Sameness and Difference in Canada and the UK: Interrogating Whiteness As a Categorical Marker Within Interpretative Matrices of Inclusion and Exclusion

Sameness and Difference in Canada and the UK: Interrogating whiteness as a categorical marker within interpretative matrices of inclusion and exclusion

Raluca Bejan

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of Social Work University of Toronto

Sameness and Difference in Canada and the UK: Interrogating whiteness as a categorical marker within interpretative matrices of inclusion and exclusion

Raluca Bejan

Doctor of Philosophy

Social Work University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

This dissertation contests the ontological social work interpretations addressing issues of societal inclusion and exclusion for migrant populations.

Outcomes of societal advantage and disadvantage, of privilege and oppression, as the colloquial social work jargon designates, resulting from distributive inclusionary-exclusionary processes, are generally abstracted on identitarian categorical markers (i.e., gender, class, race) and subsequently interpreted through intersectional matrices of analysis. Categorical whiteness, taken as a fixed classification to denote fair skin colour possessed by those originating from Caucasian racial ancestries, particularly from European ethnic backgrounds, has grown to represent the universal marker grounding analyses of privilege. Yet the assumption that whiteness is the same (i.e., European,

biologically marked by skin colour and privileged) across the globe, in every social circumstance, and universally traversing national communities of value, is highly problematic, since interpretations of categorical markers depend on particular geo-political and national referential frames. In comparing and contrasting the inclusionary and exclusionary logic determining aspects of societal marginalization for two populations, skilled migrants to Canada, and

Romanian and Bulgarian migrants to United Kingdom (UK), this dissertation demonstrates that: 1) a universal taxonomy of whiteness as explanatory for outcomes of inclusion and exclusion does not hold within transnational contexts; 2) current understandings of ontological whiteness are constructed on a false epistemological presumption of equivalence that synonymizes colonialism with Europeanness, Europeanness with whiteness, and whiteness with colonialism; 3) the theory of intersectionality, generally used to contextualize particular outcomes of privilege and oppression, is limited in analyzing inclusionary-exclusionary processes; and it proposes, in turn: 4) the adoption of a sameness-difference dialectical reasoning to guide inclusionary/exclusionary analyses for transnational migrant populations.

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Acknowledgments

First, I would to thank my Supervisor, Professor A. Ka Tat Tsang for supporting me in drafting a theoretical dissertation. Many thanks to the Committee Members, Dr. Natalya Timoshkina and Dr. Charmaine Williams, as well to the internal and external examiner(s), Dr. Lin Fang and respectively Dr. John Shields for reading the dissertation in detail and for providing thoughtful comments and feedback. Special thanks to Angela Umbrello for her timely administrative support. I am very grateful to other Faculty Members who I met along the way, for brief or substantial periods of time, and who challenged my thinking on the matter: Bridget Anderson, Maria Nikolakaki, Adrienne Chambon, Sheila Neysmith, Rupaleem Bhuyan, Adrian Favel, Daniel Auer, Gregory L. Cuéllar, Zovanga Kone, Nicholas Van Hear, Manuela Boatcă and Dace Dzenovska. Shelley Craig offered me strong support when I entered academia. Michelle Buckley introduced me to a remarkable research project in the UK and offered me the opportunity to gain substantial research experience. Special thanks to Igor Shoikhedbrod for reading several drafts of this text and for providing invaluable feedback. Many thanks for Fritz Pino, Yu-Te Huang and René Paul Bogović for the endless theoretical discussions on current systems of classifications. A big thank you to Ioan Cocan for his patience and care. And to my parents, Maria and Florin Bejan, who taught me early on that critical thinking is the kernel of a meaningful life. My friends stood out along the way. They offered me laughs, care and ongoing support. Thank you, Andreea Iorga-Curpăn, Carrie Cooke, Mirela Cherciov, Peter Murvai, Daniel Amza, Iulia Mihăilă, Olga Amza, Flavius Georgescu, Valentin Coman, Cora Grădinescu, Naomi Lightman, Jarrett Moore, Salim Nabi and Manaal Fahim. Without all of your help, this dissertation would not have been possible.

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgments ...... iv List of Figures ...... vi Introduction ...... 1 1.1 The argument explained ...... 7 1.1.1 The argument within the context of social justice social work ...... 12 1.2 Methodology ...... 24 1.3 Introducing the author ...... 28 1. Processes of inclusion and exclusion ...... 33 2.1 The notions of inclusion and exclusion ...... 33 2.2 Classified outcomes of inclusion and exclusion ...... 39 2.2.1 The Canadian context ...... 41 2.2.2 The British context ...... 49 2.3 Resolutions of inclusion and exclusion ...... 60 2.3.1 Inclusion: The Candian solution ...... 62 2.3.2 Brexit: The British resolution ...... 71 2. Explanations of inclusion and exclusion ...... 82 3.1 The Rubik’s Cube ...... 82 3.1.1 Skilled migrants in Canada ...... 85 3.1.2 A2 nationals in the UK ...... 95 3.2 Whiteness as an explanatory parameter of the Cube ...... 109 3.2.1 Ontological whiteness ...... 109 3.2.2 Epistemological whiteness ...... 137 3. Matrices of inclusion and exclusion ...... 155 4.1 The limits of intersectionality ...... 157 4.2 The universal-particular dialectic ...... 163 4.2.1 The (multicultural) national as the terrain withholding the universal-particular dialectic ...... 193 4. Conclusions...... 199 References:...... 215

List of Figures

Figure 1. Estimates of non-British resident population (p. 57).

Figure 2. Figure 2: Yearly estimates of GDP rates in the UK (p. 73).

Figure 3. British Election Study - Word Cloud (p. 75)

Photo 1. Carl Brigham- A Study of American Intelligence. Cover (p. 120)

Photo 2. Carl Brigham- A Study of American Intelligence. Table No. 33 (p. 120)

Photo 3. Carl Brigham- A Study of American Intelligence. Table No. 32 (p. 120)

Introduction

The social work discipline uses the notions of inclusion and exclusion as analytical pillars in grounding a larger social justice discourse, theorized on universalized ontological and epistemological assumptions, and abstracted on identitarian categorical markers (i.e., race, gender or class) to denote societal advantages and disadvantages. Certain identitarian markers signify privilege (i.e., male gender, whiteness, etc.), while others signify oppression (i.e., racialized identities, female gender, trans-gender, etc.). Categorical whiteness generally delineates the ultimate, universal marker of advantage. Since 1988, when Peggy McIntosh introduced the ‘white privilege’ terminology within the academic jargon, framing it to conceptually branch-out from interlocking systems of oppression, mounting it as analogous with the male privilege notion in symbolizing unearned life advantages (i.e., one’s ability to navigate personal and occupational spheres) and associating it with skin colour to supervene other markers of distributing societal advantages and disadvantages, such as those of class, ethnicity, religion or geographical location (McIntosh, 1988), the universal taxonomy of ‘whiteness’, juxtaposed to the ‘privilege’ notion, has secured an ontological residence within everyday vocabularies. The white privilege rhetoric has for long surpassed the academe and is currently applied across a variety of cultural, social and political domains. Entries on white privilege can be spotted on Wikipedia, a whiteness definition within Oxford Dictionary, while several daily analyses continually surface on the subject, from BuzzFeeds to the New York Times. Netflix created a Dear White People TV series, Vice Channel followed suit with a string of episodes on white supremacy, and MTV also deliberated on the topic with a White People documentary. Denoting light skin colour, the categorical marker of whiteness is commonly grasped as a non-racial marker, containing everything that is absent/lacking from the idea of race. Race, in return, is more or less understood either in biological terms or either assumed as a social construction. From the time when the race idea was first structured within linguistic exchanges, societal perceptions shifted from defining it in biological terms (Lundström, 2014) to discussing it as socially and historically construed (Glasgow, 2010). The academic rhetoric moved from a discourse of scientific racism (Alcoff,

2015; Lundström, 2014) to one emphasizing the processes that ontologically construct ‘race’ and subsequently institutionalize the material effects of this construction, producing, in turn, what we have come to know as racialized subjects. Race-based societal practices are understood, however, as the material consequences of racialization processes and not as resulting from the very same categorical taxonomies of race. Despite considerations of ‘race’ as socially produced and of racialization processes as practices transforming subjects into racialized subjects, whiteness is ontologically understood as devoid of racial developments. Put differently, whiteness is not seen as a race but rather as the non-racial marker that delineates what other races existentially represent, and are compared with, and against. Associated with fairer skin colour, Caucasian ancestry or European ethnic backgrounds, whiteness becomes the ultimate referential point by default, a non-sign that marks as a sign, specifically by presenting itself as unmarked (Lee & Bhuyan, 2013) and self-establishing as the comparative benchmark for those to whom racialization applies. Taken as synonymous with Europeanness, conceptually overlapped onto abstract notions of Eurocentrism and the West (Lee & Bhuyan, 2013; DeVault, 1995; Montgomery, 2005), whiteness delineates, sine qua non, a base privilege for those deemed societally included. Yet, what is epistemologically understood of whiteness and Eurocentrism, was created through North American post-colonial scholarly interpretations, which lumped together all European geographical nations as one and the same in defining a totalized cultural and political construction of the term. Nevertheless, despite a universal inclusionary-exclusionary logic (abstractly speaking, the societally included are those not excluded, and the societally excluded are those who have never been included, although historically the once-included can also be excluded), inclusionary-exclusionary processes are rarely manifested in a universalized manner, but are rather context specific, dependently varying on particular societies, particular communities of (national) values, and particular fields of knowledge production. It is predominantly the North American-centric thinking, building from historical accounts of racialized slavery within US and Canada, where the black population was “subordinated {..} inside territorial boundaries” (Alba & Foner, 2015, p. 98), that constructed such processes in linear fashion, on binary categorical rationalizations, where the included are marked by certain attributes (i.e., whiteness) while those excluded are lacking such inclusionary attributes (i.e., racialized). Yet life outside the Atlantic does not always follow

Atlanticized forms of classification. American conceptualizations (of who is included and excluded) would work just fine if applied to North American realities and to subjects whose life situations were not shaped by transnational geographies. It is highly problematic, however, to apply an analogous logic to realities outside the North-American geographical, spatial, temporal and historical sphere, and to categorically define migrants whose habitus formation does not fit the boxed-in labels shaped by American historical realities or whose trajectories of migration do not follow ‘first world’ colonial patterns. This dissertation critically examines how the aforementioned concepts inform social work understandings of societal advantages and disadvantages, of privilege and oppression, and of inclusionary and exclusionary processes. In contrasting and comparing the societal logic that marginalizes two migrant populations -skilled migrants to Canada, and respectively, Romanian as well as Bulgarian migrants to UK- the dissertation contests the ontological interpretation of whiteness as a homogenous categorical marker that universally denotes privilege. It shows that societies exclude different types of migrants (white and non- white, skilled and non-skilled) and it demonstrates that inclusionary and exclusionary processes are spiraling out from within the idea of the national (from a sameness imaginary, territorially grounded within the nation-state) as a principle of differentiation, and not from categorical markers attributed to individual subjects. Whiteness is defined, within the context of this dissertation, as a racial taxonomy grouping subjects possessing light skin colour and as an idea bestowing ontological appurtenance to this pre-determinate classification; as a classification that categorizes subjects by hierarchizing them by colour and subsequently bestowing them with degrees of social dominance. The two migrant populations taken as case examples represent just that: examples. This is not a study tracing the exclusionary societal treatment of the two migrant groups, nor an empirical study assessing their levels of societal inclusion and exclusion, but an analytical inquiry that comparatively illustrates a differentially manifested, yet universally contoured inclusionary/exclusionary logic molded on the principle of the national. Migrants are differentially included into, or excluded from the nation, based on who they categorically represent as migrants and how are they imagined to fit within these categories and the nation (Anderson, 2013). Skilled migrants are somewhat included within Canadianness (symbolically understood as an ideological belonging to the nation-state), since they have the

right to access citizenship regimes, unlike refugees/refugee claimants, or undocumented individuals, yet they are excluded from several axes of belonging, such as the labour market, due to non-recognition of their foreign credentials as well as economic, linguistic and cultural sources of discrimination. Similarly, Romanian and Bulgarian migrants in the UK, as European Union (EU) citizens, have a somewhat legitimate right to inclusion in relation to accessing the British labour market (pre-Brexit anyway). Culturally, however, they are unwanted in the nation and symbolically excluded from Britishness (representing belonging to an ideally valued community delineated by the nation state). UK imposed transitional labour curbs on the A2 or EU2 migrants (labeled as such since 2007, when the two countries, Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU), consequentially placing these subjects in a liminal conditional status -precariously employed and culturally excluded. Comparing and contrasting the societal treatment of skilled migrants in Canada with that of unskilled or low-skilled A2 migrants in the UK, groups ostensibly different based on who they represent as (categories of) migrants, contrary to the fact that numerous other migrants (i.e., undocumented migrants) encounter various degrees of societal exclusion within both societies, trails from the relation these two groups partake with the state. In both countries, the state is obliged to tolerate these subjects. In Canada, skilled migrants are recruited on a selective, human capital points system- as determined by education, language proficiency and age, hence constituting the type of migrants that are publicly desired. By contrast, low skilled workers, temporary foreign workers and undocumented individuals are not wanted by the Canadian state. Their entry (i.e., limited work contracts) and stay requirements (i.e., inability to access permanent residency status; temporary entry) are a priori constructed from an anticipated premise of future exclusion (i.e., deportations; having to leave at the end of their temporary stay). Deemed unworthy of inclusion, low skilled migrant workers are regarded as deserving their own exclusion, which is why the state abstains from actively trying to include them. Their exclusion is normative, as a perpetual, continual state and not as a phase to be exceeded, much different than skilled migrants, whereas an a priori desirability premise (i.e., points selection) indicates that the state must undertake efforts for their inclusion. In the UK, there is a similar societal dislike for the A2 nationals, however, the British state is obliged, or at least it was obliged prior to Brexit, to tolerate them from a forced inclusionary premise (as EU subjects). Based on inter-territorial,

