Jennifer Elrick - Böcker

A definitive guide to a perplexing and increasingly polarized topic, Immigration and Canada distills the latest research into a highly accessible account, explaining how Canada’s immigration system works both domestically and within the context of international migration, and how profoundly it shapes the lives of newcomers and the fabric of Canadian society.Written for readers with little familiarity of the field, the book’s lively Q&A format delivers information concisely, without sacrificing analytical depth. As well as providing a helpful backgrounder, the authors address more complex and delicate questions – Is immigration good for the economy? Are immigrants learning the official languages? Are immigrants driving the housing crisis? Is Canadian immigration policy still racially biased? – responding with clear, evidence-based analysis. This primer offers a welcome understanding of Canada’s immigration system, its historical development and current pressures, the politics of immigration across the country including Quebec, and the critical data on immigration and integration trends.Amid widespread misinformation, Immigration and Canada fosters informed debate on one of today’s most topical issues.

In 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 criteria emphasizing not just economic utility, but also middle-class traits and values such as wealth accumulation, educational attainment, entrepreneurial spirit, resourcefulness, and a strong work ethic. By making "middle-class multiculturalism" a demographic reality and basis of nation-building in Canada, these state actors created a much-admired approach to managing racial diversity that has nevertheless generated significant social inequalities.