What does hospitality look like when immigrants are ‘wanted’? The case of the immigration selection process in Quebec, Canada

Abstract

Recent scholarly work in the social sciences has engaged with the concept of hospitality in order to explore immigration dynamics, especially in relation to the situation of asylum-seekers. As an ambivalent concept, it captures the tension between, on the one hand, the act of hosting and welcoming foreigners and, on the other, controlling their entry. In this article, I reflect on the relevance of this concept for the study of the bureaucratic process of selecting qualified immigrants in Quebec, which aims to identify those future ‘skilled’ immigrants who would be most likely to integrate, both culturally and economically. These migrants, far from being unwanted, constitute the core of the federal and provincial immigration policies and the main mechanism through which a foreigner could obtain permanent residency in Canada. Through a fictional narrative based on my fieldwork with permanent residents living in Montreal, I show how the immigration selection system works in practice. Applied to the case of selected immigrants, the concept of hospitality forces us to distinguish practices from national discourses.