Managing the National Status Group: Immigration Policy in Germany

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.

Discrimination in migration and citizenship

“…The recent interest in a critical re-examination of immigration and citizenship law has shown the persistence of group bias in immigrant selection (Jasso 1988;Legomsky 1993Legomsky -1994Law 1996;Fitzpatrick 1997;Abu-Laban 1998;Johnson 1998;Dauvergne 2000;Boucher 2007;Orgad and Ruthizer 2010;Tannock 2011;Walsh 2011;El-Lahib and Wehbi 2012;Block 2016;Boucher 2016;Bonjour and Duyvendak 2018;Elrick and Winter 2018). Unlike earlier accounts of immigration and citizenship policy which limited the scope of exclusion to race, ethnicity, and national origin, contemporary analyses routinely bring an intersectional approach to the study of inclusion and exclusion.…”

Social Class, Migration Policy and Migrant Strategies: An Introduction

“…First, individuals and groups do not just differentiate vertically along a line separating resourceful from resourceless migrants, but also along a horizontal line defining qualitative differences between migrants based on the structure of their resources. Second, plurality allows for the convertibility of one form of capital into another, and for mechanisms of compensation (Kofman [], this issue; Elrick & Winter [], this issue). Most emblematically, migrants with little economic capital may be able to migrate or gain legal status by compensating for their low material resources with cultural or social capital (van Hear, , ; Bréant, ; Wray et al., forthcoming).…”

“…Jennifer Elrick and Elke Winter [] show that the “dichotomy between economic utility and identity maintenance” which structures existing scholarship on immigration politics is void, since both in fact reflect the same purpose: “building the national middle‐class status group”. Drawing on Weber's concept of “status”, Wallerstein's conception of nations as “status groups”, and Bourdieu's concepts of “field, capital and habitus”, they go far beyond the conceptualisation of class as market position, so common in the migration literature.…”

“…Most notably, they fail to acknowledge that contemporary discourses on migrant integration reflect self‐imaginaries of European societies as simultaneously classless and middle‐class (see Elrick and Winter, in this issue). Segmented assimilation theory has long criticized dominant policy and research conceptions of “integration” for assuming that migrants will or should settle into a very specific segment of racially and socially stratified societies, namely the white middle class (Zhou, ).…”

“…While the role of class inequality in shaping possibilities and impossibilities of migration, types of transnationalism, modalities of return, and dynamics of incorporation has been substantially addressed and refined in the last two decades (Zhou, ; Carling, ; Feliciano, ; Van Hear, ; Rutten and Verstappen, ; Cederberg, ), its relevance in migration policies and policy framings has only been marginally acknowledged in the scholarly literature since the demise of post‐World War II labour migration policies. A key reason for this neglect is that social class as ascribed social group membership has become a relatively illegitimate criterion of discrimination in contemporary democratic societies, and thus may only appear in official policy in the form of proxies such as economic resources, cultural values, education, individual “merit” or skill (Shachar, ), which in turn can serve as substitutes for even less legitimate criteria such as race or ethnicity (Bonjour & Duyvendak, ; see Elrick & Winter [] in this issue).…”