Capitalism,immigration,language and literacy: Mapping a politicized reading of a policy assemblage

Abstract

Immigration for Australia and Canada is critical to sustain economic growth. Each country’s immigration policy stems from its vision of a nation that includes the role of language and literacy and a program of economic outcomes. While the authors acknowledge that economic integration through employment dominates immigration policies in Canada and Australia, the goal of this article is to critically examine and map how language and literacies in an immigration policy are positioned in relation to economic outcomes in neo-liberal times. Questions flowing from the article’s objective are: what does immigration produce, and what is its effect on how language and literacies are legitimated? The questions explore how capitalism decodes immigration, language and literacy, and in turn how immigration, language and literacies reterritorialize/reconfigure in the context of human and economic capital. These questions are taken up in an assemblage that includes Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on capitalism and deploys multiple literacies theory to read capitalism, immigration, language and literacy in the context of immigration policies prevailing in Australia and Canada. These two countries offer an interesting entry point for rhizomatic analysis since Canada’s government has, in recent years, been actively investigating Australia’s policies and their effectiveness in the successful integration of newcomers. Mapping a politicized reading of the immigration–language–literacy policy assemblage and questioning how this assemblage reconfigures is important as global migration intensifies around the world.

Keywords

Assemblage capitalism immigration language literacies rhizome

In a country where immigration is a priority, criteria for entry are linked to policy based on a country’s vision as a nation and to economic outcomes. Additionally, important criteria are language and literacy. This article highlights immigration policies in Australia and Canada which are dominated by economic integration through employment. Engaging in a politicized reading of the immigration–language–literacy policy assemblage and questioning how this assemblage works is important as global migration intensifies around the world. These two countries in particular offer an interesting entry point to analysis since Canada’s government has, in recent years, been actively investigating Australia’s policies and their effectiveness in promoting the successful integration of newcomers. As language and literacy education scholars working in Canada, where one in five Canadians are foreign-born (Statistics Canada, 2013), we have become increasingly concerned about the politics of immigration policies and programs in the current neoliberal moment defined by capitalism. This article examines how capitalism functions in relation to immigration, language and literacy policies. Some of the questions explored are how capitalism decodes immigration and language and literacy abilities, and how immigration reterritorializes in the context of human and economic capital. In the current era of neoliberalism, what does immigration produce and what is its effect on how language and literacy abilities are legitimated? These questions are taken up in an assemblage that includes Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on capitalism and deploys multiple literacies theory to read capitalism and immigration in the context of the immigration policies prevailing in Australia and Canada.

In addition, a rhizomatic mode of analysis that calls for problematization and questioning underpins a reading of policy assemblage. A rhizome has no tree-like vertical roots. It has roots/shoots that spring from the middle and grow horizontally. It has neither beginning nor end. Moreover, there are no points or positions in a rhizome. There are only lines (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). In social systems, such as policy, these rhizomatically intersecting lines form complex arrangements which operate in particular ways and which continually shift their configurations to function in new ways. This article proposes to map the functioning of an assemblage consisting of language and literacy policies in relation to immigration, state and capitalism. The concept of assemblage stems from the English translation from the French agencement (arrangement) or the processes of arranging, organizing and fitting together (Livesey, 2010). The concept of assemblage developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) can be used broadly to think about all kinds of structures, including social, economic and policy structures, but in a way that accounts for their dynamic, continually shifting relations or de/reterritorializations. Deleuze (1993) proposed that a society and its collective assemblages are defined by lines, and in particular lines of flight (or points of deterritorialization). Lines of flight are unpredictable in that the trajectory that a line of flight will take is unknown in advance. Moreover, how a line will turn suggests three types of rhizomatic lines within all assemblages: (1) molar lines: rigid, segmenting, overcoding; (2) molecular lines: supple, fluxing, decoding in a relative deterritorialization that reterritorializes and (3) lines of flight: nomadic, creating something novel. “What we call by different names – schizoanalysis, micropolitics, pragmatics, diagrammatism, rhizomatics, cartography – has no other object than the study of these lines” (Deleuze and Parnet, 2007: 125).