legislatively defined rights (i.e., free movement entitlements within EU), A2 nationals retain legitimacy for inclusion in the British nation. The discussion is centered on two populations for whom an inclusionary premise is preliminary existent- either forced (Britain) or desired (Canada) by the state: both are seen as deserving of inclusion, or at least as having legitimacy for (claiming) inclusion into the nation. Both populations should be included yet they are excluded. Comparing the situation of two groups of people incomparable in the form, yet subjected to similar ideological processes in essence, and exploring the similarities and differences between inclusionary/exclusionary processes within the Canadian and British contexts, subsequently decentering them from orthodox interpretations that universalize migrants’ attributive markers as determining such processes, will show that inclusionary- exclusionary developments, although universal in their logic, are dependent on local histories in their manifestation, and not on categorical identitarian markers attached to individualized migrant subjects. Intersectional analytical matrices habitually contextualize notions of privilege and oppression, with categorical whiteness deemed to supervene other distributive axes of inclusionary-exclusionary outcomes. This dissertation critiques the use of intersectionality as a framework guiding interpretations of inclusion/exclusion and proposes instead the use of a sameness-difference dialectical reasoning to unravel inclusionary/exclusionary processes. Intersectionality is critiqued for inadequately addressing categorical interconnections and for failing to engage with the intersections of multimodal points within categories. Inclusionary/ exclusionary struggles exist within every socially constructed category that builds up the intersectionality web. While intersectionality is useful in describing interconnected categorical points of consequential advantage and disadvantage, intersectionality is limited in providing a conceptual cache for correspondent relations existent within pre-intersecting dimensions. Take the example of a white Canadian born female from a marginalized social economic status (SES). In theory, an intersectional analytic framework accounts for the intersecting dimensions of the subject’s race, gender and SES. However, these intersecting, subaltern layers are relationally constituted on each particular identitarian dimension, despite the subject’s involvement in several intersecting dimensions of belonging. For instance, she is white in relation to not being racialized (despite the innumerable interracial categorizations existent on this line); she is a woman in relation to

not being a man; she is from a low SES in relation to not being from high SES; she is Canadian born in relation to not being an immigrant; and this relationality gets constructed on abstractly infinite (intersectionality being conditioned to presume that intersecting lines are infinite lines, whereas finite lines might not intersect per se geometrically speaking) yet practically finite, pre-constructed, categorically comparative, and dialectically framed lines, whose poles embody the benchmarks against which everything located on the line gets measured against. Each intersecting line has multimodal possibilities of intersection in- between two differentially benchmarked poles, which restrict the possible range of categorical appurtenance in between these poles. Despite claims to infinite intersections, each categorical dimension making up the intersectionality web has its own inclusionary- exclusionary dialectic, its own in relation to, which ultimately frames one’s positionality, hence also a (homogenously assumed) comparative benchmark for the in relation to. Intersectionality turns out to be about homogeneously-assumed categorical intersections and not about intersecting heterogeneous points contained within categorical axes. The sameness-difference dialectical reasoning is proposed as an alternative analytical matrix for interpreting the in relation to of inclusionary/exclusionary processes that later materialize in advantageous and disadvantageous societal outcomes for migrant populations. The sameness-difference matrix is conceptually construed through Hegelian dialectics and abstractedly overlaid on a whole-part dynamic, in which the whole equates sameness and the part differs from sameness. It operates through a universal-particular contention, with the universal taken as the comparative benchmark for the negated particular. The whole represents the universal, the complete something, be that life, God, being, ((national) identity referring to being for example), and the part represents the particular, the sliver which is part of the whole, yet it lacks the significance possessed by the whole. The Hegelian dialectic is constructed on the ‘Aufhebung’ concept, which concomitantly implies negation, preservation and suppression at a higher level. The non- negated that negates, gains from this negation, an affirmative, higher conceptualization (Hegel & Rauch, 1988). The interpretation guiding this research is that first there is sameness (the nation-state organized around territorial ideas and ideals) and second, there is difference (minoritized fragments within the nation-state), through the negation of which, sameness, superiorly constructs itself from being into being-for-itself. It is through the negation of

difference (i.e., Immigrantness) that sameness (i.e., Canadian, British appurtenance) not only preserves itself but subsequently grows into a better, qualitative type of sameness (i.e., Canadianness; Britishness). This dissertation shows how the dialectical, universal logic of attributing advantages and disadvantages (resulting from inclusionary/exclusionary societal processes) unfolds; it argues that such logic is differentially manifested within the Canadian and the British context(s); and it queries the analytical homogeneity of the ready-made notion of whiteness, routinely presented in social work (and beyond) to delineate interpretations of (dis)advantage, privilege, inclusion and exclusion.

1.1 The argument explained

Outcomes of privilege and oppression, of inclusion and exclusion, are differentially distributed across various societies and across various identitarian axes. Processes determining such outcomes operate by a universal inclusionary-exclusionary logic (despite individuals being concomitantly implicated in several inclusionary-exclusionary axes) yet bound in their manifestation by local peculiarities: the oppressed is never a universal subject as it never represents the same group(s) in all socio-political and geographical spaces. For instance, Muslim Turks would be de facto placed into the oppressed category within Canada (as racialized subjects), however the Turks are seen as the oppressor by the Kurdish population (in Turkey) or by other nations (in the Mediterranean, Balkan areas) formerly colonized by the Ottoman regime. Similarly, Iranians might be othered within North America, yet historically they oppressed the Kurds in Iran, and were considered an Aryan race within different chronological times. Traits of racialization and whiteness (despite the problematics of whiteness perceived as un-racialized), resulting from an oppressor-oppressed logic, fluctuate within and between different socio-political contextual situations. Although the oppressor generally oppresses the oppressed, which is why the oppressor-oppressed logic is universal in nature, the agents of oppression do not embody the same collective subjectivity in every geo-political context. Their positionality is conjecturally determined; the universal is locally defined and locally realized, meaning there are different universals bound by local peculiarities, since universalization unfolds in terms of its logic and not in terms of the consequential outcomes resulting from the manifestation of such logic. Subject positions

do not universally represent sameness around the globe. The sole universal is the ideologically shaped societal reasoning that excludes, the logic of exclusion in itself, which negates difference in behalf of an imagined, ideal sameness, yet one can argue that even this process is not stable or universal as the logic of exclusion can take particularized ways. That sameness consequently inferiorizes difference is secondary, a side effect of the qualitatively distinctive form of sameness. Sameness excludes not for the other, but in behalf of the other for itself. Not for the difference but on behalf of the difference for itself, to reposition itself, as sameness, at a higher level. That sameness operates by a universal logic to preserve itself, does not take way from the fact that sameness is bound as particularized, locally manifested, and dependent on societal logics themselves grounded within territorial nation-states. This conceptual viewpoint is part of a larger thinking scheme, that extends beyond this dissertation and that examines several inclusionary/exclusionary parameters- whiteness, class, and perceived cultural difference- each possessing different referential coordinates and each differentially manifested vis-à-vis particular referential frames, all with their own spatial quadrant of manifestation, their own territorial nation-states. These parameters are maneuvered not by attributes contained within themselves but through attributes specific to the principle(s) differentiating the space (i.e., the nation state). By virtue of manifestation within the (territorial) nation-state, the idea of the national becomes the primary determinant of belonging. Abstractly speaking, if someone is whiter, wealthier and perceived more culturally similar, that someone will be included into a particular nation (which frames its national appurtenance on class, race and cultural suitability, for example). How these attributive proportions are scaled depends on how much the idea of the national weighs on the scaling process, on how permeable are the imagined boundaries of the nation, on how much the national rubber-band extends itself away from its innate sameness to accommodate difference. The delineation of included and excluded subjects has nothing to do with the identitarian attributes of these subjects. It is simply contoured by the space in accordance with the principle(s) of differentiation dividing the space. The juxtaposition of all categorical markers of identity to the national is what makes one subject worthy of inclusion. Left as decontextualized, markers of identity mean nothing outside the spatial dimension of the nation state. In Euclidian geometry, a plane is a tri-dimensional space established as such by various combinations of points and intersecting lines. Taken singularly, a geometrical point simply

reflects a position, a dot without any attributive or descriptive properties. A dot possesses properties when taken in conjunction with other geometrical elements. Metaphorically speaking, a point needs to be analyzed within its spatially defined plane, since its properties are not universal to enable unanimous interpretations. Taking categorical markers outside referential frames, or analyzing them from the presumption that there are only singular spatial referential frames for their manifestation, makes little sense. Categorical markers cannot allocate outcomes of inclusion and exclusion based on their categorical features. Rather it is the referential quadrant that determines how such markers are bound to operate. Subject positions then, circumstantially depend on spatial, political and geographical bound characteristics. This dissertation addresses one parameter of sameness and difference-whiteness as the categorical marker delineating interpretations of inclusion and exclusion. The difficulty in addressing other parameters concomitantly is that every categorical marker has different geo- political referential frames. Take the example of the Rubik’s Cube. Once the facet changes, there is a different combination of colours that need to be considered in solving the Cube. It is for brevity and feasibility reasons that this dissertation engages solely with a particular parameter traversing a singular facet of the Cube. In comparing the differential construction of skilled migrants away from and within the idea of Canadianness with the differential construction of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants away from and within the idea of Britishness, this dissertation demonstrates that the universal ideas of Canadianness and respectively Britishness, mediated by the divisive principle of the national, get juxtaposed to an ideal image of citizenry, creating two delimited communities of (national) value (two planes), each producing different outcomes of societal privilege and disadvantage. In Canada, the excluded are highly skilled, racialized migrants. In Britain, the excluded are lower skilled, white migrants. Both societies exclude racialized, white, high-skilled and low-skilled people. Categorical whiteness does not stand as the fixed, universal benchmark for defining privilege, whereas Romanian and Bulgarian migrants are white (in terms of skin colour taxonomies) yet culturally excluded from Britain as a community of value. Whiteness is equally racialized, and racialization is not synonymous with immigration. More so, white privilege cannot be solely explained through Eurocentric membership since Europeanness is not homogenous but differentiated and not all nationalities within Europe are treated as

privileged white nations. Exclusion then, might not be consequential of migrants’ characteristics per se (although individual traits might be inferred to justify their exclusion) but consequential of peculiarities withheld by referential frames, by systems of ideological coordinates within host societies, which superiorly juxtapose national features (and the ideals of these national criteria as imagined through the ideas of Canadianness and Britishness) to (dis)value subjects located outside national communities of value. Unfixing whiteness will concomitantly unfix interpretations of migrants’ exclusion on attributively defined identitarian basis. Attached to identitarian markers, the migrant is once again individualized as the problem, with the sole difference that the negative, devaluation spin contained within the mainstream rhetoric of interpreting exclusion (it is migrants’ own race, or migrants’ low human, social and cultural capital skills that excludes them in Canada and the UK) gets transformed into a positive twirl (e.g., since migrants’ attributes are ‘good enough’, society should positively value these attributes to counteract their exclusion). Such logic still centers on something that migrants possess or lack, and on the positive or negative attributive weighing of migrants’ surpluses or deficiencies, without querying the ideological processes constructing the benchmark that stands as the comparative ground in relation to which such assessment gets juxtaposed as valuing or devaluing. It is insufficient to replace deficitary judgments with positive valuations. The problem is not the outcome of the judgment but the judging logic in itself, which solely focuses onto how migrants’ attributes are perceived by the society that imposes its own benchmarks, without questioning how the host society constructed its own attributes as worthy of standing as comparative grounds. Such thinking reflects just a more sophisticated way of reinforcing that migrants are excluded because of some fault of their own. What is needed is an interpretative shift to decenter the focus on migrants’ attributes and to place it onto the differentiation properties contained within national host societies. The metaphor of a soccer game can illustrate the comparative grounds of the two case populations. Take the ‘game’ of Canadianness and respectively, Britishness, for example. Naturally, two games are never the same. It is unpredictable what will happen, how the players will play and who will ultimately win the game. Yet every soccer game has some universal characteristics that make the game playable. A match is always performed within two 45 minutes halves; players need to abide by a set of rules; and the game is played by two

teams. Similar to how the dominating-dominated, privilege-oppression logic is juxtaposed on two dialectical (not to be understood as binary) grounds: vis-à-vis the abstract notions of privilege and oppression, the oppressed is always in antithesis with the privileged, although the identitarian markers associated with privilege and oppression are relatively defined (e.g., gender non-conforming categories are always located in-between the relative poles of ‘male’ and ‘female’). Continuing the analogy, the labour market constitutes the field of the game. Just as the soccer playing field possesses universal traits (e.g., green colour, either grass or artificial turf, the field divided into two halves, etc.) so as the labour market retains universal characteristics (e.g., wage relations between social actors, the field divided between the employed-unemployed, etc.) The labour market constitutes the terrain where the universal- particular dialectical game (between Canadianness/ Britishness and Immigrantness gets played (where Canadianness /Britishness negate Immigrantness to maintain and re-affirm their dominant position) and the site where processes of belonging and non-belonging are juxtaposed via the notion of ‘work’ and the (de)valuation of the work produced by a certain type of migrant subject, to broader conceptual ideas and ideals of the national. Operationalized through the ideological notion(s) of Canadianness and Immigrantness as the symbolic attributes determining the trajectory of inclusionary and exclusionary processes within territorially defined nation-states, the national gets manifested as the ultimate standard for regularizing societal access and for keeping intact two (national) communities of value. To access the field of the game one needs legitimacy to take part in the game, hence to (categorically) belong to a team (e.g., skilled workers in Canada; A2 migrants in UK). Just as there are set numbers of players in a team (eleven), set numbers of migrants are institutionally prearranged: in Canada entries of skilled migrants are capped within the points system; in UK, until 2013, numbers of A2 nationals were capped through labour restrictions. To allow more people in, would imply the game could no longer be played. Incentives for correctly playing the game are apportioned on yellow and red cards: skilled migrants in Canada need to become more Canadian to be included in the game; in the UK, the Brexit vote (partially casted against the A2 migration) could metaphorically imply that a red card can be used to expulse those unable to appropriately play the game. The national performs as the main principle of differentiation, in virtue of which kicks and penalties get distributed. Societal advantages and disadvantages are the results of the game. The labour market as the

field of the game is of particular importance, since the migrant is perceived as an active figure within the labour market. In market societies, subjects find themselves in and out of migratory statuses, as they need to ‘freely’ relocate according to the demands of the market (Nail, 2015). Markets expand and contract according to demand and supply. Labour oscillation is directly tied with capital’s migration (when capital migrates, workers follow) and capitalist valorization (capital migrates where its return will be maximized, including areas with cheap labour). Due to foreseen ‘opportunities’ (pull factors) or current ‘hardships’ (push factors), there is always a surplus of unemployed workers waiting to be mobilized (Lundström, 2014; Nail, 2015). This might be a simplistic view in regard to the global labour market and its transformation, however, of particular interest is that both populations addressed in this dissertation embody the types of migrants whose roles are to primarily satisfy the demands of various (national) labour markets.

