Neoliberal nationalism and immigration policy

ABSTRACT

Contemporary nationalism in the West tends to be understood in ethnic terms and associated with a bottom-up reaction to disliked effects of globalization, in particular migration. But there is also a top-down nationalism that is inherent in states` boundary-policing and – constituting membership policies. This paper draws the contours of a state-level neoliberal nationalism. Its imprint can be found in social policy, citizenship policy, and – the focus of this paper – immigration policy, in particular for the highly-skilled. Neoliberal nationalism combines diversity and meritocracy, and thus a modicum of cultural and economic liberalism. The prefix ‘neo’ flags the refashioning of political community from solidarity-based to contract-based, conditional on individual contribution and strict reciprocity.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• nationalism
• immigration policy
• high-skilled immigration

Introduction

Perhaps the most prominent form of nationalism in the West today is ‘ethno-nationalism’ (Bonikowski 2017). This is a reactive movement by or on behalf of imperiled ‘ethnocultural majorities’ (Bonikowski 2017) against the forces of change in globalizing market societies, which assume visibility for many in the loathed figure of the migrant. However, this does not exhaust the possibilities of nationalism. In addition, there is a state-level nationalism that is structurally attached to the modern state. Since the late eighteenth century democratic revolutions, the state has been nation-state, the nation giving name and identity to the demos or people from which the post-monarchic state derives its legitimacy. The nation-state form even applies to states whose democratic credentials are feeble to non-existing, as former communist or today`s Islamic and autocratic states. As bounded political units with sovereign jurisdiction over a territory, modern states are structurally nationalist; they must police the boundaries and secure the identity of its collective membership that is the nation. State-level nationalism has been the object of modernist nationalism theories, which variously located nationalism`s origins in the serializing logic of industrialism (Gellner 1983), vernacular-spreading print capitalism (Anderson 1983), or, more endogenously, in geopolitical rivalry and war (Mann 1992). Today`s predominantly ethnic expressions should not let us forget the civic force of nationalism, which associates strangers beyond primordial kinship ties – hence Benedict Anderson`s evocative notion of nations as ‘imagined communities’, whose members will ‘never know most of their fellow-members’ (1983, 6–7).

In the spirit of modernist nationalism theories, but with a normative rather than explanatory bent, the early 1990s saw a range of writings on liberal nationalism (Kymlicka 1992; Miller 1995; Tamir 1993). This was before contemporary ethno-nationalism was on the map, which is a movement of the political right. The liberal nationalists located their opponents rather on the political left, in terms of cosmopolitan diagnoses of the nation-state in decline. Against them, the point of liberal nationalism was to show that important political goals, like social justice and democratic deliberation, presupposed the existence of bounded political communities, ‘nations’, with a high level of trust and solidarity. In a way, liberal nationalism was a necessary complement to a liberal theory of justice, which in John Rawls` iconic version was also a social-democratic theory of the welfare state, which presupposed but had failed to develop its nationalist fundament.

Liberal nationalism was mirrored in the real world by liberal or liberalizing immigration and citizenship policies that peaked around the same time. However, the irony is that liberal nationalism entered the field just when society and state came to be radically remodeled along neoliberal lines. Neoliberalism is a project that had started earlier, with the attack on Keynesian demand-side economics in the mid-1970s. It switched to high gear with the onset of post-communist globalization, which is a condition in which capitalism is ‘alone’ in the world, without a competitor to tame its rougher edges (Milanovic 2019). Neoliberalism radicalizes the individualism that is constitutive of liberalism, throwing out the social elements that liberalism had adopted at doctrinal level from John Stuart Mill to John Dewey and T.H. Marshall, and that were institutionalized in post-WWII social democracy and the welfare state. If applied to immigration and citizenship policies, neoliberalism shares with liberalism the aversion to group-level, categorical discrimination.¹ For neoliberalism, such discrimination is particularly odious because it conflicts with its meritocratic foundations. But neoliberalism parts ways with liberalism in repudiating the responsibility of society and state to correct unequal market outcomes. Instead, neoliberalism stipulates an austere self-responsibility of the individual, be she citizen or immigrant. In fact, the citizen-immigrant distinction becomes irrelevant as the individual unit in a neoliberal order² is the ethnically anonymous ‘worker citizen’ (see Anderson 2015).

This paper maps the influence of neoliberal precepts on the structural nationalism that is inherent in boundary-sustaining membership policies, with a focus on immigration policy. It draws the contours of a neoliberal nationalism that combines diversity and meritocracy, and thus a modicum of cultural and economic liberalism. At the same time, neoliberal nationalism refashions the political community from a community of fate (which it had been for the liberal nationalist) to one that is contractual and dependent on individual contribution and a strict sense of reciprocity.

1. Immigration policy: structurally nationalist

But before elaborating on its neoliberal imprints, it is important to recognize that nationalism is a necessary input factor without which there could not be an immigration policy in the first place. In his pluralist justice theory, where justice varies with the meaning of the goods to be distributed, Michael Walzer (1983) argued that the first good to be distributed is that of membership in the political community, which cannot itself be subject to considerations of justice. ‘(W)e who are already members do the choosing’, Walzer writes, ‘in accordance with our own understanding of what membership means in our community and what sort of a community we want to have’ (Walzer 1983, 32). If it were otherwise, ‘there could not be communities of character, historically stable, ongoing associations of men and women with some special commitment to one another and some special sense of their common life’ (Walzer 1983, 62). This normative political theory account does not consider that in reality it is states but not political communities that do immigration policy, and notoriously under the influence of interest groups rather than majority preferences (see Freeman 1995). Walzer nevertheless expresses an elementary truth: without a structural nationalism built into it, there could not be immigration policy in the first place. While reality may (and mostly does) look different, the ‘national interest’ is the undisputed regulatory ideal of immigration policy, wherever it happens (for a classic example, see Fuchs 1981).

Building upon Walzer, if the character of a political community takes on liberal contours, as it did in Western societies under the human rights regime post-World War II, immigration policy cannot remain unaffected. Accordingly, group-level, discriminatory selection, on the grounds of ethnicity and race, gave way to individual-level, non-discriminatory selection, on the grounds of skills, family ties, and human need, which are the three major migrant selection criteria today (Joppke 2005). By the same logic, one must conclude that if the political community comes to be shaped more by neoliberal than by liberal precepts, this cannot but leave its imprint on immigration policy (see below).

