Description
Book SynopsisIn the 1950s and 1960s, immigration bureaucrats in the Department of Citizenship and Immigration played an important yet unacknowledged role in transforming Canada’s immigration policy. In response to external economic and political pressures for change, high-level bureaucrats developed new admissions criteria gradually and experimentally while personally processing thousands of individual immigration cases per year.
Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism shows how bureaucrats’ perceptions and judgements about the admissibility of individuals in socioeconomic, racial, and moral terms influenced the creation of formal admissions criteria for skilled workers and family immigrants that continue to shape immigration to Canada. A qualitative content analysis of archival documents, conducted through the theoretical lens of a cultural sociology of immigration policy, reveals that bureaucrats’ interpretations of immigration files generated selection criter
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 2. Bureaucratic Discretion in the Historical Canadian Context 3. Race/State/Nation: From Racist Exclusion to Intersectional Inclusion 4. Individual Merit and the Making of Multicultural Skilled Workers 5. Putting the “Class” in “Family Class” 6. Conclusion: The Legacy of Middle-Class Multiculturalism Methodological Appendix Endnotes Bibliography Tables