1.1.1 The argument within the context of social justice social work

Ethical principles guiding social work praxis stand in ideological conflict within the discipline. On the one hand, a socially just, humanistic discourse of rights is morally emphasized by self-labeled critical endeavors, generally centered within anti-oppressive praxis, while on the other hand, a principled focus on the development of competence-based professionalism and disciplinary knowledge (CASW, 2005) is strongly influenced by psychoanalytic and behavioural praxis (Lundy, 2011; McLaughlin, 2008). Dedicated to intersecting oppressions shaped by categorical identitarian markers, such as those of race, gender or class, anti-oppressive social work developed into a one-size-fits-all approach, not only materialized into organizational policy positions aimed to protect marginalized subjects from micro-discriminatory societal treatments, but also synonymized with anti-colonial, de- colonial, radical and progressive praxis (Bhuyan, Bejan & Jeypal, 2017). However, what goes under the ‘socially just’, anti-oppressive label is rarely scrutinized. Several points of contention are considered. First, social justice social work lacks a thoroughly contoured theoretical base for delineating what social justice means, or what socially just approaches anticipate to attain at the practice level. The discipline broke away from its original interest in structural

power analyses, once it focused on modeling the medical profession (Graham, Swift & Delaney, 2008). This led, in turn, to a consequential neglect of politicized, theory-intensive approaches for guiding social work praxis. Superficial accounts of linking theory and practice, resumed, in lieu, to simplistic viewpoints such as the ‘person in the environment’ approach (which directionally assesses the confluence between the individual and the structure the individual belongs to) or the competency based-framework (Bogo, 2013) (which presumes the mastery of a universal checklist for every client situation), merely constructing professionalism as complimentary to critical thinking skills (albeit quests towards professionalization within a capitalist, materially driven society, leave little room for critical engagement), contrary to claims that such an approach brands a new form of neoliberal managerialism, a ‘nouveau gestionnairat’ that threatens society, where liberty takes the form of absolute liberty, de-regulatory state governs citizenship, immigration solely satisfies economic purposes and wealth polarization keeps increasing (Boudreau, 2013). Small fractions within the discipline turned towards feminist, de-colonial and critical race studies to theorize oppression, however, pre-formulated conceptual responses, imported from broader arenas engaged in anti-colonial, de-colonial and post-colonial thought, such as anthropology and cultural studies, were uncritically reiterated within social work, taken sine qua to represent social justice work, and introduced without a thorough conceptual engagement. The discipline, henceforth, failed to articulate its own heterodox responses to contemporary socio-political problems. Take the social work curriculum as an example. Although it includes a plethora of information on ‘mainstream’ social work, it lacks a comprehensive account of the literature grounding post-colonial, anti-colonial and critical approaches. Recent post-colonial and decolonizing writers (i.e., Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, Andrea Smith) are offered within the discipline’s set of formal courses, however, Marxist texts (although the subaltern, post-colonial studies have emerged within the Marxist field of study) and texts representative of post-colonial literature (i.e. Edward Said; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty) are absent for the most part. Such tendencies could explain why social work scholars and practitioners uncritically import loosely defined anti-oppressive ideas to univocally epitomize socially just approaches. Second, a failure to thoroughly engage with historicizing the development of social justice frameworks has constructed social justice social work as commensurate with

diversity work (oftentimes enmeshed to symbolize inclusion). Yet diversity grows relevant for those already included, for the groups deemed worthy of belonging to (national) communities of value. Take the Oscars’ example. Hollywood actors receiving the awards do not represent, by any means, underprivileged groups. Would increasing diversity in the Oscars’ awarding process constitute a social justice matter? Similarly, with the Women’s March in Washington, which took place last January in 2017 and this year in January 2018. Many participants were women from privileged socio-economic backgrounds, bringing in six figures salaries while praising the speech of Scarlett Johansson and others alike. However, racialized, poor or immigrant women have nothing in common with Scarlett Johansson, for example, since Johansson is not socially marginalized, nor at risk of being excluded from the nation. A march of (abstract) women, in essentialized form, is a privileged way of demonstrating citizenship. Speaking in Arendtian terms, not everyone is entitled to claim rights. It is the included that have the right to rights (Arendt, 1970) (i.e., the right to protest, the right to claim inclusion into the nation, etc.). While women (as a category) struggle with pay levels below those of men, (essentialized) women, represent, in many aspects, a societally included group. As a category, women can access entitlements that usually come attached with belonging to the community of value delineated by the nation-state, unlike many (categories of) migrants (e.g., undocumented) who lack the prerogatives to claim citizenry rights. This is not to say that the idea of citizenship lacks contingent societal determinacies. Not all citizens are included into the nation, yet the possession of citizenship does confer a primary ground for (claiming) inclusion into the nation. Diversity additionally accelerates access to capitalist consumption. Diversity markers, particularly those positioned within privileged class settings, tend to be easily exploited by those with little in common with the underclass (hooks, 1994). For instance, a new study from Ohio State University found that high-earning racialized subjects, of Black and Hispanic identity, face higher rates of discrimination compared with their white counterparts (Colen, Ramey, Cooksey, & Williams, 2017). It is interesting that concerns get voiced-over the discrimination of the already well-off. The inclusion of racialized people into professional life overlapped with the expansion of economic corporate power has led to successful class achievement for middle-class African -Americans (whose class status jumped to 25% from 5%) but not for the poor African-Americans (West, 1993). Cornel West

argues that such a change merely opened entry for African-Americans into the status of consumption (West, 1993). bell hooks (1994) similarly argues that those gaining individual advantages from diversity are not the most oppressed, as they are already ‘in’ the system of allocating resources. “Within class, race matters”, writes hooks (2012, p. 177). This is not to say that certain aspects of identity (i.e., citizenship, class) are universally more important than others (i.e., race) but rather that their weight is determined by the referential frame. For example, from within a transnational analytical paradigm, citizenship might be more important if the referential frame is the nation and the analysis takes as its analytical coordinates the (hierarchical) positionality of nation-states on the global scale. Understandings of identity framed from within national parameters disregard that within transitional context, national systems of classification might not be able to maintain their assigned universal features. A poor African-American person from the Global North will have much more in common with a Romanian worker in the UK than with an African- American person who attended Harvard and grew up in Beverley Hills. It is the shared experience of ‘othering’ (be that classed, raced, etc.) that ties people, their ideological look on the world and life, their former experiences, and not necessarily the similarity or dissimilarity of categorically defined identitarian attributes. Cornel West (1993) discusses that group interests are not homogenized on identity bases, since they involve political, ethical and class-based divides (West, 1993). hooks (1994) likewise writes that unity comes from struggle and not from a shared racial identity; she further argues that an individual is more likely to be aligned with the class interests of those sharing similar status, including whites, on the premise that materially disadvantaged people cannot equally resist racial assault compared with their materially privileged counterparts. The anger that the racialized are not treated the same as the whites, she continues, happens among those within privileged class status. Take the racist commentaries towards Michelle Obama for example. While definitely unpleasant, such remarks could be weighted out by her privilege-fueled status (Michelle Obama will never be denied access to the public arenas of American socio- economic and political life), commentaries that a racialized poor person will have no ammunition to fight against and that will most likely have impactful material consequences. Diversity efforts are assimilated by the corporate word, not on ethical grounds, but simply because diversity sells: it increases profits and contributes to innovation. Private and

governmental institutions, from corporate banks to universities, provide internal anti- oppressive training, establish diversity and anti-racism cultural offices, and advocate for increased diversity numbers. These initiatives are not pursued in the name of dismantling power systems that produced differential societal treatments for those belonging to diverse groups. But on the motive, that, without anti-oppressive policies and practices, less clients will be attracted towards whatever these institutions or corporations are selling: banks will draw less money; televisions will sell fewer shows; universities will admit fewer students and so on and so forth. In the business realm, for example, (immigrant) diversity is professed on behalf of improving competitiveness for host countries at the global scale: “Innovation is a by-product of diversity” reads a corporate report drafted by Deloitte, a financial advisory firm, since “people from varying backgrounds see problems differently and develop different solutions” (Deloitte, 2011, p. 10). In one of the first white papers released by the American Network of Executive Women on the theme of ‘managing diversity’, Kimberly Betts, the network’s president, argued that diversity “is a business imperative, especially in light of the fact that three-quarters of the American population and nearly two-thirds of the nation’s work force [comprises] women and minorities” (Progressive Grocer, 2005). Diversity seems to work well for all, especially for the market. While it benefits society, it benefits a lot more the economic side of the world. Sara Ahmed (2012) argues that institutionalizing diversity to replace the former rhetoric on ‘equality’, ‘equal opportunities’ and ‘social justice’, might signal a mainstreaming of the term. Indicative of capital’ ability to accommodate and appropriate, diversity now possesses a substantial commercial value, suitable as a matter of national pride (this can be clearly seen in the Canadian national investment towards multiculturalism) and easily used as a marketing stratagem. Pre-constructed ethno-cultural divisions are facilitating capital’s accumulation (Chibber, 2013), without having to commit to institutional or corporate redistributive guarantees (Ahmed, 2012). There is no intention to diminish the claim that institutional representation efforts have been successful in balancing societal access for racialized groups. Such efforts, however, speak to the symptoms of a problem and not to the actual problem. Once institutionalized, they have been subsequently co-opted by the system. Enhancing diversity at Harvard, for example, does not create equal access for all to attend Harvard, but rather stretches the admittance boundaries for those already possessing the ‘social disposition’ to

apply for entry. Even if admission would hypothetically be public for all, racialized people from working-class backgrounds will not be as inclined to attend Harvard the same way that a wealthy racialized person would (i.e., due to associated symbolic and material apprehensions). The costs of books, the costs of moving somewhere (in describing her admission experience to Stanford University, bell hooks (1994) wrote that even with an entrance scholarship, her parents were not convinced they could afford to send her), one’s (in)adequacy as it relates to (non-) belonging to certain spaces, would create additional impediments. Feelings of not fitting in, even when objective circumstances rightfully ground one’s competence, is what Pierre Bourdieu understood by the concept of habitus. Importing it from Aristotle, Bourdieu (1984) introduced the term within the discipline of sociology, to refer to the structurally structured conditioning that determines one’s (unconscious) disposition to position in the world. Classified and classifying structures, shaped by the relations between classification systems, defined via a structuring differentiation, and cemented by a subjective internalization, influence subject positioning, which also encompasses a disposition towards belonging to certain social spheres and towards occupying positions congruent with such belonging. Habitus is a structured result, which structures, in turn, one’s subjective ways of being. For instance, Bourdieu’s work in Distinction (1984) centers on taste as embodying socio-economic aspects that structure, in return, the very same divisions that will later classify subjects (according to their taste). Taste in food for example, reflects social class; the rich tend to consume less meat, or red meat/pork; they show preference for certain clothing style(s), certain health products, and this pattern of consumption superiorly positions the consumers of such products versus those consuming meat and potatoes, let us say. Taste in food cannot be decontextualized; the same way that social relationships cannot be taken outside the structuring divisions in the world. For instance, shopping for clothes at Wal-Mart versus The Hudson Bay does not solely illustrate an economic difference (i.e., based on price) but also a symbolic difference, as the aesthetics associated with both stores’ clothing styles will subsequently differentiate people, which will, in turn, differentially position themselves (vis-à-vis others) according to this differentiated difference, initially determined by price but ultimately positioned on style. In the above example, fashion aesthetics, although resulting from a differentiated difference, subsequently differentiates. Style, a product resulting from monetary systems (the initial

access to the acquisition of stylistic/cultural capital was economically determined) will, in turn, become, through price, the one to classify. Barack Obama’s presidency constitutes another example of faux-pas diversity. Obama’s presidential tenure was highly problematic in relation to domestic and foreign political affairs. Besides the Iranian nuclear deal, which somewhat released (in the short term) certain tensions in the Middle East, and the anemic health care reform, Obama did not do anything more than a white centrist and market-orientated president would have done. The US continued to tally high levels of poverty during his presidency (the 2010 Census showed that one in seven Americans was living below the poverty line) (Ali, 2015) as well as increased levels of economic inequality (ranked the second-last place of all developed nations) (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009), while deportation numbers and drone-strikes far surpassed those under George Bush’s presidency (Benjamin, 2017; Skeels, 2016). Identity alone does not constitute the main indication of how one does or does not do something. Political surveys have historically shown that the African American population, traditionally positioned on the left side of the political spectrum, has usually opposed the US military interventions aboard. However, a 2013 poll indicated that 40% of African Americans supported Obama’s airstrikes in Syria, 2% more than whites and 9% more than the Hispanics, prompting Glen Ford, the Executive Director of the Black Agenda Report to refer to African Americans as the most bellicose ethnicity in the US (Ford, 2013). Support for these interventions implies a tacit reinforcement for a presidential leader solely envisioned on identitarian grounds. Identity becomes the interim basis for sustaining oppressive foreign policies that would otherwise never relent, in the absence of identitarian categorical markers. Third, the intermittent use of post-colonial, anti-colonial and de-colonial approaches as one and the same, had resulted in assumptions of synonymy between Eurocentrism, whiteness and colonialism as the referential symbols to confer meanings of conquest, coloniality and privilege (Ife, 2000; Lee & Bhuyan, 2013; Sinclair & Albert, 2008; Tamburro, 2013), without a thorough interrogation of what these concepts mean and within what context(s) they ought to be interchangeably used. Europe colonized the New World, and since Europeanness was de facto seen to embody a white, privileged collective subjectivity, it gets inferred that the New World colonialism was essentially white. Yet synonymizing Eurocentrism with whiteness and colonialism represents, in fact, a

