Whiteness and the politics of middle-class nation-building in Canada

Abstract

In Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Postwar Canada, Jennifer Elrick maintains that Canada’s shift to an immigration admissions regime premised on human capital considerations was (a) spearheaded by high level bureaucrats, (b) did not eschew racial considerations (as is generally assumed) but rather recast them by moving from a biological to a class-based conceptualization of race and national identity, and (c) has served as a model for other countries experimenting with managed migration policies. I am persuaded by Elrick’s arguments but argue that her discussion of racial recasting could be enhanced by thinking of the process as a reconceptualization of whiteness. I also note that Elrick underestimates the role of non-bureaucratic, political drivers of liberalization in the 1960s. Similarly, her discussion of policy formation in the 1990s and 2000s, in Canada and other states, understates the influence of neoliberal populism in the development of managed migration regimes.