The article is organized according to rhizomatic entries that may resist linear logic, yet create intensities that the reader “plugs into” and thereby opens potentially new and productive ways of thinking about immigration policies.¹ A conceptual framework for analysis is a concept of reading emerging out of multiple literacies theory, in which reading is intensive and immanent. Literacies consist of words, gestures and sounds; that is, human, animal and vegetal ways of relating in the world: ways of becoming with the world. They are texts, broadly speaking (for example, mating rituals, music, visual arts, physics, mathematics, digital remixes). The contribution of reading intensively and immanently is proposed as a novel way to examine policies on language and literacies. Literacy, understood as engaging with printed material, is undone. Reading in the conventional manner is hierarchically decentered in a rhizomatic mode of analysis (Masny, 2013).

From the outset, we propose to map the functioning of an assemblage consisting of language and literacy policies in relation to immigration, state and capitalism. This article offers four rhizomatic entries consisting of differential elements in an assemblage. The first rhizomatic entry is multiple: a Deleuze–Guattarian perspective on axiomatics and capitalism, reading capitalism as a decoding machine through the lens of multiple literacies theory, reading human capital and immigration. The next two rhizomatic entries are devoted to language and literacy respectively. The next entry, an intermezzo (not a conclusion), emphasizes the opportunities rhizomatic analysis and multiple literacies theory afford when considering the rhizomatic trajectories of the lines – molar, molecular, lines of flight, shooting through the immigration–language–literacy policy assemblages of Canada and Australia.

Axiomatics and capitalism

This entry focuses on the relationship between capitalism and axiomatics. What are axiomatics? How do axioms function? What do they produce? A response begins with coding practices in society. Societies function according to social rules established by the state to code or regulate concretely the flows of desire seen as positive and productive along a qualified continuum. Overcoding, that is merging existing codes into a high-order regulative structure, is also practiced to limit movement. A relevant example is how the fine-tuning of international adoption legislation effects the overcoding of existing policy structures such that, in practice, the eligibility to adopt children becomes increasingly constrained (Government of Canada, 2016). Movements, both figurative and literal in this case, become limited as the regulation of transnational migration intensifies.

In contrast, axiomatics and capitalism are not subjected to such structured movements. Capitalism is a decoding social machine that creates unrestricted flows of money and labor, for example. While a society, in order to function, is structured and coded, an axiom does not operate with a code. An axiom is more abstract. An axiom may be added and subtracted. It is a decoding machine that will do anything not to limit its movements. As a machine, an axiom is meaningless. It takes on meaning once a model is realized and applied to material situations (Toscano, 2010). While coding and overcoding practices are established in context, decoding decontextualizes these practices that apply to any situation and becomes quantified and commodified through a process of axiomatics. Related to our earlier example, one sees how this decoding can operate when private agencies crop up to assist “clients” interested in adopting internationally in negotiating the existing legal structures, but these agencies do so for a substantial fee. An axiom operates on decoded flows: capitalism. Capitalism is its offspring, its result (Buchanan, 2008).

Capitalism, a decoding machine, is limitless because capitalism can constantly empty coded flows introducing novelty and innovation into society (Buchanan, 2008). This does not say that society is codeless. The function of the state is that of “organizing conjunctions of decoded flows in the service of capital accumulation and the axiom of money” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 451). In other words, the state cannot operate without axiomatics. The state can only regulate them. Returning to our adoption example we note how the state has organized decoded flows, that is, flows of people and capital created by the private adoption agencies. Across Canada provincial governments regulate these agencies, and in Ontario the Ministry of Children and Youth Services (2016) actually sanctions these agencies through licensing.

