or to refugees, who are judged on formally different criteria than that of ‘skills’.

The tenacity of the skills discourse for now over six decades is remarkable in so far as it has not only meshed with Canada’s express move away from race-based exclusions but also numerous shifts in policy. These shifts include the neoliberal turn of the 1990s when family-class immigrants were restricted, and economic immigrants selected on human capital grounds were favoured for bearing the costs of their integration and contributing to Canada’s global competitiveness (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2002). The skills discourse has worked in tandem with the global competition in the 2000s for ‘high skilled’ and 'talented’ immigrants amongst OECD countries jockeying to enhance their competitive advantage (Nixon 2023; Shachar 2006; Shachar and Hirschl 2013). The skills discourse has also worked with changes over the 2010s that moved Canada’s immigration policy towards a ‘two step model’ whereby the ideal immigrant wanted for citizenship not only carried ‘skills’ but also held an offer of employment (Abu-Laban, Tungohan, and Gabriel 2023; Ellermann 2021, 215–267).

Over these decades, even if the polity has grown more demographically diverse, Canada’s immigration policy selection is not neutral in practice when it comes to lines of social differentiation, including those of ‘race’. Canada’s immigration policy, premised on the skills discourse, is also not neutral when it comes to categories of entrants which by the Immigration Act, 1976 evolved to differentiate in law the broad immigration categories still in place today around the economic, family and humanitarian streams. Specifically, the logic of the policy and the discourse on skills has made, and continues to make, its way into not only Canada’s approach to the economic stream but also the family and humanitarian/refugee streams. Not least, greater public and public policy recognition during the height of isolation in the COVID-19 pandemic that certain workers perform ‘essential’ valuable work in relation to services and care (Esses et al. 2021, 6) has also come to be framed in relation to the skills discourse in immigration.

Stuart Hall (2021[1997]), in thoroughly rejecting the discredited biological understandings of ‘race’ as fixed, posited instead that it was a floating signifier. Hall understood race to have meaning ‘because it is relational, and not essential, can never be finally fixed, but is subject to the constant process of redefinition and appropriation: to the losing of old meanings, and appropriation and collection and contracting of new ones, to the endless process of being constantly resignified … ' (Hall 2021[1997], 362). Likewise, it is argued that ‘skills,’ as a discursive category, similarly serves as a floating signifier without a fixed understanding, but subject to differing meanings and appropriations in Canada’s post-1967 immigration policy right through the COVID-19 pandemic. Because the skills discourse works to paper over and even reinforce inequities, the case of Canada is relevant for understanding a paradigmatic real-world example of middle class nation building, and illuminating the logic, social sorting functions, and pitfalls of an emphasis on ‘skills’ in immigration.

In making this argument, this article takes a three-fold approach. In the first part of the article the history and longevity of the skills discourse is examined from its decisive emergence in the 1960s to the more contemporary global competition for ‘high skilled’ immigrants, and COVID-19 pandemic demands for caring labour. The skills discourse is far from neutral and facilitates a form of social differentiation that re-invokes and maps on to other distinctions relating to race, class and gender in Canada and elsewhere. In the second part of the article, I examine how the skills discourse has impacted Canada’s immigration intake, and its especially pernicious implications in relation to the family stream and refugee/humanitarian streams, as well as in facilitating temporary migration. Three programs introduced by the Trudeau Liberals will also be examined: the 2016–2017 Global Skills Strategy for temporary ‘skilled’ workers; the Economic Mobility Pathways Project Canada undertook in partnership with UNHCR in 2018–2019 to facilitate the entry of ‘skilled’ refugees; and the 2020–2021 time limited permanent resident pathways for select temporary residents and refugee claimants. In the third part of the article, the equity considerations of the skills discourse, and its overlap with middle class nation building, are reviewed with an eye towards the experience of many newcomers and immigrants to Canada amidst ongoing deeply rooted social inequities. These may render newcomers, even those who are ‘middle class’ in conventional educational and cultural terms, disadvantaged. The article concludes with the invitation to consider jettisoning ‘skill’ in the ways scholars, policy-makers, and publics might speak about and even imagine immigration policy.