But whether liberal or neoliberal, we are still dealing with immigration policy, in which an essentially political, liberally unjustifiable boundary between one state and its people and all other states and their people is affirmed and sustained. Accordingly, under international law immigration policy is only minimally constrained (see Orgad 2021), by elementary non-discrimination norms, and most substantially, by the non-refoulement norm of the international refugee regime (which binds even non-UN convention states). As most clearly articulated in the American legal principle of plenary power, which stipulates that Congress`s immigration choices are judicially non-reviewable, immigration policy is elementary politics unfettered by law (see Bartolini 2018, 106).

Nineteenth century liberals still had a keen sense for the crudely political nature of immigration policy. When laying out the ‘elements of politics’ at his time, Henry Sidgwick (1891) distinguished between a ‘cosmopolitan’ and a ‘national’ ideal of ordering political life. While he fathomed that the ‘cosmopolitan ideal’ might become ‘the ideal of the future’ (and the one that he personally favored), he found that at present the ‘national ideal[] of political organization prevailed’ (Sidgwick 1891, 205). According to it, ‘the right and duty of each government is to promote the interests of a determinate group of human beings, bound together by the tie of a common nationality’ (Sidgwick 1891, 295). By contrast, under the cosmopolitan ideal, the government is merely the fiduciary caretaker over a particular territory, but it is ‘not in any way to determine who is to inhabit (it)’ (Sidgwick 1891, 295f). Accordingly, immigration policy is notionally tied to the national ideal; it is structurally nationalist, much as states qua states are. Sidgwick deemed this necessary for ‘internal cohesion’ and for ‘rais(ing) the standard of living among the poorer classes’ (Sidgwick 1891, 296), that is, as we would say today, for social-democratic reasons. But there was also a conservative motive: the ‘governmental function of promoting moral and intellectual culture might be rendered hopelessly difficult by the continual inflowing streams of alien immigrants, with diverse moral habits and religious traditions’ (Sidgwick 1891, 296).

Unsurprisingly, Sidgwickian immigration policy was nothing less than brutish. It entailed ‘the right to admit aliens on its own terms, imposing any conditions on entrance or any tolls on transit, and subjecting them to any legal restrictions or disabilities that it may deem expedient’ (1891, 235). For Sidgwick, this followed from the international law principle of ‘mutual non-interference’, which is still with us today. However, if we consider that in Sidgwickian times the only restriction to this international law principle was ‘due warning … and due time … for withdrawal’ (1891), one must conclude that ‘the cosmopolitan ideal’ has mightily advanced in the meantime (see the canonical statement by Carens 2013).

2. What is neoliberal?

Fleshing out the contours of neoliberal nationalism as today`s nationalist input factor of boundary-policing immigration policy, requires to be clear about the meaning of neoliberal, and how it might differ from liberal. Let me mention two important differences between liberal and neoliberal, the first with respect to different takes on the principle of functional differentiation, the second with respect to different takes on social justice.

Functional Differentiation. Liberalism, as Michael Walzer (1984, 315) put it evocatively, is the ‘art of separation’. It builds a ‘world of walls’, and ‘each one creates a new liberty’. The most obvious (but not only) example is the ‘wall’ between economy and the democratic polity, which disconnects property from the exercise of citizenship. Along this line, anthropologist James Ferguson defined liberalism as ‘finding the right balance between two spheres understood as properly distinct, if always related: state and market, public and private’. By contrast, neoliberalism ‘puts governmental mechanisms developed in the private sphere to work within the state itself … The question of what should be public and what private becomes blurred’ (2010, 172). It may sound paradoxical, but liberalism, despite its universalist thrust of positing the individual and her interests as the first principle of political order, is in institutional respect a particularistic boundary-respecting, not boundary-busting device. Liberalism thus ‘reflects and reinforces a long-term process of social differentiation’ (Walzer 1984, 319). No one was clearer on this than social theorist Niklas Luhmann (1995, 246), who considered ‘freedom and equality’, the two pillars of liberalism, as ‘semantic correlates’ to the ‘order of inclusion’ in a functionally differentiated society. This is a society in which individuals are no longer unequally subsumed under one group or estate but equally included in all subsystems of society, and this not as complete persons but only in specific roles and functions. Liberalism thus understood is not optional but the necessary ordering principle of functionally differentiated societies, societies that are ‘seeking various separations’ (Crouch 2011, 4): at individual level, to limit the reach of power and enlarge the scope of liberty (Crouch 2011); at system level, to ‘(protect) values specific to particular institutions and spheres of life’ (Starr 2007, 54).

By contrast, neoliberalism commands that the logic of one sector, that of the profit-seeking market economy, permeates all other sectors, even breaching the protective walls of the individual herself, who is to become ‘responsibilized’ and rendered ‘self-sufficient’, detached from society so as not to become a burden on it (see Mounk 2017). One of the earliest analysts of neoliberalism, Michel Foucault, was also the first to realize its boundary-breaching logic. He found it in Chicago economist Gary Becker`s concept of ‘human capital’, which is ‘giv(ing) a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic’ (Foucault 2008, 219). In neoliberalism, classic liberalism`s focus on market ‘exchange’ is pushed aside in favor of ‘competition’, which is generalized to all spheres of human life. Competition legitimizes inequality because only one can win, unlike exchange, which makes both parties better off.

The dethronement of equality, through its formalist reduction to isonomia (equality under the law) (see Hayek 1960), is perhaps neoliberalism`s most fundamental move. But returning to human capital, its result is the individual becoming an ‘entrepreneur of himself’, as Foucault memorably put it (2008, 226). Wendy Brown has added that ‘when everything is capital, labor disappears as a category’ (2015, 38). In other words, and this is a weird variation on liberalism as necessary for functional differentiation and thus as non-optional, neoliberalism swallows the possibility of opposition and thus also becomes non-optional – ‘there is no alternative’, as Margaret Thatcher intuitively grasped the logic of the order that she helped bring into being.

