Skills to build the nation: The ideology of ‘Canadian experience’ and nationalism in global knowledge regime

Abstract

Skilled immigrant professionals are being aggressively recruited by once-exclusionary Western nation-states as crucial for their long-term national prosperity. Recent scholarship reads this as a rupturing of national identity and national membership due to the instrumental concerns of a global knowledge regime. In contrast, this paper argues that the welcome extended to skilled immigrants is provisional on their potential to secure nation-states’ interests in knowledge economies. Drawing on recent Canadian skilled labour policies, this paper shows how Canadian/Western experience is ideologically constructed as essential for immigrant professionals to succeed in the Canadian labour market. I argue that such a move enables the simultaneous functions of a ‘proactive state’, procuring necessary immigrant labour and a ‘defensive state’, shoring up the traditional, historically and culturally formed imagination of the nation. These contradictory functions of the state are anchored on a racialized discourse of skill, in which immigrants are typically cast as lacking, redeemable only through Canadian/Western education/training. I read this as a conditional welcome. Reinstating the contested figure of the Canadian as the desirable worker subject is how the nation form reasserts itself when identity-based nationalism is ideologically untenable and practically unsustainable. I thus contest the argument that national identity and national membership are decoupled in the context of the global race for skills, and instead welcome a dialogue between scholarships on skilled immigration and nationalism to facilitate better understanding of the enactment of nationalist ideologies in the site of the high skilled labour market.