unidimensional conceptualization of coloniality. It ignores that coloniality also existed within Europe and not just between Europe and the rest of the world. It additionally downplays the American-centric colonial influences -ideological, military and political (Ali, 2015), nowadays dominating the world. The epistemological discourse on European colonialism, European whiteness and white colonialism was for the most part produced by the North American knowledge production system, which refuses to see itself as detached from its European roots. However, in reality, after the former European conquests, a new world, with new nation-states and new rules of territorial socio-political games, emerged. This new world has little to do with the former European colonialism. It built, instead, its own version of colonialism. The US dollar is delinked from (and in fact substitutes) the gold standard (Prashad, 2014); NATO is still under American control, although it was formed as an organization during the Cold War, under the auspices of countering the erstwhile Warsaw Pact and blocking Soviet aggression (hence it has no legitimacy for prevailing this long); and about 662 military bases are located outside the US soil (in Central Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific, Caribbean, East/West Africa) (Ali, 2015). The American way of living, the American style of free trade agreements, the American academic model of intellectual life and the American-based multinational model of doing business have spread all over the world, destroying local communities, making foreign countries dependent on international loans, and conditioning transcontinental economies on credit and debt-fused regimes. Despite such crude realities, a focus on American colonialism seems rather absent from the de- colonial rhetoric in social work. The synonymy line appending understandings of colonization to the notion of Europeanness and abstracting it on categorical markers (i.e., whiteness) to define its ontological meaning (i.e., Europeanness equals white), additionally disregards that global colonization processes have not been historically confined to white people colonizing non- whites. Instances of whites colonizing whites (i.e., the Tsarist; the Habsburg or the Soviet empire) or non-whites colonizing whites (i.e., the Ottoman Empire; the Japanese Empire) are also common. Decolonizing a past is important yet conducting de-colonial efforts from within an epistemological framework which sees coloniality solely as the appendage of European dynamics, this while grounding itself within a colonial, American-centric framework of knowledge production, which gets an ‘out of jail free card’ because of its

fixation on Eurocentrism, constitutes a colonial process in itself. It maintains as such current relations of global domination and obstructs the construction of solidarity networks against the structures oppressing those unprivileged enough to have ties with (or be part of) the North American imperialism. Marxist-based critical theories are nowadays rejected for their Eurocentrism, yet post-colonial, anti-colonial and de-colonial theories are similarly American-centric, supported by scholars affiliated with North American institutions (i.e., Spivak; Smith), hence originating from an American apparatus of knowledge production. The highest ranked academic journals are based in the US, the highest ranked academic institutions are American, and the areas of subaltern, post-colonial studies are supported by an Americanized market of cultural production, where fashionable, careerist academics, backed up by self-styled radical departments are concomitantly opposing domination while accumulating material wealth (Chibber, 2013). bell hooks (1994) states that critical race scholars oftentimes refuse to publicly name capitalism as the mean for their material position, based on the (American) societal assumption that everyone longs to be rich and achieve material satisfaction (hooks, 1994). Micro-aggressions encountered by racialized academics oftentimes take away from the fact that, within society at large, being an academic is a fairly privileged position. Are there that many under-privileged scholars to justify the play-out of social justice ideological battles within the academic terrain? Or the concentration of official efforts towards increasing institutional access within already privileged settings (i.e., university classrooms, research groups, etc.)? This is not to deny that racial, gendered and classist micro-aggressions do unfold at institutional levels or that one’s ability to deal with such hostilities dependently varies on raced, classed, gendered and other structuring and structured institutional positions. Yet racist harm for those already attached to an institution or for those in privileged socio-economic positions, is oftentimes of symbolic manner. While it trails one’s psyche, the situation is different from those whose very livelihood depends on the effects of racist or classed practices. Contesting the theoretical notions grounding the social justice rhetoric within social work, can lead to alternative forms of knowledge production, not only by politicizing current ideological positions, but also by developing heterodox conceptualizations to issues of immigrant exclusion. Queries of what falls under the ‘socially just’, ‘radical critique’ labels are not necessarily welcomed in social work due to claims of un-safeness of discussions and

epistemological harm in the classrooms. However, it is this very same line of thinking that creates barriers in the development of critical thought. What is left, then, are looping critiques of abstract privilege appended on attributive group belonging. From within such an epistemological context this dissertation aims to deconstruct the already-formed bodies of knowledge that inform social justice social work praxis. Potential theorizations could refine macro social work, through understandings of various ideological values but also micro, clinical practice, in working with migrants whose personal experiences are shaped by transnational (exclusionary) processes that differ from the boxed-in categories ontologically envisioned by an American-centric epistemological view of classifying the world. All concepts addressed in this dissertation-whiteness, privilege, oppression, Eurocentrism, inclusion, exclusion, migrants, labour market, the national- are concepts that the social work discipline continually preoccupies itself with, making for a strong argumentation in support of deconstructing and reconstructing new ways of critically engaging with these notions. The Second Chapter of the dissertation outlines the processes of inclusion and exclusion for the two migrant populations in both socio-political contexts, Canada and the UK. It describes the notions of inclusion and exclusion, it insists on the categorical inclusionary-exclusionary outcomes encountered by the two migrant groups and concludes by discussing institutional inclusionary-exclusionary resolutions formulated for both populations. The Third Chapter provides a brief overview of the explanatory suppositions that pertain to the exclusion of both types of migrants, skilled migrants in Canada and respectively A2 migrants in the UK. It then analyzes considerations of whiteness as an explanatory parameter to interpret outcomes of inclusion and exclusion. It discusses the ontological and epistemological taxonomy of the term, challenging the assumption of whiteness as ontologically fixed and the epistemological interpretation of ontological whiteness as resulting from a relation of equivalence that synonymizes colonialism with Europeanness, Europeanness with whiteness, and whiteness with colonialism. The Fourth Chapter takes the discussion into the interpretative matrices of inclusionary-exclusionary processes. It provides a critique of intersectionality-the orthodox perspective grounding inclusionary-exclusionary analyses; and proposes the adoption of a sameness-difference dialectical reasoning (drawing from the work of Ernesto Laclau, Judith

Butler, Slavoj Žižek and G. W. F. Hegel) as an alternative, heterodox approach to interpret processes of inclusion and exclusion. It then applies the ideological mechanisms of the sameness-difference dialectic by focusing on the idea of the national (as reflected through the ideas of Canadianness, Britishness) as the main principle differentiating migrant subjects into same and different categories. Implications for social work knowledge and research are discussed in the Conclusions. Some things should be kept in mind when reading the text. The analysis is construed at the abstract level. The dissertation does not explore nor analyze the situation of these two populations in terms of their actual migration experiences to Canada or the UK. Rather, it explores the logic of certain processes into which these populations get tangled. It contests the essentialized use of whiteness, the fix-ness of what is understood of whiteness. The dissertation does not deny that an ideology of white supremacy gets manifested in racial profiling, imprisonment rates, unemployment levels, or the distribution of social determinants of health, for example. It argues, however, that the interpretation of whiteness as fixed, stable and unequivocally privileged, is likewise supporting such an ideology, impeding on the creation of solidarity amongst people that share similar othering experiences across and beyond identitarian lines. If race is taken as socially constructed, interpretations of whiteness should follow similar conceptual lines. Juxtaposing the idea of racialization as socially constructed, to an essentialized notion of whiteness, understood, in turn, as devoid of racial characteristics, cements the ideal (the imaginary) of whiteness as a singular, unbreakable benchmark for racial comparison. Not recognizing that marginalization similarly exists within whiteness, construes belonging to whiteness as a symbol of prestige. Opening up the concept to include additional groups (i.e., Jews, Italians) and zipping it right after, will continually perpetuate exclusion for the groups not yet allowed entry in the categorical marker; assimilating concrete degenerate whiteness into absolute abstract whiteness, by transforming the ‘degenerate’ (formerly Southern Europeans, Irish, etc.) into socially acceptable, keeps the idea of white supremacy intact. The weight placed on the national as the main principle of differentiation (processes of inclusion and exclusion relate to communities of value delimited by national appurtenance, by what it means to be territorially bound within the nation-state) does not imply that the ways host societies conceive of differentiating categorical markers, is

irrelevant. Naturally, a white immigrant to Canada will have better chances in ‘making it’, the same way that a wealthy immigrant will. Although the national is raced, gendered and classed, and immigrant selection systems are shaped by racial, gendered and classed biases (Satzewich, 2015), the national constitutes, however, the primary indicator gauging the ability to belong and to determine who is worthy of belonging, the primary barograph allocating the privileges in behalf of which inclusionary rights can be claimed. Those belonging to a national community of value might be excluded on many other societal axes, but what they will never be stripped off, is their prerogative to claim inclusion based on territorially bound national appurtenance. Certainly, the state desires rich people and white people, either in Canada or the UK, but once people live within the nation, the transcendental process of inclusion is either about transforming migrants into national subjects (i.e., the Canadian context) or about expulsing migrants for their inability to become like the national subjects (i.e., the British context). Nationality carries a substantial weight in differentiating migrants. After all, it is the nationality criteria that serves as the referential benchmark in apportioning inter-state movements of national subjects (i.e., visa restriction regimes, selective immigration systems, etc.). And it is the principle of the national that delineates exclusion as a domestic problem (exclusion happens within the perimeters of the nation- state). Hierarchies based on nationality might matter more globally than those individually framed on race, class, gender and sexuality for that matter, since nationality is the first decisive criterion delineating migrants’ entry into the host nation-states. That the national is also white and determined by the global move of capital does not imply that whiteness stands independently, detached from nationalist, state-centric understandings. This work should not be misconstrued as aligned in support of white supremacist, racist determinations. The dissertation is written from an anti-racist, egalitarian standpoint, with a framework of political solidarity in mind. It starts from the reasoning that differentiated axes of racial classification maintain the differentiation of racial subjects. Showing the arbitrariness of racial classifications may open a space of egalitarianism where subjects can share commonalities that are not solely defined on identarian grounds. The presented argument aims to open a dialogue towards traversing and possibly abolishing identitarian markers associated with sameness and difference and towards creating heterodoxic interpretations of ontological subject-positioning. Recognizing that a

commonality of marginalization can also constitute sameness, and that sameness is not merely reflective of shared identitarian markers, could bring together people from various racial, classed backgrounds. Transgressing essentialist understandings of identitarian markers, could potentially create inter-identitarian solidarity networks, contingent upon not just particular identarian markers but also on interests, needs or circumstances, that could disrupt the current exploitative economic system that uses the national to differentiate amongst identitary divisions to further promulgate itself. Acknowledging that a poor racialized person, for example, has more in common with a poor white person, than with a racialized person from a higher economic or cultural position, could be a first step in the creation of radical movements that could provide actual alternatives to the current market- based system, rather than simply facilitating socialization into this very same system. Yet constructing as inexistent any subalternity contained within categorical notions denoting privilege, consequentially reinforces aspirations of belonging to such high esteemed identities. In analyzing the universal/particular dialectical logic grounding transnational processes of inclusion and exclusion, without purporting that such logic creates universal effects, this dissertation has a political scope, that of facilitating a change of ideas shaping social justice social work.

1.2 Methodology

This thesis engages with a case-study methodological approach. It examines various data sources in order to understand, holistically, the societal treatment of the two groups, to critically interpret the knowledge produced in regard to the two groups, to theorize the epistemological grounding of such knowledge and to build a heterodox argumentation to disrupt the ontological assumptions circulated by orthodox forms of knowledge. Grounded within a constructivist paradigm, which posits that epistemological foundations are socially constructed, context dependent and interpreted through particularized, subjective ways, the case-study method is generally used to generate in-depth explanations of a phenomenon, within a specifically situated milieu (Baxter & Jack, 2008; Zainal, 2007; Tsang, 2001; Yin, 1984). Constructivist epistemological paradigms do not rigidly differentiate between ‘theory’

and ‘method’ as do the traditional scientific inquiries (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Such constructivist paradigms posit that what one knows cannot be easily dissociated from how one came to know it. The fetishism of evidence (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992), as in only including as evidence findings ensued through a standalone linear process of data sampling, data collection and data analysis, disregards that evidence exists in immediate contexts of study and in the particular stance that allows one to situate a context within the overall social structure shaping the context (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Case study approaches are particularly relevant when the scholarly work aims to cover the contextual conditions that weigh on the subject matter and directly relate them to the phenomenon under study (Baxter & Jack, 2008). Literature identifies three streams of case study research: exploratory, descriptive and explanatory (Zainal, 2007). In exploratory efforts, observations that are of interest to the researcher, are collected prior to the formulation of research questions. In descriptive case studies, the researcher describes the data in order to generate a narrative picture of the phenomena studied. In explanatory stances, the researcher intends to first understand and then explain a phenomenon. Theory development, theory building, are processes usually intended to explain societal circumstances. Formulating a theory to understand a situation starts from the examination of a case study or multiple case studies that constitute the point(s) of interest for the one developing the theory. Kim Crenshaw (1991) developed the theory of intersectionality by taking as a case example the experiences and societal treatment of women of colour. The field of critical theory originated from the Frankfurt School scholars, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas, who took as a case study the nineteen-century Marxist socialist revolution to investigate its downfall and to adapt it to the twentieth-century capitalism (Agger, 1991). Pierre Bourdieu (1993) took the example of Gustave Flaubert’s literary oeuvre to map the power relations manifested within the field of cultural production. Jean Baudrillard (1998) travelled through the US by car and took the entire country as a case study to recount cultural tales about American society. Max Weber (1992) took as a case example the religious Protestantism to discuss how the Protestant, in particular the Calvinist ethic was a cornerstone in the formation of modern capitalism.