Similarly, through a process of axiomatics and its offspring (capitalism), literacy, as we shall see later, is a quantified commodity. For the moment, instances with the internet provide additional examples regarding the axiomatics of capitalism. There has been an exponential surge of data tracking on the internet. One example is doing a survey once you have used a particular service. Another is the footpath you have created using different websites that then appear shortly after as ads on your screen. A globalized axiom is at work governing the interactions. Whatever exchanges occur happen regardless of the people, positions or geographic entity involved. It is irrelevant. The axiomatic is at work codeless (decoded).

Reading capitalism

Multiple literacies theory’s relevance lies in proposing other ways of conceptualizing literacies and reading that provide opportunities to think differently about them through such concepts as capitalism, the assemblage and becoming. Multiple literacies theory refers to reading the relationality of heterogeneous elements (expression and intermingling of bodies human and non-human) that de- and reterritorialize in an assemblage. In this context, how does reading capitalism through the lens of multiple literacies theory function? What does it produce?

In multiple literacies theory (Masny, 2014a), literacies engage visual, oral, written, tactile, olfactory and multimodal digital modes. They produce different vegetal and animal mutations, speakers, writers, artists and digital avatars. Literacies actualize according to a particular context in time and in space in which they operate. Literacies are nomadic (not wed to a context) and are taken up in unpredictable ways. Multiple literacies theory refers to reading as a process in reading the world and self that creates potentialities for transforming life. Reading self refers to reading the relationality of the differential elements through the flows of affect that the assemblage produces.

In addition, multiple literacies theory is both theory and practice. From a theoretical perspective, it focuses on problems and questions that enable the creation of concepts. From a practical perspective, Deleuze likens a theory to a toolbox: “it has to be used, it has to work” (Deleuze, 2004: 208). The toolbox is practical, for it consists in creating non-pre-given concepts. Concepts are not definitions. They provide new directions for thinking. Accordingly, multiple literacies theory is interested in praxis, the ability to do, to practice when asking questions about how literacies function and what they produce.² Questions and concepts create “possibilities for thinking beyond what is already known or assumed” (Colebrook, 2002: 19).

In asking how reading works and what it does or what it produces (Deleuze, 1990), multiple literacies theory has conceptually created reading to be intensive and immanent. To read intensively is to read disruptively. Reading the relationality of the elements in an assemblage disrupts and reading becomes intensive. In the case of reading capitalism, reading intensively consists in reading capitalism in a way that decodes and disrupts coding and overcoding practice. To read immanently refers to the virtual thought of what might happen in reading the world and self (Masny, 2014b; Masny and Waterhouse, 2011). Reading capitalism immanently refers to an actual–virtual interaction. Actual–virtual describes Deleuze’s ontological insistence on the potential of difference (virtual) to disrupt and transform reality as it is lived (actual). Take, for example, an immigration assemblage. A problem tied to the economy of the country arises: the state claims that there are insufficient skilled workers. Reading that element as part of the assemblage disrupts the relationality of the elements in the assemblage (reading intensively expression and content or bodies, workers for instance). Meanwhile, a reading immanently suggests that in the virtual, immigration is asignifying. The virtual thought of immigration then actualizes through an actual trajectory (untimely, and not pre-given) of different coding practice(s) relating immigration to labor. A new immigration–labor signifying nexus forms in the actual, but that same nexus may once again be decoded and unravel in the virtual. For example, a temporary foreign worker program was created in Canada with overcoding rules (what companies could do, whom small businesses could bring in, etc.) to hire foreign workers temporarily because there were no Canadian citizens or permanent residents available. Through the capitalist decoding machine, the program began to unravel: qualified persons from abroad took positions held by Canadians and received a lesser salary. Other businesses brought in foreign workers, paid the minimum wage and were not necessarily enumerated in a timely manner. The program was halted until a different quantified formula could be developed. Another instance of reading immanently happened and capitalism deterritorialized. The trajectory to actualization is unknown and untimely.

Reading human capital

The economy constitutes a worldwide axiomatic (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 453).