The emergence and tenacity of a skills discourse in immigration intake

For much of Canada’s history since Confederation (that is the founding of the modern Canadian state in 1867), the country’s practices and policy surrounding immigration were designed to expropriate Indigenous lands and disappear Indigenous peoples by building Canada as a ‘white settler-colony’ that was modeled politically, economically, culturally and demographically on Great Britain (Abu-Laban 2020). A decided preference for white British-origin Protestants impacted immigration intake, and this continued well after World War Two. For instance, in 1947, then Liberal Prime Minister Mackenize King stated that his government would respect public sentiment since ‘the people of Canada do not wish, as a result of mass immigration, to make a fundamental alteration to the character of our population. Large-scale immigration from the orient would change the fundamental composition of the Canadian population’ (Mackenzie King 1947). Here ‘the orient’ meant everything outside Europe in the Eastern hemisphere. Likewise, 1952 regulations also explicitly favoured the entry of British subjects from the UK and white Commonwealth, along with those from the US and France, but clearly restricted others (Abu-Laban, Tungohan, and Gabriel 2023, 44).

Elrick’s careful archival work reveals that between 1952 when Canada’s race-based exclusions were reinscribed into immigration, and 1967 when the point system was introduced and race-based exclusion formally removed, high-level immigration bureaucrats worked to admit several thousand individuals whose national origin/race would have precluded them under immigration law. This was done through orders-in-council which gave the minister responsible for immigration and cabinet discretionary powers. Elrick shows that senior bureaucrats were predisposed towards favouring for admission those with ‘exceptional merit’ who embodied middle-class characteristics and values, ‘understood as a relational attribute ascribed to an individual or group based on socioeconomic distinctions (e.g. perceived success, wealth, power); moral distinctions (e.g. perceived work ethic); and cultural distinctions (e.g. perceived level of education)’ (Elrick 2022, 117–118). The language and criteria used by these immigration officials foreshadowed the point system and formed part of ‘middle class’ nation-building that came to be ‘multicultural’ in so far as immigrants were more ethnically, racially and geographically diverse than historically (Elrick 2021; Elrick 2022, 123). The ad hoc and discretionary logic identified here arguably also extended to refugees, such as the 100 ‘skilled’ French or English-speaking Palestinian refugees (mainly men) chosen with their families to resettle in Canada in 1955–1956. This movement, while small given the overall numbers of Palestinian refugees, was a harbinger for later Canadian approaches governing the admission of other non-European refugees (Raska 2015, 473)

The discretion accorded to the minister of immigration and the bureaucracy, as well as 1962 changes that removed most (though not all) of the overt discrimination pertaining to race and country of origin (Kent 1988, 408) were issues that came to be resolved in relation to responses to the 1966 White Paper on Immigration. The White Paper was issued by the government of Liberal Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, as a statement of intended policy, and the White Paper lay the justification for the eventual adoption of the point system of selection (Kent 1988, 410–412). The White Paper asserted that ‘it is in Canada’s interest to accept, and if need be to encourage, the entry of as many immigrants as can readily be absorbed’ (Canada, Manpower and Immigration 1966, 5). It also advanced that in order to ‘fairly and effectively’ determine admissions there should be ‘no discrimination by reason of race, colour or religion, and consequently must be universally applicable’ (Canada, Manpower and Immigration 1966, 6). Notably, however, this officially non-discriminatory policy was placed squarely in tandem with the vision that ‘immigration policy must be consistent with national economic policy in general’ (Canada, Manpower and Immigration 1966, 7). This in practice in the 1970s and 1980s translated to attention to unemployment in relation to immigration levels (Ellermann 2021, 214). It also involved avoidance of so-called ‘unskilled immigrants’. As stated in the White Paper, ‘if large numbers of unskilled immigrants come to Canada when the economy is particularly buoyant, the problems of poverty exposed by any economic readjustment will be more severe’ (Canada, Manpower and Immigration 1966, 12). Thus, the White Paper stressed that ‘increasingly we will have to explore new sources of well-qualified immigrants’ (Canada, Manpower and Immigration 1966, 11).

In the buoyant economy of the 1960s, and in the context of decreasing immigration from European countries, the White Paper merged the concept of non-discrimination with a vision that Canada’s expanding industrial economy required ‘skilled’ immigrants (as opposed to ‘unskilled’). As a result of this, regulations were introduced in 1967 that recapitulated the arguments made in the White Paper through a stated rejection of discrimination on the basis of race or nationality, and the adoption of a point system of selection in which immigration applicants would be evaluated in the same way on the same criteria relating to ‘skill’ (Abu-Laban 1998: 75).