Other classifications of case study research refer to interpretative and evaluative approaches (Zainal, 2007). In interpretative efforts, the researcher develops new conceptual categories for understanding data. In evaluative case studies the researcher appends a judgment when interpreting the phenomena. To a certain extent, this thesis follows an explanatory case study approach. It provides evidence to support the development of an interpretative explanation. Explanations are theories; theories are made up of arguments; and arguments are discourses circulated to support or reject claims about society at large or about specific segments in society. On the one hand, this thesis builds a set of arguments that contest certain interpretative frameworks and their limited application within the field of social work. On the other hand, it also provides an interpretative-evaluative account of the currently used theories in contextualizing certain societal realities. What constitutes evidence is an assortment of written, spoken and symbolically articulated social texts (Tsang, 2001). Social texts are anything that carry and bestow meaning within society: discursive accounts produced by cultural (i.e., media, television) or scholarly (i.e., journal publications, conference proceedings) outlets; social and cultural practices, such as sporting events, films, music; or official systems of categorization used by the state, such as Census data or national surveys. Several data sources are used to examine and theorize the exclusionary societal position of the two populations: scholarly bodies of work, for instance those defining ideas of inclusion and exclusion or those using various approaches (i.e, social capital) to theorize inclusion and exclusion, as well as bodies of research that document outcomes of inclusion and exclusion for the migrant populations; statistical data on historical trends and migration patterns, as documented by National Offices collecting information on such topics; annual population surveys; Census data and current Census classifications; national legislation in Canada and the UK; documents drafted by the House of Commons (i.e., Canada and the UK), the European Commission and the European Parliament; official statistics on national GDP and minimum wage trends from Eurostat; remittance statistics from the Romanian National Bank; immigration statistics produced by National offices; Citizenship study guides; Citizenship, Nationality and Immigration Acts; official surveys of national values; dictionary definitions; searches of scholarly databases; archival scholarly texts; public speeches of politicians or members of the academic community; observations on common social and cultural practices, such as sporting events, cultural and economic patterns of consumption,

etc.; texts produced by non-profit and corporate organizations that have engaged in public messaging with regard to issues of migrant integration; newspapers and mixed media sources, such as YouTube videos or documentary films; in short, various sources to interpret how knowledge is used, what it conveys, how it affects subjects and how it constructs migrant subjects as social categories (Tsang, 2001). Since the purpose of this thesis was to draft a heterodox interpretation to explain and evaluate particular societal circumstances, as well as to create new interpretations of such circumstances, the selection of data was limited to accounts directly related to the development of the arguments. Multiple sources of data do not weaken in any sense the analysis (Yin, 1984). “Each data source is one piece of the “puzzle” (Baxter & Jack, 2008, p. 554) and the multiplicity of various data sources contributes to the researcher’s understanding of the whole phenomenon. This method follows, more or less, the Foucauldian inspired dossier approach (Foucault, 1975), where different discursive materials are enmeshed together as data sources. Taken together, these might not constitute a uniformly defined data field, however, each of them, individually, pertain to, and covey information about the object of study. This method has no claims to objectivity. As with any interpretative accounts in theory formation, there is a subjective modus operandi at play in framing the argumentative positions. Indeed, the case study approach does emphasize a subjective construction of meaning (Baxter & Jack, 2008). There are multiple units of analysis to be considered when conducting case study research: an individual, a program, an organization, a process, etc. (Baxter & Jack, 2008). In this dissertation, the situation, the treatment, the exclusionary societal circumstances of the two populations, skilled migrants in Canada and Romanian and Bulgarian migrants in the UK are taken as the case examples. It is not the populations per se that constitute the case studies but rather their contextual situatedness within inclusionary-exclusionary societal dynamics. The cases are analyzed/referenced throughout the entire three Chapters of the dissertation. It is important to re-emphasize that the kernel of this thesis is the construction of a theoretical argument. Generally speaking, arguments are matters of subjective interpretation. They are constructed from the unique, particular view-point of the one developing the arguments. Subsequently, the empirical evidence curated in this dissertation speaks to the particularity of a situated lens- that of the author’s. The selected empirical examples are not examples that prompt to the formulation of absolute truths and falsehoods. Yet they do prompt to the

formulation of a unique, particular truth that could be integrated amongst other types of epistemological truths that are currently circulating within the knowledge production field in relation to the topic. A truth that aims to disrupt certain “automatisms of thinking” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 223), which replaced critical thought in relation to identity-based systems of classification.

1.3 Introducing the author

It is far stretched to assume that everything one says or does is a direct reflection of one’s privilege (or lack thereof), or, for that matter, that one needs an identitarian appurtenance to engage with a logical, theoretical or philosophical argument pertaining to identitarian topics. Nevertheless, judgements, observations and interpretations of social issues are filtered through one’s social position. Developing awareness of the locus from which one perceives (and acts in) the world (Carr, 2004), parallels social work’s vision that a self-reflexive stance on privileges associated with social location (Heron, 2005) is essential for anti-oppressive praxis. Judith Butler (Butler, Laclau, Žižek, 2012) also states that theorists need to reflexively explore the position from which they create descriptions, while bell hooks (2004) contends that one’s personal-political trajectory needs to be well thought out in theorizing how one came to be in the present. The topic of this dissertation was likewise influenced by a personal-political trajectory. Despite the reticence to publicly give evidence of this trajectory in support of the argument (since a reflexive stance does not require the publicization of such introspective fallouts), some thoughts are jotted down to contour the personal-political development of this text. Born and raised in Romania, I lived through the unsettling process of a political regime change. The transition from the Soviet communist system to the capitalist-democratic arrangement, replaced the state dictatorship with a market dictatorship and generated severe cultural trauma: thousands of parents working abroad (and consequentially, strained family relations); increased rates of socio-economic inequality; mass privatizations; heightened levels of corruption; and the development of patterns of conspicuous consumption that

resulted in people continually gauging for social status. More or less, everyone was grappling with these transient effects. My parents opted to work abroad in Libya for several years, a time when I frequently changed my living arrangements (i.e., with relatives, grandparents and family friends). It was my first acquaintance with the ‘topic’ of migration for work, and issues related to national visa regimes (Libya was one of the fewest places accommodating work-arrangements for Romanian nationals, given the former politic-economic relations between the Soviet bloc and the Arab world). After the 1989’ revolution and the collapse of the Soviet regime, most of the surrounding reality was shaped by people wanting to leave. Leaving Romania was in fact the main conversation topic: how to smuggle across the Hungarian border into Austria (borders were not yet opened with the exception of Hungary), how to use fake passports, how to exit with counterfeit visas, etc. My aunt crossed into Germany, and after one year spent in a refugee camp, she applied for immigration to Canada. My father tried to cross on foot but he was arrested in Austria and sent back to Romania. A friend/working colleague of my mother sneaked into Germany by hiding for the entire journey under the back seat of a car. Two of my good friends chose the fake passport option. They were arrested and forced to spend two weeks in a detention camp in Ireland. After finishing my undergraduate studies, unable to secure work in Romania, I left the country to work in Malta. My mom was by now already working in Malta without legal residency/work-permit status. To leave Romania at that time, one had to show proof of a return ticket, of paid travel insurance, and 500 euros in cash. People would usually fly out from Budapest, Hungary rather than Bucharest, on rumors that the Hungarian custom officials were much more relaxed in their manner of questioning. Being in Hungary also implied that one already had money to move around and to secure a legit way of travelling. The Hungarian itinerary made for a less suspicious route. For those living in Northern Romania (close to the Hungarian border) the practice was to drive from Cluj to Budapest with a transport bus, then take a flight. An entire transportation industry was created along the Cluj-Budapest route. The bus driver usually had money ‘to show’ at the border for each passenger. He would loudly ask who needs money to cross and he will hand over 500 euros to the respective person(s). After passing customs, money would exchange hands, back to the driver. Upon reaching the destination, one risked being denied entry for lacking the sufficient amount. However, this procedure was not routinely practiced at all arrival spots. It was

mainly enforced at the Romanian and Hungarian borders, which, in order to join EU, promised to control migration flows to Europe. Summing up, crossing the borders at the time was more or less a matter of fake confidence, deceit and good luck. When I arrived in Malta (a small island in the south of Sicily, where entry was easier than in other parts of Europe, as the Maltese state only required a visa on arrival, and for unknown reasons, very few Romanians were incoming, most migrants landing from Bulgaria, Russia and Serbia, hence a Romanian would not be thoroughly questioned at the border), I filled up the visa form, lied about having the money with the hope that no one would ask me for the proof, and obtained a three months entry permit. At the end of my three months, I prolonged my stay by handing over my passport to someone connected with the Immigration Office. Luckily, my passport returned with a stamp. At the workplace, a night club where all staff consisted of Eastern European women, mostly Bulgarian and Russian, working ‘under the table’) we always knew ahead of time of scheduled immigration checks, thus having the chance to leave the establishment a few minutes before. Despite these connections, some colleagues were arrested after Immigration officers showed up at their homes. One jumped from the third floor and spent days within the deportation camp in Valetta with broken legs. After my daily bartending shift would finish at around 5:00 a.m. (this work generally started at 9:00 p.m.), I would have just enough time to catch the 45 minutes bus from Bugibba to Pieta, where I would start an early morning shift in a retirement home, preparing breakfast and doing several side jobs for which I had no qualifications (i.e., administering insulin injections). My shift would last until about 10:00 a.m. One morning as I arrived home, my mom was nowhere to be found. The landlord informed me that Immigration showed up at home. My mom was detained in Valetta. I remained in Malta until my visa expired. After a six months period, one had to leave the country for another six months to seek future entry. I returned to Romania with my male companion who was Canadian. Jobs were scarce. We decided to go to Canada. I applied for a visitor visa and was rejected. We decided to try Cyprus, on rumors that it might be easier to get in, plus as a touristic island, we assumed that bar/restaurant work would be readily available. My partner got a three months stamp at the Cypriot border. What I received was a stamp valid for ten days. I was able to find work, but I was denied an extension on my visa. We had no other option but to return back to Romania. I re-tried to get a Canadian visa. My

partner hired a lawyer in Canada to re-submit my application yet I was denied entry again. We turned to the ‘marriage’ option since moving around seemed impossible and surviving without an income was difficult. We started my application for Canada under the sponsored spouse program. At the time spouses were not allowed to wait in Canada during the procession of their files. By this time (i.e., the Cyprus trip, the marriage) six months lapsed and we were able to return to Malta. At least we could find work. Malta did not have a Canadian embassy, only a consulate. We sent in the paperwork (i.e., photos, bills) by mail, at the Canadian embassy in Rome, which saved the trouble of requesting a visa for Italy. About eight months later we were on a plane to Canada. Once in Canada, I did not access any state- supported integration programs (i.e., language classes, employment assistance etc.,) since I was not aware of the availability of such services. I was quick in finding bar jobs, yet despite having an undergraduate degree and a couple years of experience in community work in Romania, I was unable to secure ‘better’ work. Getting a Canadian education seemed the only way to move around the ‘Canadian experience’ requirement. After five years, I re- started my educational path, in a diploma program at George Brown College, which I shortened to one year (instead of two) given my former Bachelor Degree. Upon graduation, this led me to my first ‘proper’ job (although underpaid) as a Community Access Program Worker at University Settlement, a non-profit organization. By now, I was going through a divorce, given the consequential (and typical) abusive and dependent conjectures that come attached with being a spouse in the sponsored migration stream. One year later, I secured admittance for a MSW and two year later for a doctoral program. These credentials seemed to have given me entry into the notable category of whiteness, subsequently erasing the rightfulness of any marginality resulting from former circumstances. Despite having changed class circumstances and transgressing to a superior nationality (i.e., possessing Canadian citizenship by now), I was still struggling to get away from feeling ashamed of my Romanian origins. Yet in Canada, anyone would place me within the privileged, white box category. Of course, this was mainly deriving from a specific North American unfamiliarity with anything outside the North-American national/regional context. For the younger Canadians (the mature ones seemed well aware of Cold War reminiscences) being from Romania seemed not that different than being from Portugal or Spain. Yet, my goings to the UK, or my visiting trips back home (where I was

questioned much more for re-entering with a Romanian versus a Canadian passport) always reminded me of what is like to feel inferior for being born in a second-tier nation. This self- colonizing shame, which I believe most Romanians are inflicting upon themselves, has led me to use my Canadian passport for my transatlantic trips back to Europe. It would at least, offer me a normal treatment at the EU borders. The discrepancy in these experiences, differentially felt across the globe, have led me to question the notions of whiteness, Eurocentrism, and privilege, and their congruency on synonymous lines. I never understood my placement into the white, European, privileged category, as I never felt European, nor privileged, and until I came to North America I never conceptualized race on a white-racialized binary nor was I aware that I am European. It is not just about growing up poor. But also, about growing within a differentially structured division where one’s subjectivity is always framed as inferior, in this case inferior in relation to the West. The treatment of Romanian nationals in Europe, especially in the UK is hateful. Derogatory remarks are flambéing out the local and national press on a daily basis. It is irrelevant that these people are white. What is relevant is that they represent poor nations. If Romania was to have the GDP of France, Romanian nationals would definitely have been welcomed in the UK. Although I did enter Canada as a sponsored spouse and not under the skilled worker program, my focus on the skilled migration stream is connected with the fact that I personally experienced migration as economically linked. The difficulty in finding commensurate work in Canada has made me fundamentally question the applicability of the Canadian multicultural discourse vis-à-vis the issue of immigrants’ inclusion. More so, when working for academic or community projects on topics related to sponsored spouses or undocumented migration, despite my personal and familial experiences with these issues, I was always considered white-skinned in the Canadian context and catalogued as not knowing what it is like to deal with matters related to borders and migration. My brief involvement with self- proclaimed radical organizations advocating for migrant rights felt outwardly exclusionary; the legitimate subjects of discussion and advocacy for migration related issues were those with visible markers of racialization. bell hooks (1994) talked about communities of exclusion being formed on identity appurtenance. She argued that separatist politics, based on cultural fascism and solely grounded on gendered or raced shared identities, are actually

impeding the creation of a progressive culture of communalism. Inclusionary/exclusionary boundaries drawn on essentialized selves seemed senseless and paralyzing to me. Nevertheless, I simply did not feel at ease with having to share personal stories or having to fight for the space to share personal stories in order to get entry into such organizations. I do know of other people, migrants from Ecuador, Croatia, who had similar experiences with Toronto based migrant organizations, which seem to have closed boundaries as it relates to accepting others who underwent similar migration experiences. I find that a similar logic unfolds within academic circles. Many scholars studying migration have never experienced migration. Oftentimes born within North America (i.e, originating from migrant families), their legitimacy of studying migration issues is never questioned but already accepted from an a priori visible identitarian characteristic (i.e., the racialized identity of these scholars). Skin-based tones and racialized appearances seem to indicate validity for pursuing migration related topics. It is important to note that I do not advocate for group appurtenance in researching social issues (I do not consider that arguments have to originate only from those personally involved with, or defined by a subject matter, despite an acknowledgement that social position impacts the interpretations of such issues). What I problematize is the uncritical uptake of someone’s legitimacy to speak about something strictly due to their identitary features. The logic of applying fixed categorizations to people whose former life experiences were not determined by their positioning within such categorical markers, indirectly results from synonymizing terminology that is not in fact synonymous and from essentializing terms without acknowledging that transnational, historical trajectories impact the subjectivity of those continually placed within the significance of such terms.