The concept of human capital occupies a significant position for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which defines it “as the knowledge, skills, competencies and attributes embodied in individuals that facilitate the creation of personal, social and economic well-being” (Keeley, 2007: 29). Reading is deployed through the lens of multiple literacies theory. It consists of reading, for example, sounds and gestures, human and non-human. This conceptualization of reading is proposed in order to engage with the differential elements in an assemblage. Human capital as well-being has been disrupted, and reading intensively the relationship of elements in the assemblage coincides with reading immanently. Reading immanently considers how the concept of human capital as well-being has been disrupted. What might human capital produce in becoming?

Human capital might have undergone transformation through the decoding machine of capitalism. In reading immanently, human capital deterritorializes and becomes asignifying. It is virtual. The process of decoding calls for creation of a different coding, for example, capitalism decodes labor and labor reterritorializes as (the axiom of) money (i.e. human capital). Has capitalism also decoded the human? To quote Colebrook (2006: 127): “In its final form ‘man’ becomes a laboring being whose force is no longer invested in a coded flow … but is decoded and deterritorialized through money and labor.” We ask whether humans might be quantified in terms of money. Another question is whether Canada’s immigration policy, for instance, is invested in the coded human. Through capitalism, has the individual been decoded and axiomatized as money, that is, in terms of human capital? Gu and Wong (2010) (while not dealing with immigrants/newcomers) provide a reference used by the Canadian government for human capital stock. Canada adopted the term human stock in their immigration policy. Human capital stock refers to:

… the expected future lifetime income of all individuals while human capital investment is estimated as changes in human capital stock due to the addition of new members of the working age population arising from the rearing and education of children and the effect of immigration on human capital. (5)

Reading immanently calls for a virtual–actual interaction. This interaction is repeated, but each time it is different, for the assemblage is different each time. Accordingly, once more, reading human capital can be deterritorialized. Regarding understandings of how human capital circulates in Australian government policy on education, for instance, Sellar and Zipin (2013) reformulate human capital through Deleuzean affect theory as relational. This relational perspective frames human capital in terms of multiplicities and changes in capacity to affect and be affected. Such a conceptualization of human capital has the effect of shifting the locus of capital from the individual to the collective. Human capital is no longer simply individual human skills, resources and knowledge, but entails a rather more complex view of human capital as a productive set of relations operating within an assemblage. As such, the whole of affective human capital is greater than the sum of its parts, a key characteristic of complex global systems.

Immigration

Through multiple literacies theory, immigration is intensive. It is disrupted by the decoding machine of capitalism and transformations are effected through human capital, such that human bodies are decoded through capital. Although both countries share mandates to facilitate the “integration” (Canada’s word choice) and “social inclusion” (Australia) of immigrants, what dominates their policy and programming is economic integration through employment. Everything is about product/capital and producing flows of product/capital. For example, in Australia, the New South Wales Department of Education and Training’s (2011) Annual Report 2010 describes in detailed financial statements the millions of dollars in revenue generated by contracted Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) services, estimated at AUD$40.6 million. Moreover, the report indicates that AUD$1.8 billion was poured into technical and further education (TAFE) programming, which includes migrant language training programs as well as other college level, workplace readiness programs. Similarly, in 2006, the newly elected Conservative government in Canada tripled funding to immigrant settlement services, including its flagship language training program, Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC). The Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, commented in a news conference on November 28, 2010:

Overall the federal government used to spend, before we came into office, under [CAD]$200 million annually on settlement and language services for new Canadians. Now we spend well over [CAD]$600 million a year.

It remains to be seen how the policies of Canada’s newly elected liberal government, which ran on a pro-immigration platform, will address immigrant language training. What can be said at present is that their immigration platform emphasizes family reunification, yet at the same time continues to recognize the economic importance of immigration, stating that it “has always been an important part of Canada’s economic growth” (Liberal Party of Canada, 2016a: 1). The Liberal costing plan describes new investments in, for example, job training and immigration, but in the latter case makes no mention of language training or other integration services. Instead, the plan foregrounds fund allocation to immediately respond to the Syrian refugee crisis and to reduce processing times for immigration applications over four years (Liberal Party of Canada, 2016b).