While the point system was labeled as ‘universally applicable’ and hence a neutral and objective way to evaluate potential newcomers by awarding points on the basis of education, occupation, and vocational training, in practice it was decidedly not neutral when it came to socially constructed ideas relating to ‘skill,’ or criteria designed to attract those deemed to be ‘skilled’. What counts as a ‘skill’ was confined to work performed in the public (as opposed to private) sphere, effectively devaluing much care work done primarily by women. Moreover, although the point system changed over time in terms of how criteria were weighted, overall the criteria served to favour men living in countries with extensive educational opportunities, or who had the means to acquire such education, in one of Canada’s official languages of English and French (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2002, 47–54; Abu-Laban, Tungohan, and Gabriel 2023, 49–50). Put differently, even if immigration came to be much more open to ‘non-traditional’ countries, the point system and the skills discourse worked to effectively limit those that could enter Canada for permanent settlement, particularly in relation to countries of the global south (Abu-Laban 1998). This serves as a reminder that the very existence of any immigration policy is to exclude (Abu-Laban 1998; Joppke 2024).

In Canada, and in other countries that have followed Canada’s lead by adopting a preference for skilled immigrants as well as multiculturalism, like Australia, the criteria also differentially impact applicants in relation to country of origin, class and gender (Boucher 2016). As noted, the point system with its emphasis on skills proved amendable to a greater turn towards human capital in selection and competition for ‘high skilled’ immigrants in the 1990s and early 2000s, a period which also coincided with the negative politicization of immigration from the former Reform Party as well as 9/11 (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2002; Ellermann 2021, 216). Reflecting these dynamics and shifts, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) replaced the Immigration Act, 1976, and with IRPA and related regulations came a new way that ‘skills’ were given meaning. These were touted under the then Liberal government of Paul Martin as a step forward for attracting ‘new immigrants who are better prepared to adapt to Canada’s labour market and economy’ because they had ‘flexible and transferable skills’ (Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2004, 8 my emphasis). While under the Martin Liberal government, it was acknowledged that ‘the global environment is also one in which competition for skill and talent will intensify’ (Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2005, 8), in keeping with neoliberal rationales it was also stressed that ‘skilled workers are also expected to have enough money to support themselves and their dependants as they settle in Canada’ (Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2005, 17). (For more on neoliberalism see Christian Joppke 2024).

By the time the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to power (2006–2015), ‘skills’ came to signify still other ideas. For instance, some were framed as lacking ‘skills’. To quote: ‘the number of displaced people – most of them unskilled – is predicted to grow substantially as the world population increases by 2 billion people by the year 2050’ (Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2007, 6 my emphasis). In this period it was also stressed that Canada needed to use immigration to address ‘both short-and long-term labour market needs by attracting people with the right mix of skills and talents’ (Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2007, 6 my emphasis). This articulation about the ‘right mix’ was part and parcel of efforts aimed at continuing to compete for ‘highly skilled’ people while also attending to how ‘certain sectors, industries and regions of the country are generating a high demand for low-skilled workers, who are currently in short supply’ (Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008, 8 my emphasis). This was to be addressed by the expansion of avenues for employers to utilize temporary foreign labour to ‘more quickly and easily meet immediate skills shortages’ (Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2008, 9). Indeed, it was under the Harper Conservatives that by 2008 the numbers for temporary migrants came to outnumber permanent entrants (Ellermann 2021, 248–249). Moreover, under the Trudeau government, in power since 2015, the number of temporary workers in Canada, as well as international students, has steadily increased still further, and both face unique vulnerabilities to abuse (Das Gupta and Su 2023; Lu and Hou 2023).

Indicating yet another way in which ‘skills’ are understood, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and border closures, policy under the Trudeau Liberals shifted to embrace a new idea – that there were areas of ‘essential’ work that could not be disrupted by stay at home measures. This also came to be reflected in the relation to immigration and a revamped ‘skills’ discourse. Hence it was observed that ‘Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs) bring essential skills to Canadian businesses. Over the course of the pandemic, the importance of TFWs to Canada was highlighted as many filled essential service jobs, particularly in the agriculture sector’ (Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada 2021, 17 my emphasis).

Before turning further to the Liberals of Justin Trudeau and the implications of policies today, it should be noted that as more states have been involved in pursuing ‘high skilled’ migrants there has been a growing comparative literature that critiques the language of ‘high skill’ by emphasizing the socially constructed nature of skills and worth. For example, as Hagan, Hernández-León, and Demonsant (2015) illuminate, while migration specialists, governments and even the public tend to classify those with less formal education as ‘unskilled’ in the United States, the evidence of their five-year study shows that the work and ongoing ‘skills’ development of migrants from Mexico to the US (and back) involves labour market contributions, ‘skills’ transfer and even entrepreneurship. Put differently, those defined as ‘unskilled’ in relation to human capital frameworks actually have ‘skills’. Still further, Iskander’s analysis of the categorization of ‘unskilled’ work in construction in Qatar in advance of the 2022 World Cup is instructive in illuminating the profound ways that ‘skill’ serves a broader function in relation to sociopolitical differentiation and power. Her work underscores that the label ‘unskilled’ not only belies the actual reality of workers’ abilities but also serves to regulate boundaries of inclusion/exclusion in membership. This is because in paralleling the cartesian division of mind/body the language of skill challenges the personhood of those defined as ‘unskilled’ (Iskander 2021, 14–15) and it does so in ways that map on to other forms of social differentiation in context-specific ways. To quote:

The effect of skill as a language of power was ubiquitous in Qatar, but not unique to Qatar. The political language of skill is spoken in many different places, but across contexts, it uses the same logic to say much the same thing. Like all social categories, representations of skill structure economic and social interactions, political identities and coalitions, and power relations. These representations interact with other social categories, attaching themselves to signifiers of race, gender, and class, and amplifying the social hierarchies they produce. (Iskander 2021, 9)

Not least, and writing by way of a 2021 special issue devoted to the topic of ‘the question of skills in cross-border labour mobility’ in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the editors decry the manner in which categorizing migrants in relation to skills is occurring in many states and is actually dehumanizing. As they note:

It is worthwhile to bear in mind that the categories of ‘highly skilled professionals’, ‘skilled labour’ and ‘guest workers’ are but visa categories, not actual people. A human-centred approach to migration might reveal that not only do we need to rethink the way nation-states categorise migrants, but also how we employ these concepts in our own studies. (Liu-Farrer, Yeoh, and Baas 2021, 2247)

To sum then, although Canada has long had an immigration policy making use of a discourse on skills, in practice this has worked to favour some groups over others, and it is invidious. This is because a skills discourse in and of itself reinforces socially constructed ideas of ‘high skill,’ ‘low skill’ and even ‘no skill’ (as suggested by the term ‘unskilled’). While migration scholars have options to choose their words, the next section will consider still other policy implications of the discourse on skills by addressing how it has impacted different categories of newcomers to Canada since Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party came to power in 2015.

The consequences of the skills discourse for other immigrant categories

A legacy of the Harper years, and embraced by Trudeau, is the Express Entry System which has been in place since 2015. The online Express Entry System was designed to fast-track the application process for ‘skilled’ immigrants for permanent residency. With Express Entry, those who score high points through a Comprehensive Ranking System are invited to apply for permanent residency, although there can be variability from one year to the next on the threshold required to be given an invitation, and a provincial nomination may add points or work separate from the Comprehensive Ranking System (Miekus 2021). Notwithstanding such variations, overall the emphasis has shifted away from simply a human capital approach. Specifically, rather than a strictly human capital approach, Canada’s immigration policy has evolved towards having more of a ‘two step approach’ favouring employment experience and offers of employment in Canada over other criteria (Abu-Laban, Tungohan, and Gabriel 2023, 113–115). This shift has effectively increased competition between applicants, and it has paved the way for the increased salience of delays, and even denials, in offering permanent residence to temporary workers as well as international students understood to be 'highly skilled' (Abu-Laban, Tungohan, and Gabriel 2023, 114–119).

The preference for the ‘highly skilled’ can also be seen in a new temporary immigration recruitment program introduced and launched by the Trudeau Liberals in 2016–2017. Known as the Global Skills Strategy the aim of this program is to support ‘Canadian business by providing a fast and reliable way to bring in the highly skilled foreign talent needed to succeed in the global marketplace when workers in Canada are unable to fill the need’ (Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada 2020: 16). When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, an immediate reaction across states was to invoke travel bans and border closures, with predictable consequences in relation to dramatically limiting the global movement of travelers, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers (Vijayaraghavan and Mukhopadhyay 2022). Nonetheless, the Global Skills Strategy (GSS) continued to be a priority and in 2021 Canada admitted ‘38,500 temporary workers with specialized skillsets and global experience under the umbrella of the GSS, contributing to Canada’s economic recovery’ (Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada 2022: 21).

In Canada, the border closures also led to temporary pandemic measures designed by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make good on their stated desire in 2020 to actually increase immigration in the years ahead (see e.g. Mendicino 2021). Specifically, in 2020–2021, there were time-limited permanent resident pathways for select temporary residents and refugee claimants. The former allowed recent international graduates from Canadian post-secondary institutions, along with ‘essential workers’ in areas like healthcare to apply for permanent status, with 106,000 applications received and 24,000 admitted in 2021 and 18,000 admitted in 2022 (Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada 2022, 23). A one-time initiative operating between December 2020 and August 2021 allowed ‘guardian angel’ refugee claimants working in healthcare during the pandemic a pathway to permanent residency for their ‘extraordinary contribution … when there was an urgent need to help’ (Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada 2022, 23).