1. Processes of inclusion and exclusion

2.1 The notions of inclusion and exclusion

Social inclusion is broadly defined as the capacity to fully participate in society, while social exclusion, as the inability to do so (Nolan, 2015). The terminology of social exclusion entered the French academic discourse in 1970s, after René Lenoir published a paper titled

‘Les Exclus’, where he addressed the marginalization of those unprotected by social programs -the poor, the elderly, the homeless or the mentally ill (Graham, Swift, Delaney, 2012; Lightman & Lightman, 2017). The term was initially applied to poverty and unemployment. It later extended beyond economic groundings, to encompass a plurality of inequalities within the personal, public, formal and informal arenas (Fraser, 2010): housing, health, education, income, debt, quality of life, dignity and autonomy; to denote social, economic, political, cultural and racial disadvantages; to indicate unequal access to the major fields of civic life, to the rights, goods and services in society; and to convey subjective divides in relation to one’s identity (Fraser, 2010; Good-Gingrich, 2003; Hyman, Meinhard & Shields, 2011; Lightman & Lightman, 2017; Lightman & Good Gingrich, 2012; Salojee, 2005). Health Canada, for example, takes into consideration eight dimensions of disadvantage within analyses of exclusion: cultural, economic, functional, participatory, physical, political, relational and structural. These dimensions are regarded as being entangled with other constructs of disadvantage, such as poverty, disability, marginalization, isolation and discrimination (Hyman, Meinhard & Shields, 2011). Exclusion denies the possibility of equal interaction in society (Fraser, 2010): the excluded are situated outside societal functioning and have restricted (citizenship) rights (Balibar, 2015). Exclusion is perceived as a threat to social cohesion: it negatively impacts not only the excluded but also the society as a whole (Caidi & Allard, 2005). This is why institutional efforts to address exclusionary circumstances have been generally pursued. Governmental actions to combat exclusion were first legislated in Europe in the beginning of the 1990s, when the EU adopted an official policy of eradicating social exclusion and poverty (Fraser, 2010). The 1989 EU Social Charter, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty and the 2000 Lisbon Agreement, all emphasized abolishing social exclusion as a widespread Union goal (Siemiatycki, 2006). In UK, under Tony Blair’s government, a Social Exclusion Unit was established in 1997 (Siemiatycki, 2006) and the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) opened soon after, in October 1997 at the London School of Economics (Fraser, 2010), with funding from the Economic and Social Research Council. In Canada, a report titled “Reducing Barriers to Social Inclusion and Social Cohesion” was drafted, in 2013, by the Canadian Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs (Lightman & Lightman, 2017) with the mandate of developing an institutional

framework on the matter. Currently, the Human Resources and Social Development Canada is the federal department that promotes official dialogues on socially inclusive policies (Siemiatycki, 2006). Policy orientations seem to oscillate between two principled poles on the inclusionary/ exclusionary axe. In Britain and the EU, the focus rests on exclusion, while in Canada, the emphasis shifts towards social inclusion. Both efforts are projected to combat exclusion. Understandings of exclusion and inclusion have always been relationally framed. Being outside the community presupposes that “one is excluded from something” (Lightman & Lightman, 2017, p. 87) and that something is inclusion (Balibar, 2015). Both concepts are relationally bounded by each other. They operate on a bounded function and not on a binary function. Boundedness is used in mathematics to denote a function with finite limits, with its values ranging between an upper and a lower bound. In linguistics, boundedness refers to “the presence or absence of a component of meaning indicative of a border at the location indicated in an expression” (SIL, 2018). Segments of significance depend on the inside/outside of the boundary from where meaning takes place. The inside and the outside shift with the location of the boundary, and understandings of the inside and the outside shift according to the commonly shared limit delineating the inside and the outside. Saying that exclusion is bounded by inclusion and inclusion is bounded by exclusion means that the boundaries/limits/borders of each notion represent the other notion. Inclusionary policy solutions have been framed as the most adequate responses for addressing issues of exclusion. Oftentimes taken as synonymous with human capital investments, respect of differences, and the dissolution of systemic barriers, in terms of outcomes (i.e., standardized life conditions) and processes (i.e., broad public participation) (Graham, Swift, Delaney, 2012; Hyman, Meinhard & Shields, 201; Saloojee, 2005; Siemiatycki, 2006;), such approaches construed inclusion as the normative socio-political conduit to develop the social, economic and cultural capabilities of the excluded. Despite its policy implementations, the idea of inclusion continues to be loosely defined. Some frame it as being about inclusive democracy, democratic citizenship and valued public participation, recognition and societal belonging (Saloojee, 2005); some about people reaching towards common aspirations, common life and common wealth (Siemiatycki, 2006); some about the creation of environments where people have “both, the

feeling and reality of belonging and are able to work to their full potential” (Region of Peel, 2011, p. 12); and others about the materialization of inclusionary strategies to guide governmental policy making (Siemiatycki, 2006). Social inclusion becomes about everything and anything; about ‘the democratization of democracy’ or about a ‘substantive rather than a formal equality’, “characterized by challenges to discrimination, exclusion and inequality” (Saloojee, 2005, p. 2) yet without clear references as to how democratization (e.g., democratization for whom?), equality (e.g., equality or results or equality of starting points) and inequality (e.g., what type of inequality) are defined. In the UK, social inclusionary policies encompass equal opportunity legislation; in France, community reintegration; in Canada, social cohesion, diversity and multiculturalism (Caidi & Allard, 2005). Despite the lack of a universal description, the consensus remains, however, that inclusion challenges exclusion. Immigration policies are, to a large extent, about inclusion and exclusion, about the changeability of inclusionary/exclusionary boundaries, about the state deciding whom should be those deserving to be inside and whom should be those relegated to the outside (Satzewich, 2015). Canada is globally regarded as a country that promotes effective immigration policies and a successful version of inclusionary multiculturalism, with the aim of not only integrating the marginalized into society but also of accept marginal perspectives that impact society (Caidi & Allard, 2005). The educational outcomes for the children of immigrants are the highest in Canada compared with other Western countries. There seem to be fewer anti-Muslim sentiments, a higher acceptance of immigrants by born Canadians, higher rates of immigrants-nationals intermarriages, higher immigrant candidatures for political office, and overall, a stronger democratic platform for building an inclusive society (Hyman, Meinhard & Shields, 2011; Siemiatycki, 2006). Similar to how exclusion is seen to negatively alter the character of the national society, immigrant inclusion (i.e., societally valued participation, recognition and belonging) is seen to positively change the character of Canadian society- a diverse society is perceived as a ‘better’ society (Hyman, Meinhard & Shields, 2011). In the case of migrant populations, the idea of inclusion gets rhetorically overlapped with that of integration, with both terms being used as synonymous within the policy-making field. The preference for the terminology of ‘inclusion’ is taken to denote a more progressive

stance on the matter (Spencer, 2018). Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC)’s official position is that inclusionary social policies and programs are necessary to assist immigrants with integrating in Canada (Bejan & Lightman, 2014). Referring to the incorporation of immigrants “into the social fabric of the destination country” (Shields & Bauder, 2015, p. 422), the umbrella term of integration is usually understood to encompass the processes that increase migrants’ access to similar life chances with the inborn population. These processes are conceptually overlaid and empirically measured on the same dimensions as inclusion: participation in educational and cultural institutions, the political system and the labour market, the existence of social and neighborhood networks, adherence to national values, political and electoral representation, as well as anything deemed indicative of reducing the differential life chances between the national majority and minorities (Alba & Foner, 2015; Codini & D’Odorico, 2014; Paraschivescu, 2011). Generally speaking, one is integrated once one belongs (in social, cultural and economic terms) to the nation (Alba & Foner, 2015). Alba & Foner (2015) argue that there are two conceptual narratives of integration. One such narrative is about increasing the access of immigrant groups to societal resources; and the second, about enlarging the mainstream society so that newly arrived immigrants and second-generation citizens are not stuck within a ‘us and them’ dynamic. Despite the foresight of integration as a two ways street- not only immigrants have to adapt but the host society also needs to change (Paraschivescu, 2011), the reality is one of a one-way street, where only the immigrants are expected to adjust in order to fit national ideals (Paraschivescu, 2011). Asking migrant subjects to integrate into the national community presumes the cultural primacy of those already belonging to the nation, of those affirming a previously established historical and cultural identity of the national (DeGenova, 2008). It is on behalf of the principle of national(ism), of the idea of nativism, which “bounds up with an assumption of natal entitlement” (DeGenova, 2008, p. 46), that the primacy of a majoritarian population is implied on the grounds of their ‘being as such’, of possessing national identity. Similarly, it is on behalf of the same principle of national(ism) that outcomes of inclusion and exclusion are attributed to migrant populations. Analogous with inclusion, the idea of integration is relationally framed. The immigrant needs to be integrated into something and that something constitutes the national cohesive body of the host society (Shields & Bauder, 2015). Integration is about the relation

between the one having to integrate and the part into which one has to integrate. This linear approach to integration, where the migrant leaves her host country, settles in a Western society and is successfully integrated once she acquires citizenship, is seen as outdated by various transnational scholars. More importantly are deemed transnational patterns of movement that enmesh intersectional migrant subjects. Some argue for a re- conceptualization of the term integration, where policies address a plurality of processes, such as pre-integration measures, dual citizenship regimes, and anti-discrimination practices (Natter & Bejan, 2015). Political intentionality is oftentimes hidden in standard integrative policies. What passes as pre-integration measures - language tests or pre-arranged offers of employment within the host society- merely reflects a concentrated effort to select better type of migrants (Natter & Bejan, 2015). Some argued that dialogues on integration and inclusion are about assimilative negotiations (Caidi & Allard, 2005); that manifestations of integration are mechanisms of control (Paraschivescu, 2011) or displays of cliché examples of diversity, of tokenistic immigrant festivals and multicultural cuisines (Alba & Foner, 2015), with little analysis about deeper structures conditioning experiences of exclusion. Integration is largely defined in economic terms, although migrants’ socio-cultural adaptation, in terms of institutional participation, strong social networks and accessibility to residential, health and social services, were shown to matter equally in creating bonds with the host society (Sakamoto, Ku & Wei, 2009; Shields & Bauder, 2015). For instance, in the case of new immigrants to Canada, their lower quality of life was associated with feelings of alienation in the new cultural environment, a decrease in social networks, and changes in familial and social relationships, experiences associated with becoming the other in the new society (Sakamoto, Ku, & Wei, 2009). With the acknowledgement that processes of integration, inclusion and exclusion evolve beyond economics and labour market outcomes, for feasibility purposes, the labour market dimension was selected in this dissertation as an axis of study to map inclusionary-exclusionary outcomes for the two populations, skilled migrants to Canada and A2 migrants in the UK. It is impossible to explore all exclusionary axes for the two groups. Since economic exclusion constitutes the focus of scholarship on immigrant integration, for argumentative proposes, this dissertation exemplifies with one type of exclusion experienced by migrants – exclusion from the labour market.

2.2 Classified outcomes of inclusion and exclusion

In the preceding pages, this thesis referred to definitions of inclusion and exclusion circulated within the policy making field and commonly used to interpret societal processes that position subjects into included and excluded subject-locations. This section focuses on the outcomes of inclusion and exclusion for two migrant populations, skilled migrants to Canada and Romanian and Bulgarian migrants to the UK. The language of outcomes was chosen since it reflects the material consequences of inclusionary-exclusionary processes manifested in the labour market. Several inclusionary-exclusionary parameters subsist within societies (see the antecedent section), however, the labour market is taken to universally represent the field where the inclusionary-exclusionary dynamics get played. This is not to imply that forms of labour are solely manifested within the waged market. Arrangements of unpaid labour are also performed outside the market, by seniours, children or homemakers. Keeping in mind that an abstract labour market does not encompass all possible subjects, in the context of this dissertation, the labour market is imagined on national lines. It is the national labour markets (i.e., in Canada and the UK) that are referenced and not the global labour market, which undergoes its own set of global transformations in the new economy. Presuming that market-employment provides sufficient revenue for living expenses, within national market societies, a functioning labour market delineates the primary terrain for the distribution of societal resources, of societal advantages and disadvantages (Lightman & Lightman, 2017). The a priori formulated state-intentionality congruently supports migrant recruitment to fit national market needs. This thesis argues that both populations are envisioned (by the state) as occupying opposite positions in the labour market. As the next few pages show, skilled migrants are selected for entry to Canada based on their skills, hence they are expected to occupy high-end professional positions. If found on the low end of the market, they are officially catalogued as excluded on this societal dimension. In the UK, it is anticipated that the A2 nationals occupy low-end labour market positions. Matching such projected imagination, A2 migrants are not considered excluded if they occupy these positions. The question becomes about their contribution to the British society. If they can do low skilled work that no one else wants to do, such as seasonal, agricultural or construction

work, they are welcomed into the nation but only for this particular line of work. If they are mobile, escaping their assigned position, and taking work from the national subjects (considered to possess the primary right to choose their position in the labour market) the A2 migrants are unwelcomed into the nation. In such cases, since they deviated from the projected national imaginary, the nation will try to expulse them. These argumentative lines will be explored in the following sub-sections of this Chapter. What tends to happen outside the realm of national fantasies, is that both categories of migrants, in both societies, are concentrated in the low segments of the labour market, in comparison to the innate population, who tends to occupy high-end positions. The analytical approach of dividing the labour market in a twofold fashion (high-low) goes under the name of the dual market theory (Samers & Sniders, 2015). It posits that the labour market is shaped as an hourglass, with polarized occupations at the two ends of its spectrum: high-paying stable jobs, primary within the knowledge, capital intensive economy, and low-paid, precarious jobs within the entry-level, labour intensive sectors (Ivancheva, 2007; Zizys, 2011). The dual labour market theory has been fairly contested. Some argued that capitalism distorted to such an extent, that any type of long-term employment is nowadays a privilege, where workers, as a category, are not temporarily unemployed but structurally unemployable, and where the old bourgeoisie is re-functionalized as a class of salaried managers (i.e., companies’ executives) servicing in return, the big banks and corporations (Žižek, 2012). Others have proposed the theory of a segmented labour market, where various market segments operate by particular (i.e., identitarian) rules (Samers & Snider, 2015) and where workers are included or excluded from the labour market based on their identitarian markers (race, gender, nationality). Immigrants who score less on racialized, gendered and classed cultural appurtenance, will subsequently have lower employment rates, and lower access to particular segments of the labour market (Samers & Snider, 2015). However, analyzing adjacent individualizing contributors (i.e., racialized, gendered, classed) as explanatory for migrants’ labour market outcomes, disregards that, despite one’s identitarian markers (and the societal perception of these markers), it is the national characteristic that evaluates these contributors and later assigns them to segments within the labour market, paradoxically constructing as conceivable the interpretation of these contributors as the cause rather than the symptom of the differential distribution of labour market outcomes.

This dissertation does not favour one particular labour market theory. All stated approaches seem plausible. Using categorical markers (i.e., whiteness) to interpret differentially distributed labour market outcomes for migrant populations, fits within the framework of a segmented labour market. Nevertheless, the projection forthcoming from the state vis-à-vis categories of migrant subjects, positions them a priori within a dual market. Yet, let us move next to a discussion of the exclusionary/inclusionary outcomes pertaining to the selected populations.