Social Justice. It was again Margaret Thatcher, who articulated a second principle of neoliberalism, in her notion ‘there is no such thing as society’. True, liberalism`s earliest formulations, in the contract theories of Hobbes and Locke, might lead one to the conclusion that the ‘neo’ did not change much to this. Anticipating liberalism`s principle of public neutrality, that is, its abstention from positing an ethical good above and thus inevitably against the individual, Hobbes (1998 [1651], 65) argued that there is no finis ultimus (utmost aim) or summum bonum (greatest good) to be achieved in society. Instead, there is only a summum malum to be avoided, which is the throat-cutting of fear-plagued and desire-driven individuals in the natural condition. But classical liberalism`s fullest articulation, by John Stuart Mill, at least implies that the ‘cultivation of individuality’ (2003 [1859], 132), which he expected of the liberal order, could not but be the work of society, the latter providing the necessary means and conditions for the individual to thrive. Mill was one of the first liberals to realize that ‘society is not founded on a contract’ (2003 [1859], 147). It was only a short and necessary step from Mill to the ‘new liberalism’ of the twentieth century, for which ‘the state has the responsibility for creating institutions under which individuals can effectively realize the potentialities that are theirs’ (Dewey 1935, 26).

By contrast, in one of neoliberalism`s most influential articulations, by Friedrich Hayek, who of course avoids the ‘neo’ because his ambition was to recover ‘liberalism’ against its totalitarian challengers, the defining feature is the frontal rejection of ‘social justice’. Hayek throws out the latter much like the concepts of ‘society’ and ‘social’, which are all ‘poisoned language’ to him (1989, ch.7). In his austere view, there cannot be ‘freedom’ unless one takes full ‘individual responsibility’ for one`s actions (Hayek 1960, 83). All things ‘social’ are sentimental hangover from a tribal past, when humans lived in ‘small groups’ and were dependent on ‘instincts of solidarity and altruism’ (Hayek 1989, ch.1). In the ‘Great Society’ of markets, by contrast, freedom beckons. But its outcomes are a function of ‘skill and chance’, notably not of merit, and ‘once we have agreed to play the game … it is a moral obligation on us to abide by the results even if they turn against us’ (Hayek 1966, 614). In a ‘catallaxy’ (Hayek`s preferred word for market, to emphasize its spontaneous order), there is only ‘a justice of individual conduct but not a separate ‘social justice’’ (Hayek 1966). Redistribution would mean to treat different people differently, while ‘law’ properly understood is ‘isonomia’, the same for all. Hayek finds it best expressed in the gradually evolved negative rules or prohibitions of English common law (Hayek 1960, 164). Social justice is regression from a ‘rule-connected open society’ to an ‘end-connected tribal society’ (Hayek 1982, 38). At the psychological plane, social justicee is even little more than ‘dislike of people, who are better off than oneself, or simply envy’ (Hayek 1982, 99). Through the lens of the late twentieth century’s most influential reformulation of liberalism, that by John Rawls (1971), neoliberalism lives up to his first principle of justice, ‘equal liberty’; but it blithely discards Rawls’ second justice principle, the ‘difference principle’, according to which inequality is only justified if it is to the advantage of the least well-off in society.

What does this rough description of neoliberalism entail for our task of relating nationalism and immigration policy? We must first acknowledge the paradox that neoliberalism is in principle hostile to nationalism.³ Accordingly, ‘neoliberal nationalism’ appears to be a contradiction in terms.⁴ For neoliberalism’s chief theorist, Friedrich Hayek (1989, ch.3), xenos, the ‘guest-friend’, who ‘would gain peaceful admission to an alien territory’ for purposes of trading, is a pivotal figure in the transition from tribal to the ‘great’ market society. And he waxed lyrical about ‘conceding to the stranger and even the foreigner the same protection of rules of just conduct which apply to the relations to the known members of one’s own small group’ – this cosmopolitanism, for him, was the very meaning of ‘liberal society’ (1982, 88).

Against these objections, it is a simple fact that immigration policy exists under a neoliberal regime. This raises the question what kind of ‘community of character’ (Walzer) this policy affirms and defends. In his classic Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Rogers Brubaker (1992) connected nationhood to citizenship, but not to immigration policy, and he depicted the latter as a neutral instrument, devoid of national colors. This is because the reference point of immigration policy is access to the territory, not access to the political community, which is the more philosophical and culture- and identity-loaded domain of citizenship policy.

But how wise is it to decouple immigration policy from nationhood? Against it speaks the fact that the boundary between immigration and citizenship policy is fluid, and even more fluid in liberal societies where territorial admissions tend to lead to membership admissions. This has been the experience in the classic countries of immigration from the start; and it has been the more recent – and more conflictual – experience in Europe as well. Accordingly, both immigration and citizenship are instances of membership policy, by means of which an ‘us’ is delimited from ‘them’. As I shall demonstrate in the following, however unlikely it may be from a doctrinal point of view, neoliberal nationalism have come to shape and influence immigration policy, a policy that for the true neoliberal (and perhaps liberal as well) should not exist in the first.

3. Neoliberal nationalism

One would expect that in a neoliberal order the structural nationalism that is necessary input of immigration policy, also shows the imprint of neoliberal precepts. This leads to the strange concept of neoliberal nationalism. It grates even more than that of liberal nationalism. The latter derives its plausibility from the fact that (social) liberals from Mill to Rawls had presumed (though not theorized) the existence of a territorially bounded society. Then it was not far to arrive at the idea of liberal nationalism. By contrast, for neoliberals, not a national society but the market is the fundamental institution, and the market knows and respects no national boundaries. Hence the resolute anti-nationalism of Hayek.⁵ But in the real world, neoliberal nationalism exists. It is the idea of a non-ethnic community of the thrifty, which is inclusive of immigrants and excludes only those who don’t work and don’t contribute, whatever their legal status or ethnicity. As I argued earlier (with Anderson 2015), its individual unit is not the citizen but the ‘worker citizen’.⁶ Before we turn to immigration policy, something akin to neoliberal nationalism is clearly visible in contemporary social policy and citizenship policy.

Social Policy. Neoliberal social policy has moved from social-risk-pooling welfare to individual-responsibility-tracking workfare. The latter, while couched in individualist language, comes as an obligation, which is not to burden society (as bounded entity, what should that be if not the nation?) with costly and wasteful behavior. The strange construct of obligatory self-responsibility deviates from the liberal tradition, in which the common good is only the indirect outcome of self-interested market behavior. In neoliberal social policy, by contrast, self-responsibility is in the direct service of the common good. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, whose Hartz IV labor market reforms injected neoliberalism into German social policy, expressed the underlying philosophy colloquially: ‘There is no right in our society to be lazy’ (quoted in Lessenich 2008, 85). Similarly, when he introduced the Universal Credit, Britain’s latest round of workfare policy that ties minimized unemployment benefits to a tough and full-time work-search obligation, Prime Minister David Cameron defended the measure as in the interest of Britain’s ‘hardworking people’, aka ‘Taxpayers’, for whom he invented the term ‘aspiration nation’. While the term did not catch on, it is revealing because to aspire and to strive, and not just to ‘be’, is the typical habitus of the middle class (see Bourdieu 1984, ch.6). Hence, one could call the policy justified in this way, with Elke Winter (2021), an instance of ‘middle-class nation-building’ (more on this below).