As Colebrook (2006) writes: “Capitalism appears to be an event that turns the flows of individual lives, our own desires and meanings, into a single global present: time is money. Everything we do is quantified” (34). Further to Colebrook’s point, not only does time undergo transformation into money, human bodies themselves appear to be decoded in capitalism. No longer citizens, no longer father/mother/son/daughter, perhaps no longer workers even, human bodies are coded and decoded in the universalizing axiomatic of capitalism.

In the Canadian context, Hawthorne (2007) notes that Canada’s nation-building “is informed by a human capital model of immigrant selection” (124). Hawthorne’s study of labor market outcomes for migrant professionals in Canada and Australia was co-funded by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, and Statistics Canada. This report has become a touchstone for government decision makers in Canada and it serves to reinscribe the primacy of human capital models of immigration, focusing on the economic value and integration of newcomers. More recently, Hawthorne (2014) reaffirms that in both Australia and Canada, immigration over the last decade has been aimed at nation-building and economic growth, aims realized in a policy emphasis on skills for the labor market.

It is important to keep in mind that Canada and Australia constitute two societies (two assemblages), each shaped by its own lines (molar, molecular and lines of flight), and each with their own social machines, political machines, etc. Yet both are operating in the context of the decoding regime of capitalism. As such, capitalism has particular effects on and interactions with each unique assemblage (the nation-state, its immigrants and citizens, its machines, etc.), effects which are produced by the interactions of the lines that traverse it. There is the molar (rigid, segmenting, overcoding forces of territorialization such as macropolitical government policies specific to each country). There is the molecular. It is supple, fluxes, migrant, engaging in deterritorialization of the diverse ways policies are actualized/enacted in the micropolitics of practice which differs between countries and even within each country. From our analysis of immigration policies in both countries, it appears that overall the Australian assemblage has been historically constituted by far more elaborate machines than Canada both in terms of a highly differentiated complex system of policies for various categories and sub-categories of migrant visas as well as in terms of the array of post-settlement support programming offered.

Mapping and transforming language in a state–capitalism–immigration assemblage

Language is shot through and transformed by lines traversing the state–capitalism–immigration assemblage. In a rhizomatic analysis, how might these lines be mapped (Waterhouse, 2011)? Two ways are suggested. In the first, language is coded in various ways (e.g. as official, as heritage/community language) and then overcoded within the molar lines of a legislative policy apparatus which inscribes the binary logic of official language(s) or heritage/community languages.³ Reading language intensively through the lens of multiple literacies theory asks what kind of overcoding language undergoes when named as official and credited points on an immigration application. Similarly, having a “credentialed community language” in Australia can then count towards migrant selection points. Reading intensively activates reading immanently, in which language ruptures and the virtual thought of what might happen follows. It then actualizes as an official language. In the Canadian context, a question arises regarding how capitalism decodes official languages through the flows of capital. Does the concept of official languages in the context of globalization, markets and flows of capital matter little? Canada espouses official bilingualism and multiculturalism, and therefore diversity. The state codes diversity through the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Government of Canada, 1982). State bilingualism and multiculturalism continues decoding through capitalism, a decoding machine of monetary value: money is codeless – it is integral to an axiom. Capitalism, the decoding machine, has traces of money and functions to decode bilingualism. Bilingualism is no longer a molar, coded national value and instead becomes a marketable individual attribute whose worth lies in terms of increasing human capital. In this context, we are interested in how diversity might function and what it might it produce when capitalism decodes state diversity. Capitalism, according to Lorraine (2011):

… reduc[es] all cultural difference to a set of variables that can be inserted into a globalizing axiomatic that welcomes difference without being affected by it. Whereas in societies rooted in a foundational culture, beliefs and practices were rooted in a way of life that was taken for granted and provided the backdrop for the vicissitudes of life, capitalism tends to replace such belief systems with the ongoing change needed to produce and market commodities. (44)

Lorraine’s comments on how capitalism effectively exploits difference, such as Canada’s and Australia’s cultural and linguistic diversity, for the axiomatic end of production leads to a second way of mapping language and the state–capitalism–immigration assemblage.

