Family|Class: Race and Third-Order Immigration Policy Change in Post-War Canada

This dissertation addresses the scholarly debate about what happened to “race” as a core idea in immigrant selection policies during the shift – in Canada and elsewhere – from a nationalist-particularist policy paradigm to a liberal-universal one after World War II. The standard account of this “third-order” policy change is that race was replaced by universal human rights and equality as the main ideas according to which immigrant inclusion/exclusion is determined. Critics argue that race never truly stopped guiding immigrant selection frameworks and practices, and that racialized exclusion remains a core component of immigration policy and its implementation. I contribute to this debate by focusing on the micro-level dynamics of how the Canadian immigration bureaucracy negotiated the removal of explicitly racist clauses from immigration policy from 1952 and 1967. I adopt a discursive institutionalist framework that draws attention to how bureaucrats engage in interpretive practices that are shaped by – and shape – the repertoire of ideas present in the policymaking context. Using archival records, I examine how bureaucrats racialized potential immigrants in the policymaking context, how they linked this racialization (positive or negative) to the notion of immigrant admissibility, and whether/how racialization processes and their links to admissibility changed during the post-war era. My analysis yields three main findings. First, it shows that bureaucrats used the idea of race to construct differences between groups not just in terms of innate biological differences, but also in terms of class and status. Second, I reveal two mechanisms (“recasting” and “crossing individuals”) by which immigration bureaucrats changed the relative salience of these two components of the idea of race and show how these affected individual and group-level admissibility. Finally, I modify the punctuated equilibrium account of this post-war policy shift, which highlights bureaucratic resistance to exogenous pressures for change. I do this by showing how the substantive content of universalized entry categories in the 1967 Immigration Regulations emerged endogenously through the interpretive practices of immigration bureaucrats. The dissertation concludes by outlining the implications of these findings for scholarship on immigration, race and nation; immigration policy theory; and the role of states in boundary change processes.Ph.D.2019-11-09 00:00:0