Importantly, neoliberal nationalism is ethnically anonymous: immigrants are readily included, as long as they are productive and not a cost-factor. It is again helpful to consult social policy for this. When reviewing the evolution of welfare measures for immigrants across OECD countries, Edward Koning (2021, ch.1) noticed that ‘extremely exclusionary measures seem to become less common’. A closer look reveals that this is less an expression of expanding welfare largesse than the flipside of neoliberal social policy, which is inclusive of immigrants. This inclusiveness follows from shifting the basis of social policy from solidarity to contract. The classic welfare state was based on solidarity and ‘shared fate’, thus presupposing ‘liberal nationalism’ (Miller 1995; Tamir 1993). Its principle was individual-blind ‘risk pooling’, which required the trust and solidarity that flows from shared nationhood. The classic welfare state ‘(made) each person a part of the whole’ (Ewald 1989, 390), without attributing responsibility for a bad outcome to the individual.

By contrast, the foundation of neoliberal social policy moves from solidarity to contract, even in its very language. An example is the ‘claimant commitment’ in the mentioned UK Universal Credit policy, which obliges its beneficiaries to be looking for work full-time, among other obligations. The individual language of contract and ‘responsibilizing’ means to remove ‘society’ and the ‘structural’ causes of hardship from the picture (Veitch 2013, 148). But once society is out, everyone is in. Neoliberal social policy blurs the citizen-immigrant distinction. This is also visible in the negative, because ‘welfare contractualism’ rests on a pejorative picture of welfare claimants as ‘shirking’ and ‘fraud’-prone (Freedland and King 2003). The latter are thus structurally assimilated to ‘illegal’ migrants, both being the opposite of honest and hardworking. Accordingly, David Cameron, when introducing the Universal Credit in 2012, depicted welfare reform and immigration restriction as ‘two sides of the same coin’: on both sides, a ‘’something for nothing’ culture’ of freeloaders had to be ended (Morris 2016, 693). The joint intention is to create a ‘hostile environment for both migrants and welfare claimants’, whereby ‘the ‘illegal’ migrant and the ‘benefit scrounger’ are intimately connected’ (Morris 2020, 247). More than classic welfare, neoliberal workfare and kindred social policies ‘cut across the citizen/non-citizen divide’ (Morris 2020, 252). This follows from the neoliberal nationalism that undergirds them.

Citizenship. A second site of neoliberal nationalism is citizenship policy. The new diction is that citizenship is not a right, which it had been in the liberal era, but a privilege that ‘needs to be earned’ (see Joppke 2021). This plays out above all in tightened conditions of naturalization, which is no longer considered a tool for further integration, as in the liberal past, but the ‘last step of a successful integration’ (as Stern and Valchars 2013, 41 argue for the case of Austria). Importantly, earned citizenship still operates on a liberal basis – it is no return to group-level exclusions on the bases of sex or race. However, the heft of earned citizenship is its neoliberal and nationalist elements. Three Dutch sociologists appositely speak of ‘neoliberal communitarian citizenship’ (Houdt, Suvarierol, and Schinkel 2011). This sounds contorted but it is the concise formula for a citizenship that is neoliberal and nationalist in tandem: ‘Under a neoliberal communitarian regime, it becomes one’s responsibility, expressed in the form of ‘earning’ one’s citizenship to convert to a nation that is sacralized as a bounded community of value’ (Houdt, Suvarierol, and Schinkel 2011, 423–424).

Earned citizenship is neoliberal because it is contingent on the demonstrated capacity of the self-responsible individual to achieve and to contribute. It asks aspiring citizens to be more knowledgeable and virtuous than the average citizen, requiring her to be a kind of ‘super-citizen’ (Badenhoop 2017). Earned citizenship is a ‘prize for performance rather than a status of equality’, as an American jurist put it with an eye on the US, where the concept appeared in the context of legalizing the meritorious portion of the country’s vast illegal immigrant population (Ahmad 2017, 260).

At the same time, earned citizenship is nationalist because citizenship is conceived of as privilege not right, reserved for the select few. Thereby the exceptional quality if not sacredness of the citizenship-conferring community is affirmed. But it is nationalism of a specific kind. When fleshing out their ‘neoliberal communitarian citizenship’, Friso van Houdt, Suvarierol, and Schinkel (2011, 424) pointedly speak of a ‘community of value’, not of a community of descent. Instead of being ethnic and wishing to restore homogeneity of this kind, the new nationalism has porous boundaries. It includes everyone who can contribute and is proven worthy – what warrants calling this nationalism neoliberal itself. Neoliberal nationalism is thus perfectly compatible with, if not altogether permeated by, the gospel of diversity that reigns across Western societies.

4. Neoliberal immigration policies: ‘middle-class nation-building’?

On the assumption that immigration policies inevitably shape the boundaries of state societies and ‘define the nation itself’ (Elrick 2021, 50), one would expect them to be a third – even the first – site of neoliberal nationalism. And indeed they are, and interestingly across selection criteria: family, asylum, and (high-skilled) labor.

Family. Casually defined as the ‘economization of everything’ (Fourcade 2016, 453). neoliberalism’s imprint on immigration policy is visible in the intrusion of economic considerations and of the motive of self-responsibility even into family and asylum migration policies, which previously had been processed as a matter of individual rights. In a comparison of tightened minimal income requirements for spousal migration in the Netherlands, Norway and the UK, Eleonore Kofman speaks of the ‘transposition of economic criteria normally associated with labour migration’ (2018, 36). Particularly noteworthy is the tendency to make eligibility dependent solely on the (usually male) sponsor’s individual work income, and to discard in the calculation prospective spousal income and third-party support (such as by extended family). The individual is quite literally made to be alone in this, even though he or she makes a claim for the exact opposite, the recognition of her primary social ties. Furthermore, tightened income thresholds on the part of sponsors now tend to apply equally to citizens and legal resident immigrants, removing any privileges that may have previously existed for citizens in this domain.⁷ There is ‘no such thing as society’ in neoliberal family migration policies; or to the degree that there is, it is the transactional or contractual understanding of society that is sported by neoliberalism. Rather than protect the family unit, these policies express ‘the need to ensure labour market participation, to protect the welfare budget and engender responsible and independent citizens’ (Kofman 2018, 42).