2.2.1 The Canadian context

Migration is a growing global phenomenon. During the last decades, Western societies have become major hubs for immigrant influxes from the Global South and the former Soviet Bloc. In Britain, France, Germany and Netherlands, 8-13% of the population is classified as foreign born (Alba & Foner, 2015). In 2011, migrants constituted 13% of the US population and 20% of the Canadian population. Both countries add about 3-6% yearly to these figures. Canada, in particular, is historically known as an archetypal destination for émigrés (Lightman & Bejan, 2013); it has the highest proportion of newcomers to the number of local residents (Omidvar & Richmond 2005), number outperformed only by Israel and Australia on a per capita basis (Satzewich, 2015). The metropoles of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary account for most of the population growth within Canada (Grant & Sweetman, 2004; Omidvar & Richmond, 2003). Between 2000 and 2009, Toronto received an average of 48 900 newcomers, representing 20% of all new immigrants to Canada (City of Toronto, 2011). Half of Toronto’s residents are born outside the country (City of Toronto, 2011). Despite its global reputation of developing some of the most liberalized immigration policies (Satzewich, 2015), Canada has a somewhat complicated immigration system. There are myriad migration pathways, some leading to permanent residency and citizenship, and some perpetuating temporariness and illegality. Management of Canadian migration falls under the Canadian Immigration Act. Introduced in 1978, the Act was considered to mark “the beginning of a new, more liberal, and more co-operative era in Canadian immigration” (Hawkins 1988, p. xv). It established three classes of immigration: the points system (i.e.,

skilled migrants), the family class (i.e., sponsored spouses, parents and grandparents) and the refugee and refugee claimants (i.e., government assisted/sponsored refugees) stream. The points system or the Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP) under its official name, is a modified quota scheme filtering migrants on human capital traits. It is a merit-based model of assigning entry into the nationhood. Migrants need to score high on educational credentials, professional experience, language ability, as in a strong command of English or French, occupational suitability, pre-arranged offers of employment, former skilled work experience, as well as different types of personal qualities (Alba & Foner, 2015; Bejan, 2011; Grant & Sweetman, 2004; Omidvar & Richmond, 2005; Oreopoulos, 2009; Satzewich, 2015). Those entering the country under the points arrangement, represent about half of today’s entries to Canada (Reitz, 2011). Between 2011 and 2012, more than six out of ten of all admitted permanent residents in Canada were economic migrants (Alba & Foner, 2015). Prioritizing the economic recruitment at the expense of humanitarian and family assistance claims is congruent with Canada’s direction towards competing with other global economies for international brainpower (Shields & Bauder, 2015; Kaiman, 2012). The points system signifies the idea of Canadian exceptionalism (Adamuti-Trache, 2015) and was branded as the gold standard in managing migration (Satzewich, 2015). It was subsequently modelled by other nations: Australia introduced a similar system in 1979; the UK and Denmark developed their respective replicas by 2008 (Satzewich, 2015); and the US president, Donald Trump, referenced Canada as the prototype to guide the reform of the American immigration system (Morrow, 2017). Other Western countries do bring in skilled workers; however, they lack a well-grounded system tying entries with permanent residency and citizenship pathways. The US brings in highly skilled people via the H-1B program, mainly foreign workers on six years visas within technical fields; since 2006, France has a ‘skills and talents’ three-years visa stream to assist employers struggling with recruitment; Germany grants similar visas in technology fields for up to five years (Alba & Foner, 2015). The current weighed criteria within the Canadian points system allocates scores on six selected factors to a total of 100 points: education (twenty-five points); language proficiency, as in English or French speaking and writing skills (twenty-eight points); work experience (fifteen points), age (twelve points), the preference being for younger individuals, whereas one point gets deducted for each year after the age of thirty-five; pre-arranged

employment in Canada (ten points); and adaptability (ten points). The pass mark for entering the system sits at sixty-seven points (Satzewich, 2015). It is apparent that the Canadian state envisions skilled migrants as the right type of subjects for recruitment: younger individuals, at the peak of their professional years, proficient in reading, writing, and speaking one of Canada’s official languages, best suited to fit the country’s economic needs (Campion-Smith, 2012; Reitz, 2011) and to have the greatest potential for yielding economic returns (Ley, 2010; Omidvar & Richmond, 2005; Oreopoulos, 2009). It is unsurprising that, prerequisites indicative of future economic success, are highly balanced in the selection of skilled migrants to Canada. Ever since Canada began receiving immigrants, in the eighteen and nineteen centuries, its immigration policies have been economically regulated (Smith, 1987). Throughout the twentieth-century, during periods of slower or milder economic growth, administrative procedures were controlling migration (Boyd & Vickers, 2000). For instance, fewer people entered Canada between 1931 and 1941 (Boyd & Vickers, 2000) and this was particularly related to the recessionary environment of the Great Depression. In 1929, farm workers, domestic workers and relatives of landed immigrants were removed from the permanent residency class (Boyd & Vickers, 2000). A similar trend unfolded in contemporary times: after the 2008 economic downturn, there has been a decreased number of entries in the skilled migration stream yet an increased number of temporary foreign workers (Harper, 2012; Todd, 2013). These changes happened under Stephen Harper’s government, when Canada’s broader commitment to multicultural ideals was greatly diminished and immigration policies were rapidly altered. Party politics is a key variable that impact the development of national immigration policies. It was during Harper’s times that the political rhetoric quickly shifted from “building citizenship” to “importing economic capital” (Russo, 2008, p. 295). The FSWP program was subsequently re-branded as highly selective. Recruiting processes were re-orientated to select only those ‘best positioned for success’, those most needed by economy and those that will cost-effectively integrate (CIC, 2013a). While the FSWP entry applications were sped up to ensure such stringent economic requirements, the overall numbers of those successfully admitted were concomitantly diminished (Canada Immigration Newsletter, 2013). Figures from Citizenship and Immigration Canada show that skilled workers applications were in decline starting 2006, the year when Stephen Harper’s government took power: 27.9% skilled immigrants

entered Canada in 2012 as compared to 36.7% in 2003 (CIC, 2013b). The focus within the points stream, towards a stronger weighting for the factors ought to determine a rapid economic integration (CIC, 2013a), was flagged by the Ontario Office of Fairness Commissioner as a “discriminatory practice of devaluing work experience obtained outside of Canada” which “unintentionally encourages employers to violate the Ontario’s Human Rights Code” (Ontario Human Right Commission, 2013). Critics questioned if such requirements consequently altered the distribution of source countries (Boyd, 2013), limiting Global South nations’ ability to contribute to the pool of linguistically proficient applicants. For example, between 2006 and 2011, permanent residency applications dropped by 45% from China; by 51% from India; by 32% from the Philippines; and by 65% from Pakistan. This is compared to only a 10% drop from the US and a 7% decrease from France (Clark & Skuterud, 2012, Skuterud, 2013). The Harper’s government’s focus on the recruitment of economic migrants was anticipated. Since mid-1990s, during his time as the Reform Party Member of Parliament (MP) for Calgary West and the Chief Policy Officer of the 1998 party’s election platform, Stephen Harper openly supported a state-ingrained national culture, advancing the assimilation of ethnic groups, officially opposing Canadian multiculturalism and advocating for limiting Canada’s humanitarian recruitment only to those with a strong capacity to assimilate within Canadian society: those possessing substantial language skills and entrepreneurial capabilities (Russo, 2008). It was also under Stephen Harper’s regime that the federal government mirrored the Australian immigration system and introduced a mandatory Expression of Interest (EOI) to require applicants’ registration in a central database, primarily accessible to provincial governments and business representatives. Corporate stakeholders were now allowed to cherry-pick the ‘best and the brightest’ before formally inviting them to apply for visas (Workpermit.com, 2012). In 2015 Canada introduced the Express Entry as a subprogram of the FSWP. Express Entry now constitutes the main system managing skilled workers applications. The aim was to speed up the process for those with pre-arranged offers of employment (Alba & Foner, 2015). Business applications were additionally braced. Entrepreneurs with high financial capital (Alba & Foner, 2015) could now secure entry to Canada by obtaining a letter of support from a firm under the angel investor groups or a venture capital fund (Satzewich,

2015). The Express Entry scheme compromises the provincial nominee program, the FSWP and the Canadian Experience Class. The cumulative numbers admitted within the stream were 31,063 people for 2015 (IRC, 2015) and 33,782 for 2016 (IRC, 2016). These were below the governmental target set at 59,000 for 2016 (CIC News, 2016). In terms of approval rates, a yearly average of 25% to 30% of skilled workers applications seem to be refused (Satzewich, 2015). Cited reasons mainly include unsuitable selection criteria or apprehensions on health, criminal and safety grounds (Satzewich, 2015). Approval rates are much higher for investors (90%) and business applications (87%) (Satzewich, 2015). As it relates to the visa-issuing offices, the highest approval rates are emitted in the Americas (88%). The European rates are lower, with an average of 79% (Satzewich, 2015). The lowest acceptance rates in Europe are in Ankara (48%) and Warsaw (49%). Lima, Santiago and Tokyo are the global offices with 100% acceptance rate for federal skilled workers applications (Satzewich, 2015). The lowest rates globally are recorded in Buenos Aries (31%), Caracas (48%) and Ankara again (48%) (Satzewich, 2015). With the primary purpose of bringing talented people into Canada (Siddiqui, 2013) and recruiting them solely on anticipated contributions to the market, Canadian immigration policy got annexed as a tool for economic growth. In fact, the Immigrant and Refugee Protection Act refers to immigrants as agents of economic development (Satzewich, 2015). Immigrants pay taxes, they expand the domestic market, facilitate economic development and constitute a source of labour for Canadian employers (Satzewich, 2015). While immigration is de facto understood as beneficial for Canada, it is the most beneficial for Canadian employers (Satzewich, 2015). This is why private companies, such as Deloitte for example -a multinational financial management and tax consulting conglomerate- advocate for bringing in immigrants to fuel economic growth (Deloitte, 2011). The market impetus within Canadian immigration policy consequentially turns skilled migrants into “capital- bearing objects, rather than capital-accumulating subjects” (Lovell, 2000, p. 20). Their abilities to contribute to the market matter more than they individually matter as people. Unequally benefiting Canadian economic interests more than those of the people migrating, immigration policies deprive the process of migration of its humanistic raison d’être - the global movement of people seeking upward societal mobility and improved standards of living. A report drafted by the Government of Canada (2015), under former Immigration

Minister Jason Kenney and commissioned by the Panel on Employment Challenges of New Canadians which consulted with various immigrant-serving organizations, regulators, employers and other stakeholders to assess immigrant outcomes, particularly emphasized the economic role of skilled migration: “Immigrants have been an important part of Canada’s labour supply over the past few decades” (p. 4); immigrants have a critical role in “our workforce and the potential to strengthen Canada’s economy” (p. 5); immigrants skilled labour is needed to “enhance our productivity”; and that “successful labour market integration of newcomers matters now more than ever”, as “Canada continues to be affected by large shifts in population composition (aging workforce), globalization and changing skill requirements”, hence it “needs newcomers to remain competitive globally.” (p. 20). The commodification of skilled migration could be metaphorically described through a stock-trading analogy. The Price /Earnings (P/E) ratio is commonly used in stock market terminology as a prognostic measure to assess stocks’ expected returns (Browne, 2007). A high P/E ratio is indicative of higher potential earnings and growth. A low P/E ratio signifies the reverse. Canadian immigration seems to follow a predictive P/E logic, with migrant groups assessed on their potential of yielding high(er) market returns. Canada focuses on selecting individuals who best benefit the country’s economy while it restricts residency for those inadequately positioned to return large economic gains. Skilled migrants have the highest P/E ratios out of all types of migrants. They have the greatest long-term potential to yield economic returns, due to high skills and credentials, hence they are easily granted permanent residency and access to citizenship. Keeping high P/E ratios necessitates a continual re-leveling of migration levels to obtain the most profitable equation. The P/E ratio for lower skilled migrants is also high (paradoxically), albeit inversely and provisionally regulated, through the negation of citizenship access. These individuals have their future stay conditioned on un-citizenship, temporariness and non-permanency. They yield high economic returns for the market, but only by residing in Canada as non-citizens, on a temporary basis. Low skilled foreign workers, refugees and undocumented individuals are seen more likely to drain the system than to benefit the market, which is why temporariness becomes key in maximizing their market value and maintaining their high P/E ratio. They are good to work on a temporary basis yet not good enough to stay on a permanent basis. Businesses and employers exploit them to hyper-maximize their profits, without having to

abide by the rights that usually come attached with citizenship (Goldring, Bernstein & Bernhard, 2009). While the doors to Canada seem open to those “playing by the rules” (CIC, 2012), these rules are merely the profit-making kind. The objective of Canadian immigration policy is to build the Canadian nation. National progress, in turn, is constructed by a stronger economy (Foster, 2014; Satzewich, 2015). High educational credentials, professional experience, language, youth, pre-arranged employment or civic knowledge (Bejan, 2011; Grant & Sweetman, 2004), although reasoned good enough to facilitate entry to Canada, they lose much of their value within Canada. Despite the economic imperative of the FSWP and notwithstanding the aforementioned stringent requirements of applicants’ social and human capital skills (materialized into selection benchmarks under the points system), studies have shown and continue to show labour market discrepancies between Canadian-born and newly arrived immigrants, manifested in lower unemployment rates, underemployment, and impaired economic and cultural mobility. Unemployment and underemployment affect about two thirds of recent immigrants. Newcomers fare worse than born Canadians on employment outcomes, as they struggle to secure work commensurate with their skills (Bejan, 2012; Elrick & Lightman, 2014; Frenette & Morissette, 2005). Many find themselves unemployed or underemployed, in manufacturing, construction or the service industry. Overall, their occupational status does not reflect their level of training or their educational credentials (Bejan, 2011; Bejan, 2012; Boyd &Thomas, 2001; Boyd &Vickers, 2000; Lightman & Good Gingrich, 2012; Mehler, 2010a; Omidvar & Richmond, 2005; Picot, 2004; Ray, 2005; Wayland & Goldberg, 2009). The mismatch between foreign trained professionals’ training and their substandard employment patterns, as well as their low predictability of working in their occupational field, was thoroughly documented. Amongst medical professionals, about 55% of internationally trained people versus 90% of born Canadians are working as physicians (Boyd & Schellenberg, 2008). In 2006, the unemployment rate of newly landed immigrants reached 12% -over three times the rate of Canadians (Alba & Foner, 2015). In 2012, landed immigrants with a university degree had a 7.9% unemployment rate versus the 3.1% rate experienced by the Canadian-born population with similar education levels (Statistics Canada, 2012). Yet 31% of the foreign-born population has at least an undergraduate degree versus the 20.3% of the native population (Adamuti-Trache, 2015). Numbers for recent years