Studies show that labor market “outcomes [are] profoundly influenced by migrants’ English or French language ability” (Hawthorne, 2014: 6). From the perspective of multiple literacies theory, reading intensively, these findings produced a rupture (deterritorialization). The policy in place became undone. Reading immanently (virtual–actual interaction) gave rise to the virtual thought of what might happen and then be actualized, with the Canadian government implementing more stringent third party language proficiency testing prior to entry into Canada. Similarly, in Australia, for some time now language testing has been in place to ensure English language proficiency and since 2007, in response to employer demands, a higher proficiency level is required (Hawthorne, 2014). In fact, Hawthorne (2014: 9) reports that in both Australia and Canada, “employers demonstrate a strong preference for skilled migrants characterized by advanced English ability [or French in the case of Quebec, Canada] and training in OECD countries.” It is clear that the demands of employers, key elements of the capitalism decoding machine, produce flows of capital by driving the policy process. In schizoanalytic terms, capitalism introduces a line of flight that interrupts (reading intensively) the relatively fixed molar lines of governmental immigration policy on language requirements, and then transforms and appropriates them in the service of increasing flows of money and human capital. A case in point is a report produced for Statistics Canada, Literacy in the labor market: Cognitive Skills and Immigrant Earnings (Bonikowska et al., 2008), in which capitalism can be seen to decode the value of language proficiency in and of itself and instead links its value to how language proficiency is able to transfer professional skills into “usable skills,” that is, useful in the production and flows of capital.

In our framework, fluency in the host country language can enter either as a skill in its own right or as an input to the generation of other skills. In the latter case, employers care only about the usable amounts of each skill that a worker possesses. Thus, an engineer who is well trained but cannot communicate with his or her employer or fellow employees would be counted as having zero usable engineering skills. Language ability in French or English then enters as an input into the production of usable skills, with greater language ability leading to higher usable skills for any given level of other inputs … Previous research indicates that reading fluency is a more important determinant of employment, but speaking fluency is a more important determinant of earnings. (Bonikowska et al., 2008: 14)

In other words, the points an immigrant has in language proficiency are in large part due to his ability to use language in the context of engineering or other professional employment. Is the decoding machine of capitalism wiping away the value of language proficiency in various facets of daily life in favor of privileging “useable skills” for the workplace? Has language proficiency been quantified and commodified according to a job market?

Mapping and transforming literacy in a state–capitalism–immigration assemblage

Closely related to questions of language proficiency as a determinant of immigration points is the issue of literacy skills. In a rhizomatic analysis, how might lines in a literacy–state–capitalism–immigration assemblage be mapped? Literacy-for-immigration constitutes a molar line in that literacy refers to engagement with printed material. According to Deleuze (1995), state power rests “on the exercise of binary machines which run through us and the abstract machine that overcodes us” (141). Relevant to our mapping of the immigration policy and literacy assemblage are binary categories such as official/unofficial language, literate/illiterate, and citizen/noncitizen, which draw rigid molar lines through government immigration policy and delimit the status of an individual. From the perspective of multiple literacies theory, literacy in Australia is a “foundational skill” (Commonwealth of Australia, 2012), along with numeracy, and is viewed in the conventional sense of being able to read and write. This received view of literacy is also apparent in the AMEP curriculum (Yates et al., 2010). The importance of literacy from the government’s policy perspective is firmly rooted in economic competition concerns, and thus reading (at least for adults and students of workforce age) is about being able to get a job, and moreover the highest paying job possible. Significantly, there is scant mention in any of the government documentation reviewed for this analysis of the importance of reading, writing or digital modes of communication in other realms of social life. Multiple literacies theory foregrounds literacies not as products, but as processes that go on in immanently unpredictable ways and that take on particular value according to the diverse social contexts of home, school and community in which they actualize. One notable exception is Yates et al.’s (2010) research report on AMEP. It makes recommendations related to first language maintenance in families and the social inclusion of newcomers, where “social inclusion” is also part of the Government’s official mandate for migrants, but it is an outcome which seems to be overcoded in terms of economic concerns like employability and international competitiveness. Yates et al. (2010) also conclude that in AMEP “a greater focus on authentic literacy tasks would be useful” (59), echoing Currie and Cray’s (2004) finding that in Canada’s LINC program “both [students] and their teachers viewed writing in LINC classes as a vehicle for the development of linguistic accuracy rather than a socially situated practice” (111).

