Abstract
During the postwar period, Canada's immigration policy underwent a relatively rapid transformation as racial criteria for admissions were replaced by a “merit-based” system that assigned points based on human capital measures. Jennifer Elrick's book, Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism provides a novel account of why and how Canada became multicultural by focusing on the role played by immigration bureaucrats.
Elrick argues that bureaucrats were effectively policymakers, who anticipated and promoted the liberalization of Canadian immigration policy through their case-processing decisions. High-level bureaucrats who adjudicated immigration cases throughout the 1950s and 1960s participated in policy experimentation that eventually formed the basis for Canada's race-neutral points system. They were enabled to engage in this kind of innovation by institutional characteristics of the Canadian government, which delegates extensive decision-making powers to Cabinet Ministers and senior bureaucrats.
The empirical basis for Elrick's study is her analysis of cases where the individual aspects of an immigration application are held to trump group-based grounds for exclusion. In a context where identification with a particular racial group was the basis for legal exclusion, an appeal on the grounds of the individual merits of the case could be considered and upheld by senior bureaucrats. She examines cases related to adopted children, non-European skilled workers, and Asian fiancées to examine how the creation of rules intended to govern decision-making for “exceptional” cases ended up informing the evolution of skilled worker selection criteria. Much of this research relies upon careful archival work, and Elrick provides a methodological appendix that describes her approach to working with primary historical sources. The appendix itself is a valuable resource for any graduate student or researcher looking to use archival material for social scientific work.
Elrick not only offers a novel empirical explanation for the liberalization of Canada's policy, but she also organizes and analyzes a growing literature on immigration policy innovation. She contends that prevailing explanations for the ending of racial restrictions on immigration in Canada and other Western liberal democracies tend to privilege macro- or meso-level factors, such as postwar global cultural shifts towards human rights and non-discrimination and the ways in which these shifts manifested in foreign policy. These explanations characterize immigration bureaucrats as conservative gatekeepers who resisted policy innovation; whereas her book demonstrates the important role they often played in pioneering experimental policy changes that would later become more generalized.
Furthermore, Elrick points to the ways in which bureaucrats recasted the idea of race within their implementation practices. “Biological racialism,” the pseudoscientific theory that humanity is ordered by a hierarchy of essential racial distinction, provided a justification for immigration restriction on the basis of race. As this idea became falsified and disfavored after World War Two, race was recast and reconfigured in relation to socio-economic class. Bureaucrats operationalized ideas about race/class through their decision-making about exceptional cases—typically citing characteristics of middle-class behavior as justifications for admitting individuals who would otherwise be excluded by group-based criteria. Several of these markers of middle-class identity would eventually become the basis for the Canadian points-based system of entry for skilled workers. Elrick's contention is that the racial logic of restriction became recast, or reconceptualized, as a class-based system of immigrant selection. Middle-class multiculturalism, she contends, “emerged as a way of managing racial inclusion in the Canadian nation” (p. 171).
At the conclusion of this book, I was left with a deeper understanding of the literature on immigration policy change and a better appreciation for the ways in which bureaucrats shape policymaking. Much of Elrick's argument about the micro-level causes of policy change rests on the significance she accords to the ways in which bureaucrats made exceptions to established policies and regulations. That bureaucrats were important actors in the policymaking process is easy enough to accept, but how much significance to accord to their work is harder to parse. To what extent were they reacting to pressure from interest groups, inter-bureau politics (pressure from colleagues in foreign affairs), and other ways in which macro- and meso-level factors shaped policy discourses? This question may not be possible to answer with a great deal of precision, so it is difficult to accurately estimate the independent significance of case-processing by bureaucrats to the process of immigration policy change.
Reading Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism was tremendously rewarding, and anyone interested in the politics of immigration policy change will find a wealth of insights in its pages. It not only makes a novel empirical contribution to the literature on Canadian immigration policy, but it also positions this contribution in relation to a broader cross-disciplinary conversation about migration, race, class, and national identity. It should be assigned reading for both undergraduate and graduate students, and anyone currently writing about Canadian immigration policy will need to consider and reference its arguments.