Political leaders in Quebec have long grappled with the question of how immigrants and diversity fit into an already contested national identity. This article explores how Quebec’s elites have negotiated immigrant-generated diversity over three decades. The article argues that to make sense of Quebec’s policy-making we need to understand the interplay of different strands of collective identity. Quebec’s policies are shaped both by relational comparisons made with the ‘rest of Canada’ and by the aspiration to be a legitimate actor on the international stage. In contrast to studies suggesting sub-state nations such as Quebec either exclude migrants or are progressively more open to them, the analysis here shows that policies result from political elites’ constant balancing of different conceptions of national identity — as state-like actor, as minority claimant relative to the federal government, as diffident majority defining itself. In turn, migration policy choices themselves are used as a nation-building tool vis-à-vis federal Canada.

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