As Audrey Macklin (2020, 8) has argued, programs like targeting ‘guardian angels’ appeal to the idea of deservingness and earned citizenship, and may be simultaneously welcomed for who it includes and deemed arbitrary for the many it excludes. Nonetheless, by largely targeting non-citizens already in the country for entry into the economic stream, data from 2021 shows that compared to 2018 the number of permanent residents had actually increased by 26% (Griffith 2022). In comparison to 2018, economic class immigrants selected for their skills were up fully 60%, although refugee admissions were only up 25%, and family class admissions were actually down 6% in 2021 as compared to 2018 (Griffith 2022), a feature that was also impacted by travel bans and border closures.

For observers of contemporary Canadian immigration trends, it would not be surprising that even in the midst of a world health crisis on the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic-class immigrants were especially favoured by the Canadian state. One major consequence of the skills discourse, and immigration shifts in place since the late 1990s, is that the economic class has been consistently preferred over others in recent decades. According to the most recent 2021 Census, about one-quarter (23%) of the Canadian population are immigrants, the highest proportion amongst G7 countries as well as since the founding of the modern Canadian state in 1867 (Canada, Statistics Canada 2022, 2). Looking at the period 2016–2021, it can be noted that over half (56.3%) of recent immigrants living in Canada were admitted under the economic category, and of those, over one-third were expressly chosen for their skills and education by the federal government through the Federal Skilled Worker Program (Canada, Statistics Canada 2022, 6). One-third were selected through a Provincial Nominee Program (Canada, Statistics Canada 2022, 6), a program aimed at meeting the labour demands of specific provinces which may at times bypass some of the emphasis on skills in the Comprehensive Ranking System. In Canada, nine provinces and two territories now have their own Provincial Nominee Program which allows them to select immigrants in relation to their perceived economic needs (admissions remain the power of the federal government). Quebec, with a majority of French-language speakers, has had an older separate agreement dating back to 1991 which gives the province a greater say in immigrant selection (with admissions also remaining the power of the federal state). Still, in Quebec, close to half (46.4%) of recent immigrants arriving between 2016 and 2021 came in through a ‘skilled worker’ program (Canada, Statistics Canada 2022, 7).

Lest there be any doubt that the emphasis on the economic class is not about to dissipate, it is worth considering where things are heading for the foreseeable future. As can be seen from Table 1 on projected levels of immigration for the years 2023–2025, Canada is set to continue to grow its immigration intake to close to 500,000 annually, and envisioned numbers for the economic class are well over double those envisioned for the family stream, as well as for the refugee/humanitarian streams.

Table 1. 2023–2025 Immigration Levels Plan (Canada).

	2023		2024		2025
Projected admissions – Targets	465,000		485,000		500,000
Projected admissions – Ranges	Low	High	Low	High	Low	High
Economic immigration*	233,000	277,250	250,000	305,000	265,000	326,000
Family reunification	100,000	118,000	105,000	130,000	107,000	135,000
Refugees/Humanitarian	77,000	109,750	75,000	107,500	70,500	89,000
TOTAL	410,000	505,000	430,000	542,500	442,500	550,000

*Under the Canada-Quebec Accord, Quebec has full responsibility for the selection of immigrants destined to Quebec, with the exception of the family class and protected persons.

SOURCE: Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, 2022 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration (2022) p. 34.

What this underscores is that the logic of contemporary middle-class nation-building plays out in relation to the intake of other categories (specifically the refugee/humanitarian stream and family stream). But the logic of middle class nation building and the skills discourse impacts the family and refugee/humanitarian streams and reinforces inequity as well. As indicated, the 1950s invocation of discretionary powers to admit select ‘middle class’ immigrants to Canada who might otherwise have been excluded on grounds of national origin/race came to also play out in relation to refugees. After 1967, the point system, while formally only applied in relation to the economic class only, also exerted influence in relation to responses to refugees. Given its geography, and since 2004 the Canada–US Safe Third Country Agreement, the number of claims for asylum made at Canada’s borders is comparatively low. However, after 1969, when Canada acceded to the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, informally elements of the point system (like education and age) were used by Canada in assessing the ability of refugees overseas to cope in Canada (Abu-Laban 1998, 76). Since the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) works to have states protect refugees and take in refugees according to the needs of refugees, this practice was out of step. As a result, Canada was historically criticized by the international community for only taking ‘the best and brightest’ refugees; since the late 1990s and 2000s Canada’s responses have been more clearly in line with the UNHCR and the international community in terms of embracing the needs of refugees for protection, as well as resettlement (Pressé and Thomson 2008, 95–96). There have been some variations such as when the Harper Government sought to prioritise ‘religious minorities’ (i.e. non-Muslim) refugees from Syria in 2014 (Abu-Laban, Tungohan, and Gabriel 2023, 72–73). But, more recently yet we have seen a resurrection of the logic of middle class nation building playing out in relation to refugees, through the concerted effort of Canada under the Trudeau Liberals to reinsert its preference for the (high) skilled. This can especially be seen in the 2018 pilot programme known as the Economic Mobility and Pathways Project (EMPP). The EMPP, worked out and agreed to by Canada and the UNHCR in the post-Global Compact on Refugees period, is described as follows:

In testing labour mobility pathways for refugees through the EMPP, Canada is exploring bringing together the two worlds of humanitarian and economic immigration. More specifically, Canada is testing to what extent a protection lens can be applied to its economic programs in order to be sensitive and more responsive to the circumstances of forced displacement while preserving the ability of Canada’s economic immigration system to support economic growth and prosperity in Canada. (Canada and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2019, 3)

Indeed, the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration in the Canadian House of Commons lauded the program as an innovation and recommended that it be reviewed and expanded to ‘increase complementary pathways and opportunities for skilled refugees’ (Canada, House of Commons 2019, 41). The language of ‘skilled refugees’ stands as an implicit differentiation from other (presumably ‘unskilled’) refugees.

By December 2021 this program had entered a second phase, which involved working with participating provinces and territories to accept 500 applications from refugees and their families, as well as having new plans to expand the program for post-2021 Afghan refugees and to accept 2000 more ‘skilled refugees’ in areas of shortage like healthcare (Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada 2022, 18). Given the history, it is fair to argue that this program is really about centering Canada’s long-stated interest in facilitating the entrance of ‘skilled’ newcomers within the refugee/humanitarian stream. Here, the emphasis on economic growth and prosperity are also themes relating to neoliberal rationales. Of course, this program operates in addition to the country’s agreed intake of refugees worked out with UNHCR, and those prioritized by UNHCR. Nonetheless, the program points to how decidedly economistic and human capital appeals can work their way into humanitarianism.

As well it can also be noted that human capital appeals have also impacted the family component. For example, while in the 1980s the family class was the largest component of immigration, since the 1990s that place of honour has decisively been accorded to the economic class. In 2019, the last year before the pandemic border closures, the economic class roughly comprised 57% of intake, the family class 27% of intake, refugees and protected persons 14% of intake, and humanitarian and other about 1% of intake (calculated from Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada 2020, 35). Since the 1990s, in the context of human capital appeals, the family component came to be presented as less or even non-productive precisely because they are not chosen for their ‘skills’ (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2002, 50–51; Abu-Laban, Tungohan, and Gabriel 2023, 180). In this way, and despite a lot of lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic about the tremendous value of unpaid labour in the home, often undertaken by women, the spouses/common law partners (typically women) of primary economic class immigrants (typically men) are still largely undervalued when considered through the lens of Canada's immigration policy.

This also holds for parents and/or grandparents, which is a small and controlled portion of possible family intake, but one especially prone to being stereotyped as non-productive. In fact, there is a lot of evidence to suggest the value of family immigration, and specifically the value of parents/grandparents (VanderPlatt, Ramos, and Yoshida 2012). Using Statistics Canada Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada between 2001 and 2010, VanderPlatt, Ramos, and Yoshida (2012) uncover data which challenges prevailing assumptions that sponsored parents/grandparents are elderly, unemployed and non-contributory, showing mothers/grandmothers especially involved in family care. As they note:

Sponsored parents and/or grandparents are not as old as many suspect, they tend to live in similar households as other immigrants and, as our analysis of their contributions suggest, they overwhelmingly – two thirds – work or are self- employed, engage in homemaking, care for family, or engage in other activities. They are active and they do make important contributions to their families. (VanderPlatt, Ramos, and Yoshida 2012, 93)

Another trend that warrants still further comment is the increased use, since the mid-2000s, of temporary workers, especially, though not exclusively, for those seen to be ‘low skilled’ whose work in fact is not always temporary even if their precarity is solidified by an absence of pathways to citizenship (Esses et al. 2021, 15–16; Lenard and Straehle 2012). As David Cook-Martin (2024) indicates, temporary labour programs have gone hand in hand with middle class nation building by meeting perceived labour market needs, especially in the bad jobs typically not wanted by ‘middle class’ Canadians or permanent immigrants deemed ‘skilled’. There is of course also precarity in the trajectories associated with undocumented migrants, who fall outside the grid of Canada’s official immigration intake, and its skills discourse. While their trajectories are not static or linear, undocumented migrants seeking to gain permanency through claims to refugee status, or permanent residency based on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, may have their claims filtered through biases pertaining to country of origin, race and gender (Goldring and Landolt 2022).