Asylum. A similar economization of previously rights-oriented migration policy is occurring in the processing of refugees and asylum-seekers. Previously, recognized Geneva Convention refugees immediately proceeded to permanent residence status in most countries. The convention did not require this privileged treatment, which stood for the exclusively humanitarian principles undergirding refugee and asylum policy. German Chancellor Angela Merkel famously made the unprecedented acceptance of Syrian refugees in 2015 a matter of Menschlichkeit (humanitarianism). However, her 2016 Integration Law made the accession to permanent legal resident status for recognized refugees contingent on meeting the civic integration standards, above all language competence and economic self-sufficiency, which already reigned, since the early millennium, in the processing of labor and family migration. Equally significant, the same integration law introduced the new legal category of ‘good prospect to remain’ (gute Bleibeperspektive). It mainly applies to rejected but ‘tolerated’ asylum-seekers, so-called Geduldete, who are legally subject to deportation but factually cannot be deported for a variety of reasons. If they find a place for vocational training and subsequent employment, the new law allows them to legally reside in Germany for another ‘3 plus 2’ years, and most likely permanently.⁸ This policy of ‘track-change’ (Spurwechsel) is controversial, because it blurs the legal distinction between labor and asylum migration, and it is suspected to create false incentives for (ab)using the asylum process for the purpose of labor migration (see Joppke 2023). Born of pragmatic considerations, to facilitate the integration of migrants who are legally unwanted but factually impossible to get rid of, this measure certainly improved the situation of scores of migrants with precarious status. But it also economizes asylum policy, and establishes the notion that the truly deserving refugee is the one who is in work and self-responsible. Unsurprisingly, migrants with precarious status are prone to internalize the expectation that they need to ‘earn’ the right to remain, which often implies vituperative judgments of their fellow-ethnics whom they perceive as less inclined to ‘hard work’ than themselves (see Wyss and Fischer 2022).

High Skilled. The one immigration policy most obviously ‘neoliberal’⁹ is for the highly skilled, which has become ubiquitous across rich OECD societies since the late 1990s. This preference is due to globalization and the accompanying ‘race for talent’ (Shachar 2006) in the technology sectors. Previous scholarship assumed that immigration policymaking was marked by a tension between economic and cultural ‘axes’, the first favoring openness, the second closure (Zolberg 1999). Jim Hollifield’s well-known ‘liberal paradox’ (1992) rests on the same assumption of economics and culture pushing immigration policy into opposite directions, open with respect to economics and closed with respect to culture. Under neoliberalism, this assumption becomes obsolete. As Saskia Bonjour and Sebastien Chauvin write, ‘in the current nationalist neoliberal context, the policy distinction between cultural and economic criteria is increasingly blurred’ – the ‘good citizen’ becomes the ‘working citizen’ (2018, 3). This blurring is the whole point of neoliberal nationalism, observable across migrant categories. But the global competition for high-skilled immigrants is its pristine site. In the EU’s Lisbon Strategy, European states projected themselves as ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world … with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’, a goal that was to be achieved by 2010 (and obviously was missed by more than an inch). The fact that ‘greater social cohesion’ is part of the picture, suggests that this is not only a vision for the economy but for society at large, with high-skilled immigration (Europeanized since the 2009 Blue Card Directive) figuring prominently in it.

A ‘nationalist neoliberal context’, to quote again Bonjour and Chauvin (2018, 3), which is merely extended to the European level in the Lisbon Strategy, unquestionably feeds the universal preference for high-skilled immigrants, across the West, and the rich Middle and Far East as well. Elke Winter (2024) has introduced the notion of ‘middle-class nation-building’ as driving the preference for this particular type of immigration. While not using this term, Jennifer Elrick (2021) has provided the most complete analysis to date of ‘middle-class’ criteria deployed by 1950s’ and early 60s’ Canadian immigration bureaucrats, who were inadvertently driving the transition from race-based to merit-based immigrant selection in Canada before this was officialized. The problem is that what Elrick calls ‘middle-class multiculturalism’ through immigration policy predates neoliberalism by two decades or more. Elrick intriguingly shows that ‘merit’, which became institutionalized in the 1967 points system, was first used as selection criterion by immigration bureaucrats who had to decide on ‘cases of exceptional merit’ among applications from ‘non-preferred’ countries of origin, most often China, which were then still excluded for racial reasons. Accordingly, this was a perplexing case of ‘managing race along class lines’ (Elrick 2021, 12), whereby ‘middle-class qualities’ like ‘entrepreneurial spirit, industriousness, thrift … alongside education, occupational status, and wealth’ lifted some non-white applicants out of the zone of categorical exclusion. Once the race restriction fell, the result was the ‘middle-class multiculturalism’ that was then extolled to make Canada a ‘striking example to the world’ (Elrick 2021, 9).

Three decades fast-forward, Elke Winter (2021) observes that, due to a civic-knowledge testing Canadian naturalization policy that recently has come to mirror the points-based immigration policy, ‘multicultural citizenship’ is available ‘first and foremost’ for the highly skilled. And she concludes that ‘the logics driving Canadian immigration and naturalization can be characterized as ethnically/racially heterogeneous middle-class nation-building, where the intake of valued human capital trumps explicitly WASP/Eurocentric national identity maintenance’ (Winter 2021, 306). Elrick and Winter (2018, 25) see the same logic at work in Germany, where high-skilled immigrants and their spouses are to boost the ‘national middle-class status group’.

While I share the thrust of these analyses, the question is whether ‘middle-class nation-building’ is the right term for describing the contemporary preference for high-skilled immigration – note that Winter (2024) herself added a question-mark to it. My quarrel is more about form than substance, that is, whether the words are the most adequate for the thing. About the ‘thing’ there is agreement: a fusion of nationalist and economic concerns in neoliberal immigration policy. Let me mention four reservations. The bulk of them notably apply to my own concept of neoliberal nationalism, so that this is an exercise of probing the limits of both. The message is that the grand ‘nations and nationalism’ club must not crowd out other factors that drive immigration policy.

