Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: a rejoinder

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration policy
• race
• class
• culture
• skilled workers
• family reunification

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Elrick and Schwartzman (2015) 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 (2002, 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.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [Grant Number SSHRC 430-2017-00276].