In short then, Canada’s emphasis on the economic stream, and discourse on skills, has been retained through its evolving immigration system which has shifted towards more of a two-step approach. This begs still further issues of what it means to put the onus on individual immigrants to integrate via workplaces and educational institutions (as opposed to community-based settlement services) or how facilitating neoliberal logics may not serve would-be citizens (Adeyanju and Olatunji 2022; Bruner 2022). Overall, demanding richer human capital from immigrants and even refugees, facilitating precarity with temporary migrant labour, and limiting the family class treats prospective immigrants as a ‘problem,’ rather than turning the lens toward wider structural issues including asking whether it is time to interrogate the discourse on skills in policy. Indeed, Canada’s emphasis on ‘skilled’ (or ‘high skilled’) immigrants and middle class nation building does not always translate into a middle-class socioeconomic status as the next section explores.

Inequities in the immigrant experience

As Antje Ellermann has noted, although issues of race and ethnicity have been important to migration studies as a multidisciplinary field, in many ways class has been ignored with the exception of work that theorizes how attracting immigrants high in ‘human-capital’ has been linked to contributing to a middle-class national identity (Ellermann 2020, 2518). While the results of attracting ‘high skilled people’ to Canada may be to produce a highly qualified and educated immigrant population according to conventionally defined ideas of ‘skill’, in fact, their socioeconomic status in coming to Canada may plummet. Further, even if they have Canadian experience their ‘skills’ and contributions may be devalued.

Consider, in August 2022 CBC, Canada’s mass media and public broadcaster, featured a first-person narrative written by an immigrant who moved from Pakistan to Canada 2015. Tellingly entitled ‘Moving to Canada was Harder than I Thought: I’m Not Sure I’d Do it Again,’ Misbah Noor recounts the difficulties she (despite an MA degree) and her spouse (a former bank manager) faced in getting work commensurate with their education and previous employment because they lacked ‘Canadian experience’. They weathered unemployment and working menial and part-time jobs as well as having to ‘upgrade’ in Canada. As she writes:

We felt disappointed and worthless. Canadian officials accepted us because of our education. Our documents were attested to so many times in the process, we thought that our degrees would be valued here. We were wrong. (Noor 2022)

Although Noor notes their employment and housing situation improved with more years in Canada, the physical and mental health tolls lead her to conclude that ‘if I could go back in time, I would think twice before immigrating’ (Noor 2022 emphasis mine).

Rather than being anecdotal, this account and the sentiment expressed serve to draw attention to broader tensions at play with Canada’s skills-based immigration system and penchant for middle-class immigration and nation building (Ellermann 2020; Elrick 2021; Winter 2024). On the one hand, it is the case that amongst real-world states Canada has been a global leader in welcoming immigrants and providing settlement services designed to promote integration (Esses et al. 2021, 8) and multiculturalism policy has been in place at the federal level since 1971. On the other hand, as attested to for well more than a decade in both the scholarly and the grey literature (i.e. from government and NGO sources), while Canada’s immigration system privileges ‘skilled’ migration, results are concerning when it comes to the economic and social integration of immigrants, with negative consequences for their health and wellbeing (Kaushik and Drolet 2018). Indeed, qualitative interviews examining the challenges highly educated recent immigrants have in obtaining jobs commensurate with their qualifications found over half (or 20 of 38) had plans or wished to leave the country (Thomas 2021, 205).

It is not clear what has created these outcomes for newcomers since the 1990s, which are decidedly more negative as concerns the match between jobs, education and income than what happened in the 1970s and 1980s. Jeffrey Reitz suggests it may in part stem from the fact that even if the education levels of immigrants have increased, domestic investment in higher education, alongside greater participation amongst the Canadian-born in postsecondary institutions, have created a more competitive environment to the determinant of newcomers (Reitz 2014, 104–105). He also notes that

Immigrants who fail to get the jobs for which they have specific qualifications may experience even more barriers at lower levels, often being dismissed as ‘overqualified,’ and can find themselves obliged to take jobs for which there are virtually no skill requirements whatever. (Reitz 2014, 107)

Here it is worth pointing out that Canada’s turn to a ‘two-step’ pathway, whereby permanent residence is dependent on having Canadian job experience, may not necessarily resolve the issue of inequities experienced by immigrants. For example, recent work by Lightman et al. (2022) on Filipina women entering Canada between 2001 and 2016 shows that while they outperform other groups in the Live-In Caregiver Program, they experience downward labour market mobility in the Federal Skilled Worker Program entry class as a consequence of the devaluing of carework.