First, the closest equivalent to explicit nation building in contemporary migration policy is not on the side of selection but of integration, in terms of ‘civic integration’ requirements for legal residence and citizenship (see Goodman 2014). However, civic integration measures target (presumably) low-skilled or low–educated family migrants and refugees, not the highly skilled. Hence the fury against the ‘integration’ concept by Adrian Favell (2022, 142), who exposes it as ‘integration in the average, if not lowest, segments of our society’. By contrast, ‘the person who ‘belongs’ most freely in our society, is in fact a free moving, mobile member of an elite’ (Favell 2022, 141). Treated not much differently from normatively denationalized domestic elites, high-skilled immigrants tend to be exempted from civic integration requirements in most countries. This also follows from a ‘competitive immigration regime’ logic that is at work in the recruitment of elite migrants (Shachar 2006). The demand for them typically exceeds their supply, so that they always have other places to go to. Some scholars observed an ‘integration paradox’ among certain high-skilled immigrants, who describe themselves as ‘adapt(ing) everywhere’ while ‘(not) feel(ing) like … belong(ing) to anywhere’ (Geurts, Davids, and Spierings 2021, 76). Elite migrant cosmopolitanism adds to the fact that states are not in a position to throw sticks at them. If these people are nation-building material, this is at their own discretion. ‘Nation-building’ is too grand and too transitive a term (‘nation-states-molding-people-in-their-image’) to describe what’s going on.

Secondly, if one follows Catherine Dauvergne (2016), even classic immigrant countries, like Canada, pursue economically instrumentalist, if not ‘mean-spirited’ immigration policies today that are devoid of the grand nation-building ambition of the past. She calls this condition ‘loss of settlement’. Canada now recruits not only its low-skilled but also most of its high-skilled immigrants, preferably (high-fee paying) graduates of its own universities, as temporary migrants first, who need to gradually ‘earn’ their right to permanence.¹⁰ In her account, Canada shifted from a nation-building logic, where immigrants were future citizens, to an instrumental logic of ‘trial migration’, in which ‘states no longer need people but rather ‘widgets’’ (Dauvergne 2016, 127). Utility seems to outweigh identity, so that the two are not as ‘blurred’ as some have suggested.

Thirdly, moving from the ‘nation-building’ to the ‘middle-class’ component of the composite term, one must consider that the Western middle class has been the precise victim of globalization, in terms of stagnating wealth and income over the past four decades.¹¹ It would be a rather cynical and dangerous enterprise to replenish it through immigrants. Any explicit such attempt would confirm the phantasm of the ‘great replacement’ that fires the imagination of the populist right, from France to America. In the second half of the twentieth century, ‘middle class’ was a metaphor for a flattened post-class society, in which everybody would rise and the top was open. In a vivid portrait of the US, where the middle-class ideal had been reality for a while like perhaps nowhere else in the world, Paul Krugman speaks of the ‘great compression’ (2009, ch.3). More recently, the typical movement for middle-class people has been downwards, while the rich have run away into their own stratosphere, re-actualizing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early twentieth century notion that the rich ‘are different from you and me’ (2009, 43).¹² Again with respect to the US, Daniel Markovits reports that the income gap separating the poor from the middle class has narrowed by about a quarter since mid-twentieth century, while the income gap between middle class and the rich has nearly doubled (2019, 105). Beyond the US, the self-description of Western societies as middle-class societies, open to the top and sealed to the bottom, which had guaranteed the political stability of the post-WW II period, has become anachronistic.

At the same time, the middle-class habitus of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’, of making yourself through discipline and hard work, as identified by Pierre Bourdieu (1984), has perversely become the preferred self-description of the new meritocratic upper class, which an American sociologist appositely called ‘aspirational class’ (Currid-Halkett 2017). This is perhaps the first upper class in history not to define itself as a ‘leisure class’ (Veblen 2009), which had still inspired Bourdieu’s notion of class struggle as one for ‘distinction’ (that was mainly fought within the upper class). To aspire and ‘work hard’ (‘and play by the rules’, to cite the complete formula by neoliberal high priests Bill Clinton and Barak Obama), is no longer the provincial middle-class habitus but the general creed of neoliberal societies, issued top-down rather than from the middle up. Naturally, to ‘work hard’ is the expectation for immigrants too, at all skill levels, as we saw.¹³ To call these orientations ‘middle-class’ has the sniff of yesteryear. If one retains the notion, it is at the cost of falling prey to elite obfuscation.

Short reviews of current high-skilled immigration policies in Canada, the United States, and Germany reveal a fourth reason to be sceptical about a ‘nation-building’ framework: these policies are too haphazardous and patchwork, too insufficiently coordinated to warrant this grand label. The latter suggests a level of design and concerted intention that may not be there:

• Canada. While the Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP) for permanent legal immigration, introduced in 1967 and better known as the points system, formally remains in place, since the early millennium even highly skilled immigrants first arrive as temporary migrants. The latter are processed within separate programs that often delegate selection to provincial governments and employers. Whereas in 2000 almost 80 percent of economic migrants arrived through the FSWP, in 2018 the figure was down to 20 percent. Over the same period, the number of temporary foreign workers grew six-fold, from 66.600 to 429.999 (Feng Hou 2020). To the degree that temporary migrants proceed to permanent residence, the process is referred to as ‘two-step migration’. In accord with neoliberal precepts, the policy minimizes the burden of society and its institutions in the integration process, imposing all cost on the migrant alone. The first step, temporary recruitment (which for the high-skilled occurs through the International Mobility Program, expanding from 89.000 in 2000 to 712.480 in 2020), is employer-driven. It even ties the migrant to a single employer without the possibility of change. In the second step, the move toward permanence, the government steps in, though with a strong involvement of the provinces and the continued strong hand of employers. Since 1995, the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) gives provincial governments (recently even cities), particularly in remote areas that are not popular as destinations, the possibility to nominate temporary foreign workers for permanent residence. In 2015, the Express Entry program was layered over the points system, lifting applicants with job offers or past work experience in Canada above the other applicants. Finally, the Canadian Experience Class program allows foreign students graduating from a Canadian university to attain permanent residency. By 2021, there were over 600.000 of them, about half of whom stay in Canada. According to Triadafilopoulos and Taylor (2022), this complex and gradually evolved regime for the highly skilled does not ‘reflect a singular guiding principle’ (p.3): ‘Canada’s migration state is a kludge, evolving not according to a grand design, but in response to public controversy and demands from subnational governments and interest groups’ (p.21).¹⁴

