What Holds Multiculturalism Together? Shared Middle-Class Identity in Canada

Abstract

Recent scholarship on multiculturalism increasingly examines how cultural pluralism intersects with social class, particularly middle-class formation. In Canada, a growing thesis argues that immigration and refugee policies promote diversity while simultaneously advancing a middle-class nation-building project through selection criteria emphasizing skills, education, and professional experience. Moving beyond macro-level analyses, this study investigates the micro-level dynamics of this process through a Bourdieusian lens. Drawing on 80 interviews with recently arrived Ukrainian and Afghan newcomers, we show that participants self-identified as socioeconomically and behaviorally middle-class in their countries of origin. They described their ambitions and future-oriented dispositions to mobilize their linguistic competencies, international experience, and transnational networks to preserve and reconstruct their middle-class status after arrival. Participants perceived shared middle-class habitus and resources with native-born Canadians as key for navigating cultural pluralities of multicultural life, fostering belonging, and (implicitly) sustaining a multicultural middle-class nation-building project. Our empirical findings demonstrate how newcomers negotiate belonging in plural societies by activating (class, linguistic, religious, and other) identities that resonate with the host context. In contradistinction with normative multicultural nationalism debates that invite for diversifying all axes of identities so as to sustain multiculturalism, we propose a new theoretical framework that situates one axis, such as class, as the thread that runs through and sustains multiculturalism.