Relatedly, the model of selection Canada has employed for family-class immigrants works to reproduce gender inequities by distinguishing between the primary (typically male) and secondary (typically female) applixant. These inequities can play out in relation to power in the household and access to state services (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2002). Indeed, the secondary applicants, comprised of primarily women, have also been shown to have an earnings disadvantage in the labour market (Elrick and Lightman 2016).

Not least, a 2019 Statistics Canada study of refugees from thirteen sources countries arriving between 1980 and 2009 finds considerable variation such that ten years after arrival the highest-earning refugee groups (from the former Yugoslavia, Poland and Columbia) nearly doubled those groups with the lowest earnings (from Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China) (Picot, Zhang, and Hou 2019, 6–7). Of course, the context compelling people to flee these different states and regions is varied. However, notably in this example, the observable human capital traits like education, age, and knowledge of an official language did not explain the situation of the lowest earning groups, leaving the authors to ponder whether other factors might account for the gap (Picot, Zhang, and Hou 2019, 6–7). These other factors included speculation about real or perceived differences among refugee groups in labour market experience in the source country, as well as discrimination (Picot, Zhang, and Hou 2019, 6–7).

What unites all these examples is they point to the relevance of things other than human capital in shaping the experiences of immigrants and refugees., and also underscore how middle class nation building through ‘skills’ masks inequities These factors include, but are not limited to, structural factors such as the role that the state and its policies may play in shaping outcomes that impact immigrant earnings and experience; the socially constructed classist ideas that distinguish between ‘high’ ‘low’ and ‘un’ skilled; and the socially constructed and notoriously gendered way in which work traditionally performed by women, and in particular caring labour, is devalued, particularly under conditions of late capitalism and neoliberalism (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2002).

There is also the fact that perceptions, bias and discrimination may play a role in shaping whether the human capital of an individual immigrant or refugee is even recognized in the first place. Here the work of Shibao Guo is helpful in reminding us that ‘skill’ is a floating signifier that also intersects with gender, class and racialization in ways that can reproduce white privilege and dominance (Guo 2015, 247). In point of fact, numerous studies have noted the myriad ways in which immigrants with significant social capital are subjected to a devaluing of their international qualifications and experiences and relatedly deskilling and downward mobility (Guo 2015, 236).

Conclusion

In focussing on the tenacity of Canada’s discourse on skills, and the many inequities associated with it, there is an explicit invitation to also challenge this discourse in policy, in scholarship as well as in everyday common parlance. Given the role discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, entry category, and the valuing of particular skills may all play a role in immigrant outcomes it is actually responsible to have a wider conversation about these kinds of issues in shaping the actual experience of immigrants and refugees to Canada (or elsewhere). A shift in perspective is needed rather than continued reliance on presenting immigrants as deficient in human capital, or deficient in human capital that intersects with it what Bourdieu calls ‘cultural capital’ (Erel 2010).

As this article has indicated, at the height of COVID-19 pandemic, measures which necessitated not only social distancing but also stay-at-home measures, a new discussion on ‘essential workers’ came to the fore. As border closures made it difficult for the Trudeau government to achieve its 2020 and 2021 targets for immigration intake, novel federal approaches to immigration emerged to allow new pathways to citizenship for those with ‘essential skills’ and even ‘guardian angel’ asylum claimants working in care as well as others already in the country. Nonetheless, these have been circumscribed programs. Canada has a longstanding and pre-existing discourse on ‘skills’ which emerged as Canada’s immigration policy evolved into a direction where there was to be no discrimination on the basis of race/ethnicity. This discourse became differently entrenched with the rise of neoliberalism and global competition for immigrants with high human capital. And, it remains with shifts in immigration policy towards more of a ‘two step’ model since 2015.

While the focus on ‘skills’ in immigration intake in Canada directly implicates permanent migration from the economic class, it also impacts – albeit in different ways at different times – both refugees and family-class immigrants. Although much scholarly discussion of ‘skilled’ migration has theorized this in relation to economistic criteria, positing migrants as maximizing the return on their human capital, there is a pressing need to also consider the socially constructed and historically specific ways that ‘skills’ itself is a discourse, and a signifier. The discourse on skills demands historical reflection, debate and normative discussion from a perspective that is attuned to the intersectional impacts it carries for immigrants and for Canada, and by extension other states which have adopted similar approaches and receive newcomers. In short, even if immigration policy is about excluding, there are more wholistic and human-centered ways to consider potential and actual contributions than a skills discourse has ever been amenable to, and these may also contribute to nation building.

Acknowledgment

For valuable and constructive comments on an earlier iteration of this article. I thank George Borjas, Mary Waters, and Elke Winter as well as the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.