• United States. The US is the textbook case of Gary Freeman’s interest-group theory of immigration policy (1995), according to which a policy that is notionally to be guided by the national interest is in reality determined by ‘client’ interests, in particular employers (vying for foreign labor) and ethnic groups (vying for more of their own). High-skilled immigrants enter the US almost always as temporary migrants first, within the famous H1B visa scheme. This is a late and perennially contested add-on to a curiously family-dominated equal-country-quota regime, which was originally meant to minimize ethnic and racial change after the introduction of a formally non-discriminatory immigration policy in the mid-1960s. When the bell for this anachronistic regime had rung, in 1990, precisely at the onset of globalization, organized ethnic group pressure retained the family quota (from which by now mostly extended Asian families profited), while business pressure – in particular, by the surging high-tech sector – brought about the new H1B. Meant for ‘specialty occupations’, it was capped at 65.000 visas per year. But from the start there was a struggle to extend the cap or to be exempted from the cap. Such exemptions were granted to universities, government research units, and non-profits in 2000. But the expansive trend stopped post-2004. Now measures for the high-skilled became immersed as just one element in the inconclusive battles for comprehensive immigration reform, which have gone on for over 20 years now. In this context, there was opposition from a variety of ‘citizen groups’, some opposed to any new migration (such as NumbersUSA), while others opposed single schemes for the high-skilled (such as Hispanics) (see Kennedy 2019). If one reviews these cacophonic interest-group struggles, one fails to see federal-state-level ‘nation-building’ in them. Moreover, the temporary H1B status, the main existing scheme for the highly skilled, is ‘risky legality’ (Gonzalez 2022), as its incumbents are often left alone to struggle for permanent resident (‘green card’) status. As Maria Gonzalez describes the ‘contingent pathways’ to legalization, ‘(t)he burden has shifted from institutions – the employer and the government – to high-skilled immigrants themselves’ (2020, 2807).

• Germany. It is little known that Germany, the proverbial ‘no immigration country’, by now has one of the world’s most open policies for high-skilled, and more recently middle-skilled migrants also. In the late 1990s, Germany and Britain were Europe’s frontrunners in introducing policies for the high-skilled. But whereas high-skill-focused ‘managed migration’ under Blair’s New Labour was government-engineered, in Germany employer pressure, particularly in the understaffed IT sector, was key. So big is the hunger for Fachkräfte today, that employers enthusiastically supported Chancellor Merkel’s open door policy for Syrian refugees in 2015, hoping that the latter were either qualified or could be brought to the required level with some training. As Oliver Schmidtke (2024) points out, a ‘pragmatic turn’ of Germany’s conservative party, CDU, under Merkel’s reign, was crucial for this development, which considered ‘immigration as an integral part of its socio-economic modernization agenda’ (p.3). This pragmatic turn was accompanied by a strong sense that ‘successful integration’ (gelungene Integration) needed to be, in terms of language learning and civic-value adoption, for which the party sported the contested concept of Leitkultur. Schmidtke’s case for ‘middle-class nation-building’ in this instance is nevertheless on shaky ground. The current CDU chief, Friedrich Merz, who incidentally had first brought up the Leitkultur¹⁵ concept over twenty years ago, concisely expresses a plain utility rationale for migrants, which is devoid of identity fuzz: ‘Einwanderung in den Arbeitsmarkt: Ja. Einwanderung in die Sozialsysteme: Nein’ (Immigration into the labor market: Yes. Immigration into the welfare state: No) (Schmidtke 2024, 15).¹⁶

5. Nationalisms

Will Kymlicka, the prophet of liberal multiculturalism, is also eloquent defender of ‘nation-building’ as a persistent and legitimate project of liberal democracies. The nationalism that he advocates is thin and liberal, centered on ‘shared language and history’ (2002, 265). As he importantly points out, nationhood ‘encompasses all classes on the territory’ (2002, 262). This is a historically unique achievement, associating strangers, and it is indispensable for realizing ‘liberal ideals of justice and liberty’ (2002, 267). Kymlicka warns that abandoning nationhood for an elusive cosmopolitan alternative is at the risk of reverting ‘back to kin and confession, as was the historical norm’ (2002, 270).

Kymlicka does not include immigration policy in his list of nation-building policies (the list includes citizenship, language laws, military service, and others) (2002, 364). But his casual depiction of nationhood as class-transcendent, which scratches the fact that nation and class have been antagonistic forces over much of modern history (see Szporluk 1988), allows us seeing the paradox and provocation that is inherent in the notion of ‘middle-class nation-building through immigration’ (Winter, 2024). As it were, the latter mixes fire and water. Of course, as we saw, a middle-class-centered picture of society is (and more emphatically was) ipso facto a post-class description of society, so that the tension between nation and class disappears. In my view, Winter’s formula rightly flags a nationalism that is neither ethnic nor liberal but focused on ‘individual merit’ – hence, a nationalism that one might call ‘neoliberal’. Both concepts are evidently of the same cloth. Therefore, to repeat, my critique of Winter’s concept largely flies in the face of my own.

Having said that, the main task of this paper was less to throw new light on immigration policy than to render plausible the concept of neoliberal nationalism. My closing remarks therefore return to the crucial issue of how to demarcate the neoliberal from other nationalisms.

That neoliberal nationalism is different from the nationalism that fires the populist right today, is plain to see. Bart Bonikowski calls the latter ‘ethno-nationalism’, which is based on the idea that ‘legitimate membership in the nation is limited to those with the appropriate immutable, or at least highly persistent, traits, such as national ancestry, native birth, majority religion, dominant racial group membership, or deeply ingrained dominant cultural traits’ (2017, S187). He further notes that ‘most contemporary democracies do not primarily structure their citizenship and social inclusion regimes around such criteria’ (2017) – they simply could not be called ‘democracies’ if they did. Accordingly, one can observe that some radical right parties in Western Europe, as in Denmark or the Netherlands, adopt liberal and neoliberal idioms when targeting ‘illiberal’ and ‘benefit-scrounging’ migrants, to give more legitimacy to their claims (see Halikiopoulou, Mock, and Vasilopoulou 2013). Overall, neoliberal nationalism at the top is not so much in competition as in congruence with ethno-nationalism at the bottom, because both have similarly exclusive effects.

