No abstract

This article addresses the question of how and in what terms states constitute ethnicity and citizenship around statistical categories when these categories lack explicitly ethnic principles of classification. It does so based on a qualitative content analysis of the way that the German statistical category of 'persons with a migration background' is deployed in parliamentary debates on education. We argue that state actors in organized politics, who are embedded in Germany's national cultural repertoire and integration policy repertoire, transform this nuanced statistical category into a homogenized social category that is defined in terms of language, class and exclusion from the imagined national community. Our findings demonstrate that, in order to understand how the state uses statistics to draw boundaries within a society, it is necessary to go beyond the content of statistical categories themselves.

Using a growth model analysis of Canada's Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (LSIC), we establish a significant relationship between application status — i.e., the distinction in immigration policy between primary and secondary migrants — and individual wages. This relationship is associated with an earnings disadvantage for secondary migrants, who are disproportionately female. The disadvantage persists over time, even when individual human capital and personal characteristics, household context, and pre‐existing differences in the relative employability of spouses are taken into account. We outline some possible explanations for this effect, as well as implications for immigration policy makers.

No abstract

This article challenges the established convention in immigration policy scholarship of treating economic utility and identity maintenance as logically distinct concerns. Drawing on work by Weber, Wallerstein and Bourdieu, we argue that concerns about economic utility and identity maintenance interact in the immigration policies of Western liberal democratic states, leading to policies designed to build and maintain middle‐class national status groups. Using the example of contemporary immigration policy in Germany, we illustrate how this impulse to build the middle‐class status group affects immigrant inclusion/exclusion in nuanced ways at both the group and individual levels, along class/status, ethnic and gender lines. We conclude by considering the policy implications of growing and shaping populations according to middle‐class ideals, particularly for the statistical monitoring of immigrant populations for integration benchmarking purposes.