In Canada, the positioning of literacy skills with respect to immigration occurs in very specific ways tied to jobs and employment. Bonikowska et al. (2008), in a report that was produced for Statistics Canada, ask whether the cognitive skills, including literacy, of immigrants differ from those of Canadian-born persons, and whether skill differences between those who are Canadian-born and immigrants depend on where human capital/education was acquired. An analysis was conducted on the results of Canadian-born persons and immigrants who participated in the International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey (IALSS). IALSS, also known as Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey, measures literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills, and according to Bonikowska et al. (2008) the scores obtained measure cognitive skill. They found that Canadian-born persons scored higher on literacy skills than immigrants. These low-score findings may be attributed to the fact that a number of immigrants were unable to complete the test and to skill differences where human capital was acquired. Immigrants who received their education prior to their arrival in Canada have lower results on skills measured than immigrants who received their education in Canada.

Regardless of these differences in skill levels and acquisition, however, we clearly reject the hypothesis that immigrants receive lower returns to cognitive skills than the Canadian born. Indeed, an important group of immigrants benefit more than do native-born Canadians from higher skill levels. … Within our analytical framework, the implication is that education acquired abroad produces cognitive skills such as literacy, numeracy and problem solving skills but does not produce other skills that are valued in the Canadian labor market. (Bonikowska et al., 2008: 9)

Reports prepared for Statistics Canada are quantitative, and this report’s data analysis suggests that literacy skills may be out of sync with those valued in the Canadian labor market. However, qualitative data and other analyses would be helpful to shed light on whether the measures on the IALSS tested language and literacy skills desired in the Canadian labor market.

Intermezzo

Though Canada looked to Australia for insights into how to reform its immigration legislation and policies with respect to language/literacy requirements, we never know in advance how becomings will unfold. Regardless of how Canada might follow in the immigration and language policy footsteps of Australia, on a molecular level, it will produce a different becoming due to the operation of difference and the de/reterritorializing effects of capitalism as a decoding regime. What will a society produce? How will a particular social assemblage find “its gradation and its boundaries drawn” (Deleuze, 1993: 233)? We wonder what molar and molecular lines run through it, how it will be “defined first by its points of deterritorialization, its fluxes of deterritorialization” (Deleuze, 1993: 233). The entire assemblage is far more complex than the molar lines alone. It includes the simultaneous operation of more supple, fluxing molecular lines, which relate to the molar lines yet create possibilities for deterritorialization. In other words, it is both the macro and micropolitical forces at work in each country that shape how it transforms in response to the decoding effects of capitalism. For example, despite the apparent uses of language proficiency tests for immigration (and citizenship) at the molar level in Australia, McNamara (2009) points out that, at the molecular level, “social policy, for example labor shortage, or social competition over control of access to opportunities for work, plays the determining role in the use of language tests for assessment” (230). McNamara gives the example of labor shortage in the health profession. Health professionals wishing to immigrate were eligible to enter without taking the language proficiency test.