The real challenge is to demarcate neoliberal nationalism from liberal or civic nationalism. While they share a non-ethnic and values-based conception of the political community, their constitutive values, and corresponding conceptions of political community, diverge sharply. For fleshing out the difference, I shall assume that civic nationalism (which is the category that predominates in the nations and nationalism literature) equals liberal nationalism (which is of more philosophical provenience). Of course, not all nationalism scholars would agree. Political theorist David Miller (1995, 189), for instance, wants to keep apart a culturally particular ‘liberal nationalism’ from a universalistic ‘civic nationalism’, which he identifies with Jürgen Habermas’ ‘constitutional patriotism’. However, this is an idiosyncratic reading of the ‘liberal’ in liberal nationalism. It is also a questionable reading of ‘civic’ constitutional patriotism that Habermas, for one, would not condone, who had coined this notion for post-war Germans in light of their particular history. A more plausible and historically informed disentangling of civic and liberal is by Maxim Tabachnik (2019). To him, in line with the mainstream in the nations and nationalism literature, the basic distinction is between ethnic and civic nationalism, which he traces back to classical Greece and Rome, respectively. However, unlike ‘ethnic’, ‘civic’ has undergone a semantic change: while in pre-democratic times its point of reference was ‘territory’, today it is ‘liberal democracy’. As a result, ‘civic’ has become ‘synonymous to liberal-democratic’ (Tabachnik 2019, 202).

On this assumption, that is, equating liberal and civic, neoliberal nationalism may be contrasted with liberal nationalism. We thus return to the fundamental distinction between liberal and neoliberal. As we saw, a key difference between both is their stances on social justice. Hayek rejected it as ‘revolt of the tribal spirit’ (1982, 144) against the ‘Great’ market society. He reduces justice to individual justice, so that ‘each capable adult is primarily responsible for his own and his dependents’ (1982). For Rawls, by contrast, social justice is central to liberalism, expressed in his difference principle. One may understand liberal nationalism, which is primarily an academic movement, as articulating the implicit nationalism of Rawls’ social liberalism. David Miller, now on safer grounds, suggests that only with liberal nationalism ‘social justice’ is possible, as it generates the ‘trust’ and ‘solidarity’ that are necessary for welfare state redistribution (1995, 149). Similarly, Yael Tamir has argued that redistribution requires ‘associative obligations’, which are ‘not grounded on consent, reciprocity, or gratitude, but … on a feeling of belonging and connectedness’; in short, the ‘morality of community’ is non-contractual (1993, 103).

This is where neoliberal nationalism departs from liberal nationalism. Its basis is not solidarity but contract. ‘Contract’ is a term that litters neoliberal social policy (see Veitch 2013), but recent immigrant integration and citizenship policies also are in the image of a contract (see Goodman 2014). ‘Fairness’ is understood here as strict reciprocity, an equivalence of giving and receiving. As David Cameron expresses the philosophical basis of his Universal Credit policy, ‘real fairness … is about the link between what you put in and what you get out’ (Morris 2019, 7). This is the thin understanding of justice that has come to shape neoliberal societies, including their immigration policies.

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge helpful comments by Peter Hall and by two anonymous reviewers for this journal.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The (neo)liberalism of Friedrich Hayek is a prime example. But note that other neoliberals, like Wilhelm Röpke, have shown racist leanings, the latter supporting South African apartheid (see Slobodian 2018, ch.5).

2 For the concept of neoliberal order, see Gerstle (2022). According to Gerstle, neoliberalism gestates from ‘movement’ to ‘order’ when the leftist opposition buys into its principles.

3 In reality, of course, neoliberalism has been strongly allied with nationalism, especially when it was introduced in the late 1970s and 1980s in the UK under Thatcher and in the US under Reagan. Some even called these regimes ‘populist’ (as Hall 1979 did for that of Thatcher).

4 A reviewer noted that the ‘principal culprit’ for neoliberalism is democracy, not nationalism. This may be true, and the work for Hayek is again the best demonstration. Because the focus of this paper is on nationalism and its effect on immigration policy, I leave the democracy issue aside.

5 The story is different for the German Ordoliberals, for whom a ‘strong state’ is to accompany free markets. They developed the compromise formula of ‘social market economy’, which became formative for post-war West Germany.

6 One might argue that an emphasis on the worker citizen also exists in the social-democratic welfare states of Scandinavia. However, the 1930s Swedish word for welfare state, folkhemmet (people’s home), does not have a contractual ring. The point of this welfare state is that it is so expensive that everyone (including women) needs to work to finance it and to minimize the cost. In practice, the Nordic welfare state’s focus on work is not a disciplining but an enabling one, to provide the childcare and other facilities that allow women in particular to leave their home to pick up employment.

7 In Norway, high-skilled immigrants have even a better success rate than citizens in their requests for family reunification: ‘‘insiders’ (citizens and long-term residents) must prove themselves to be good workers to qualify for reunification, whereas (highly skilled) labor migrants are assumed to be so from the start’ (Staver 2015, 1466).

8 The 2016 Ausbildungsduldung was expanded into Beschäftigungsduldung in 2019 (where employment over a period of five years is sufficient for temporarily lifting a deportation order). The Chancen-Aufenthaltsrecht passed in 2022 grants a 1-year probationary legal residence for ‘well-integrated’ Geduldete, who have lived for 5 years in Germany.

9 Here as throughout, it is not to be denied that contractual, merit-based, and self-responsibilizing considerations have always undergirded immigration policy, as classically in the ‘public charge’ and ‘deeming’ rules in late 19th century US immigration law. Neoliberalism is merely foregrounding these elements; it has not invented them.

10 For a similar turn toward a ‘guest-worker regime’ (for the highly skilled included) with restricted rights in Australia, see Wright and Clibborn (2020).

11 Consult for this Piketty (2014) or Milanovic (2016).

12 At the level of individual perceptions, however, the image of middle-class society is still strong. A OECD report (2019, 18) found that around two-thirds of the population in the OECD ‘think of themselves as part of the middle class’, and in Nordic and some western European countries, the figure is even four out of five.

13 To repeat, this is no invention of neoliberalism; only the foregrounding is (see endnote 9).

14 Though, as one reviewer noted, the thrust of PEP to disperse immigrants geographically may be related to ‘advancing nation-building’, which thus would be one among several criteria driving Canadian immigration policy.

15 The concept is by Islam scholar Bassam Tibi, and it was transported into politics by Friedrich Merz.

16 On the other hand, it is also true, as one reviewer noted, that the 2023 liberalization of citizenship acquisition under the German ‘traffic light’ coalition, which was not much opposed by the conservative party (CDU/CSU), speaks for the intention to not just attract but also retain labor migrants, which suggests the presence of a nation-building element. I don’t question the presence but the dominance of this element.