Market Fundamentalism and the Shifting Logic of Immigrant Admissions

• In Event: Immigrant Integration

Abstract

With the rise of market fundamentalism, the past few decades have witnessed the incursion of market mechanisms into many areas of social life (Somers, 2008). Immigration policy has been no exception to this broader trend. As notions of human capital and personal autonomy have become integral to constructions of social membership, immigration policy increasingly reflects the logic of market fundamentalism. By tracing policy developments since the turn of the millennium in Germany, Britain, and Canada, this paper examines the extent to which market fundamentalism has come to shape immigration policy across policy regimes. Examining economic, family, and humanitarian immigrant admissions, the paper tests two sets of propositions. First, that market fundamentalism has transformed economic immigration policies in ways that stratify core rights – most importantly, residence and family unification rights – by skill level, rather than economic contribution. As a second proposition, the paper contends that economic considerations are being increasingly applied to immigrants who arrive through non-economic streams. As the desirability of immigrants has come to correspond to their rank in the labor market skill hierarchy, the accompanying process of market invasion has lead to an increasing blurring of longstanding normative and empirical distinctions between economic and non-economic immigration. The paper then examines the implications of its findings for the normative basis of immigrant admissions – paying particular attention to questions of race, gender and class – as well as for the nature of immigrant integration and, more broadly, citizenship.

Author

• Antje Ellermann, University of British Columbia