In Canada, it would appear that the results of a language proficiency test will be interpreted according to what and where the employment needs are. Recall that Bonikowska et al. (2008) concluded that assessment of language and literacy is tied specifically to performance in the Canadian labor market (cf. example of language and engineering). In addition, in Canada, molar lines function to produce an apparent shortage of workers, to which immigrants are often touted as the solution. However, McQuillan (2013), following molecular lines of education and training, argues that the issue is not one of labor shortage but rather of a mismatch between the education, training and skills Canadians have and the needs of the labor market. Thus, he offers a molecular rationale for why the government should not increase current immigration rates, a molar policy decision. It is not clear if current government policy moves are based on McQuillan’s argument; however, his recommendations do align with the Canadian government’s strategic selection of skilled workers to target the needs of under-supplied sectors of the labor market, which was initially proposed as the two-step Expression of Interest (EOI) system, following similar programming in Australia and New Zealand. The system would align immigration candidates’ human capital attributes (including language proficiency) with labor needs identified at provincial, territorial and federal levels (Government of Canada, 2013). The policy came into practice in January 2015 under the name Express Entry (Government of Canada, 2015).

In sum, in reading intensively, capitalism decodes immigration and immigration policy. What emerges is contingent on reading immanently that which actualizes in an assemblage (e.g. language, literacy, policy, politics, markets) and therefore opens new and different potentialities for immigration. Is there a potential to free capitalism from the axiomatic of production? Of labor? We ask how the flows of reterritorialization might differ. Perhaps there might be an immanent reading of capitalism from a different axiom. How that axiom might function is another question. What capitalism would it produce? Through the lens of multiple literacies theory, reading disrupts and includes more than the printed material and more than its connection to market economy. Meanwhile, governments and the OECD produce reports that aim to predict, using an algorithm, labor shortages in the possible future and thus prevent unintended outcomes. Are institutions functioning in a binary system? In the context of globalization, immigration is not a question of operation within a binary machine: match/mismatch, literate/illiterate. How might an open system engage with unpredictability? An open system has the potential for the virtual thought of what might happen without shutting out other literacies in assessing immigrants, for example. It is the virtual thought of what might become when forces of unpredictability are at work in the assemblage in relation to immigration.

Following Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) schizoanalytic approach in this article, we have studied the rhizomatic trajectories of the lines – molar, molecular, lines of flight, shooting through the immigration–language–literacy policy assemblages of Canada and Australia. By reading capitalism immanently and intensively in the context of these assemblages, new questions emerge and concepts are created as responses to problems presented by lived social formations in the actual, concepts such as human capital, immigration and globalization. A de- and re-territorialization of human capital, for example, creates a different concept and consequently may invent new ways of thinking about and responding to the complexity of the human capital–policy assemblage as it relates to immigration and immigrant language requirements as well. A politicized reading of policy calls for an ontological reading of policy (Webb and Gulson, 2012). In other words, policy as a concept in the Deleuzian sense asks what policy produces, its material effects. In terms of multiple literacies theory, a pragmatic, and inherently political, study of policy incurs reading policy intensively and immanently.

This article explored the various ways capitalism functions as a decoding machine driven by the axiomatic of economic flows with regard to immigration policies in Australia and Canada. Yet capitalism itself is a concept which is not static. It has a virtual aspect and may transform as an effect of other axioms with which it comes into a relation. As such, it remains to be seen what new lines of flight will open and what new social formations (even beyond the state) may actualize. In a time of strong neoliberal politics and global organization by institutions such as the OECD, lines of flight offer potentialities for change. There are ways of laboring, languaging and living for what might yet become, which exist in the virtual, beyond thought, and which will actualize through the forces of reading the world immanently and intensively.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada 861-2009-1001.

Notes

Diana Masny is professor Emerita at the University of Ottawa and adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests include Multiple Literacies Theory, research analysis, minority education, early childhood, multilingualism, immigration and citizenship. She has coauthored Mapping Multiple Literacies: An Introduction to Deleuzian Literacy Studies (2014, Continuum), edited Cartographies of Becoming in Education: A Deleuze-Guattari Perspective (2013, Sense) and co-edited Deleuze and Education (2013 Edinburgh University Press).

Monica Waterhouse is an assistant professor in the Département de Langues, linguistiques et traduction, Université Laval where she teaches courses in research methodology, critical perspectives on culture and language education, and English Second Language pedagogy. Her current research project works with the Deleuzian concept of affect to study the social and curricular stakes of language teaching in newcomer language programs in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario.

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