ABSTRACT
In this rejoinder, I respond to generative assessments of my book, Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism, by four scholars whose own work inspired its development. I offer thoughts on four main points raised about the book’s analysis of immigration policymaking in postwar Canada: (1) the role of race and class in immigrant selection; (2) the effect of bureaucratic boundary-work on multiculturalism and “Whiteness” as elements of national identity; (3) the role of culture in immigration policymaking; and (4) the limits of bureaucratic discretion.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Elrick and Schwartzman (Citation2015) for my earlier work on this theme, focusing on the role of parliamentary debates in shaping understandings of the German census category of “persons with a migration background.”
2 I use “groupness” here in Brubaker’s (Citation2002, 167-168) sense, as denoting “a contextually fluctuating conceptual variable” that does not necessarily correspond with a substantial entity in the social world. Seeing ethnic groups, races, and nations from this perspective allows us to foreground the process and politics behind their social construction.