continue to show discrepancy. The unemployment rate for university educated landed immigrants was sitting at 6.1% in 2017 versus 2.9% for university educated born Canadians (Statistics Canada, 2018). Immigrants’ unemployment was found to disproportionally increase with their length of time spent in the country. University graduates who landed five years ago or earlier had an unemployment rate of 12.4% in 2012 (Statistics Canada, 2012). This number was sitting at 9.7% for 2017 (Statistics Canada, 2018). Data from the International Migration Division of the Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs at the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) suggests that, within a comparative framework, Canada fairs relatively well in terms of newcomers’ employment outcomes (Lightman & Bejan, 2013). National research, however, repeatedly shows otherwise (Galabuzi & Teeluckksingh, 2010; Lightman & Good Gingrich, 2012; Reitz & Banerjee, 2007; Reitz et al., 2009; Richmond & Shields, 2005; Simich, Beiser, Stewart & Mwakarimba 2005). National management of migration involves various actors within the government, civil society and the private sector. Federal and provincial political parties, inter-provincial governmental branches, NGOs, ethnic entrepreneurs, trade unions, employer associations and media, all play a role in fostering an atmosphere conducive to diverse societies (Natter & Bejan, 2015; Satzewich, 2015). Skilled migrants’ economic exclusion was also tied with a systemic lack of access to social services, housing, education and health care, a lack of awareness about the existence of such services but also with cultural bias, institutional racism as well as economic, linguistic, cultural and educational discrimination (Dowding & Razi, 2006; Galabuzi & Teeluckksingh, 2010; Schellenberg & Hou, 2008). Immigrant serving agencies oftentimes facilitate integration, resettlement and reduce newcomers’ levels of social exclusion, by assisting them with a variety of basic needs (Burr, 2011; George, 2002; Landolt, Goldring & Bernhard, 2009), including advice, language acquisition, employment, housing, health care, family counselling, job seeking skills, community participation, career advancements, cross cultural integration, etc. (Galabuzi & Teeluckksingh 2010; George, 2002; Dowding & Razi, 2006; Rose, Carrasco & Charbonneau, 1998; Norquay, 2004; Yan & Lauer, 2008). Adding to the issue, under the Harper regime, these very same organizations lost their core governmental funding and underwent restructuring (Bejan & Black, 2012; Richmond & Shields; 2005; Simich, Beiser, Stewart & Mwakarimba, 2005). Funding for the

settlement sector was reduced by six-million dollars by the former Conservative government, from 2011/2012 to 2012/2013 (Alboim & Cohl 2012). Federal transfer agreements were also halted (Lett, 2012), networks of settlement service provision amalgamated, and service providers’ collaboration relations substantially trimmed (Bejan & Black, 2012). All these changes chipped away from an integrated service provision. Shedding attention on the differential labour market outcomes between skilled immigrants and the national population does not imply that born Canadians are included on all gendered, raced or classed socio-political axes. Research has for long highlighted the importance of multiple dynamics, including age, racialized status and gender, in the construction of exclusionary societal dimensions (Block & Galabuzi, 2011; Lightman & Good Gingrich, 2012). This work, however, does not explore the cumulative effect of all these intersecting dimensions, nor does it map all possible exclusionary trajectories for societally excluded subjects. Providing a comprehensive account of ‘who gets ahead and who falls behind in Canadian society today’ (Grant & Sweetman, 2004) is well beyond the scope of this dissertation, which simply examines exclusionary outcomes overlaid onto a particular exclusionary axe, for a particular category of migrants within Canada.

2.2.2 The British context

Once the EU broadened its membership to include states from the former Soviet Bloc, the British public rhetoric, as this section will show, started to oppose intra-European migration. Central and Eastern European movement to the UK grew from 3% in 1994 to 13.1% in 2009 (Van Der Wielen & Bijak, 2015). The first intra-EU migrant surge took place after the 2004 EU enlargement, when eight countries (i.e., A8/EU8) joined the Union: The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Between 2002 and 2007, there was a fivefold increase in the numbers of European migrants to the UK, from 103,000 to 500,000 (Clark & Drinkwater, 2014). Most EU countries laid restrictive transnational policies on the 2004 wave of entry, aimed at preventing A8 nationals from freely accessing domestic labour markets for a period of seven years (Culic, 2008; Voicu, 2009). However, the UK, Ireland and Sweden did not introduce such migration controls. Public interpretations later blamed the lack of migration curbs for the large numbers

of A8 residents. Polish migrants nowadays represent the most common non-British nationality in the UK; their number reached one million in 2016 (Office of National Statistics, 2017a). On October 17th 2006, when the EU Council confirmed the ascension of two new states to the EU membership -Romania and Bulgaria (A2)- the UK abandoned its laissez- faire approach to inter-EU movement and announced that it will preventively limit access to the British labour market for the A2 nationals (Light & Young, 2009). The UK imposed transitional migration curbs to confine the A2 entries to the lowest sectors of the labour market (Ivancheva, 2007). EU2 work-entries were restricted to self-employed authorizations and seasonal contracts within the food processing and agricultural fields (Ivancheva, 2007; Light & Young, 2009; Vicol & Allen, 2014). Implemented on January 1st 2007, the curbs remained in effect until January 2014. The curbs triggered a liminal conditional status for the A2 migrants, transforming them into a group of undesirable, precarious subjects, temporarily included in the lowest sectors of the labour market yet excluded from accessing workplace benefits and rights. For instance, many Romanian and Bulgarian students employed under the Seasoned Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS) were not even paid minimum wages (Ivancheva, 2007) (before targeting Romanian and Bulgarian migrants, SAWS facilitated entry for non-EU migrants usually from Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova (Clark & Drinkwater, 2014)). Several other Romanian workers were denied National Insurance numbers, either because they mistakenly completed their self-employed forms or were missing documentation and ended up in illegalized situations, working ‘under the table’ or having to share one National Insurance number amongst several people (Briggs & Dobre, 2014). According to the Director of the Alliance Against Romanian and Bulgarian Discrimination, out of the 40 people regularly served by this Community Center, only two possessed proper work and residency documentation (Touma, 2017). Until the labour curbs were lifted, in January 2014, an average of 22,000 National Insurance numbers for Romanians and 14,000 for Bulgarians were granted on yearly basis (BBC News, 2015). By 2016, about 413,000 A2 citizens resided in the UK. The large majority (79%) were of Romanian nationality (Office of National Statistics, 2017). By 2017, the numbers of Romanian nationals in the UK rose to 411,000 (Office for National Statistics, 2017). Romanian nationality is now the second most common non-British nationality after the Polish ethnicity (EuroNews, 2018).

The European states of Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta and the Netherlands have also introduced transitional arrangements for the A2 nationals, although such labour controls constitute forms of indirect, nationality-based discrimination (Voicu, 2009; Vrânceanu, 2015). Migration curbs have historically regulated admissibility into the wealthy, sought after nations, limiting citizenship to those deemed desirable and blocking entry for the undesirable (Satzewich, 2015). Britain has had a long history of restricting migration and imposing forms of movement control. The distinction between those born in the UK and foreigners, dates a long time ago. It originated during colonial times and was maintained through the Naturalization Acts of 1844, 1847 and 1870. These Acts restricted the inclusion of foreigners into the nation only to those who could swear loyalty to the Crown (Montagna, 2014). Starting with the 1948 British Nationality Act, Britain applied the principle of ‘cives Britannici’ to Commonwealth arrivals (Green, 2017). The Act homogenized understandings of citizenship and allowed free entry for Commonwealth subjects (Quasim, 2016). In terms of appurtenance to Britain, citizens from the UK, those from the colonies, and those from the Commonwealth were grouped together as a loosely defined category of ‘British subjects’. Yet interpretations of citizenry were preferentially applied, differentiating between citizens and immigrants in residency laws and work-permit arrangements (Ivancheva, 2007; Montagna, 2014). The current multicultural texture of British society is thought to have originated in the entry premises outlined by the 1948 Act (Quasim, 2016). It is important to note, however, that the impetus for drafting this Act was economic. Resembling the Canadian example, management of migration within the UK followed similar economic rules. The primary intention in 1948 was to facilitate entry into a needy labour force. Soon after, British citizenship became more restrictive, limiting the inclusionist provisions that came from the colonist era (Boswell 2013). The 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Bill bounced back to limit admission into the country solely to the citizens of British colonies looking for employment (Briggs & Dobre, 2014). The Bill removed the rights to free movement and equal citizenship access for subjects from the former colonies (Quasim, 2016). The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrant Act limited the right of entry to those with substantial connection to the UK by birth or descent and racially differentiated between Commonwealth subjects (Briggs & Dobre, 2014; Voicu, 2009); The 1971 Immigration Act restricted the right to indefinite stay to those already lawfully settled

in the UK (Montagna, 2014; Voicu, 2009). The 1981 British Nationality Act ended the common law tradition and removed the automatic right to citizenship (Briggs & Dobre, 2014). It created three categories of nationality: British citizenship for those from the UK and former colonies; British citizenship of the territories, for those having links with the remaining colonies; and overseas British citizenship, for former UK citizens and for those from colonies that were unqualified for the prior two forms of citizenship (Montagna, 2014). The 1988 Immigration Act restricted entry for sponsored families. The 1996 Immigration and Asylum Act limited the number of asylum seekers. The 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act, and the 2004 Asylum and Immigration Act, followed similar lines of restrictions (Voicu, 2009). Based on the reasoning that British citizenship is a privilege, a recent idea, proposed in 2011, yet left unimplemented, aimed to introduce an ‘earned citizenship’ system. It would have required migrants to undergo a lengthy citizenship-granting process, with stronger language requirements, probationary residency status and the obligation to enroll in volunteer/community work as a means of demonstrating commitment to British values (Montagna, 2014). Over the years, both governments, Conservative and Labour, have systematically favoured restrictive immigration controls, mainly on grounds of deterring bogus asylum seekers, but also on the newer premises of organized crime and terrorism. Even the 1997 Labour party politik of equality and community cohesion was criticized for being inclusionary in discourse yet exclusionary in practice, by selectively admitting economic migrants (Briggs & Dobre, 2014). A2 nationals were not the first migrant group to contribute labour services to the UK economy. In the 1950s, after the second World War, it was those from the West Indies that were working in lower skilled industries, the textiles, the automotive sector or within the public transport (Ali, 2015; Voicu, 2009). Yet the anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric was similarly conflated along economic lines. After the 1950s, when the British economy was slow in comparison to other European nations, immigration (at that time from the Commonwealth and the Caribbean countries) was commonly interpreted as a national burden (Briggs & Dobre, 2014; Light & Young, 2009). The race relation riots of 1958 (Briggs & Dobre, 2014) or the 1970 racist attacks against the Pakistani community (Voicu, 2009) are clear examples of the materialization of such rhetoric. A similar discourse of national vulnerability in the face of Eastern European migration unfolded in recent times. Romanians

and Bulgarians are just the new scapegoats in an equation that gets historically re-formulated to yield economic results. Although immigrant lower skilled labour is deemed beneficial to the nation, once there is economic hardship and unemployment/underemployment for the British native population, immigrants are the ones blamed for such structural lack of productive opportunities. Foreigners representing the highest figures in a particular moment in time, will be the ones blamed for all the economic vows inside the nation. A2 migrants are some of the most skilled and educated workers in the UK, as compared to British nationals and Western Europeans émigrés. As shown by the British Labour Force survey, only 15% of all A2 residents are classified in low education levels. This rate sits at 46% for the British native population. Yet A2 migrants are more likely to work below their skill levels (Van Der Wielen & Bijak, 2015). 61% of A2 nationals are employed in low paid work compared to 43% of the British citizens (Office of National Statistics, 2017). Relegated to the low segments of the labour market, most A2 nationals constitute about half of all workers employed in the UK hospitality/restaurant industry (Office of National Statistics, 2017). One in four Romanians and one in five Bulgarians are employed within the construction sector (Office of National Statistics, 2017). In comparing workforce flexibility practices (i.e., contractual, casual, and insecure employment) by nationality composition, workplaces with an all-British workforce seem to be more secure, stable and able to provide higher levels of worker autonomy, flexibility and shorter work hours (Whyman & Petrescu, 2015). National statistics show that 61% of A2 migrants were found to work more than 40 hours a week compared to 32% of their British counterparts (Office of National Statistics, 2017). The British press has been portraying the A2 nationals as a threat to the British economy, to the British labour market (i.e., stealing jobs), to the British state (i.e., claiming welfare benefits) and to negatively impact Britain as a whole (i.e., draining resources from the National Health Services (NHS) (Balabanova & Balch, 2010; Cheregi, 2015; Van Der Wielen & Bijak, 2015). Irrational claims that the British and Romanian governments signed a secret agreement to allow Romanian migrants to access benefits in Britain, were also floating around (Vlad, 2014). Yet no empirical analyses could demonstrate that the A2 migrants were claiming benefits in larger shares than the British nationals (Van Der Wielen & Bijak, 2015). In 2016, 79% of A2 nationals were in paid employment (Office of National Statistics, 2017),

meaning they were contributing to the British economy and British finances through taxes (Vlad, 2014; Whyman & Petrescu, 2015). The proportions of those economically inactive were low. About 4% of the A2 nationals were unemployed, 5% were on study/educational leave and 12% were retired or providing home-care for family and relatives (Office of National Statistics, 2017). Moreover, A2 nationals entering the UK are much younger than the native population; 81% of Romanians and 77% of Bulgarians are aged between 16 and 49 years old (Office of National Statistics, 2017), hence most likely to participate in the labour market. They are also educated and higher educational levels are associated with lower benefit claims (Van Der Wielen & Bijak, 2015). Research on the former wave of entry, the A8, showed a low probability of claiming unemployment benefits. The main benefit claimed by A8 nationals was housing and this was due to the fact that many A8 migrants had to survive in low paid employment (Van Der Wielen & Bijak, 2015). EU2 migration additionally contributes to the leisure and business travel economies. In 2016, 61% of Romanians entered the UK on business and 21% with the purpose of visiting family and friends (Office of National Statistics, 2017). There is no empirical research to support the hypothesis that migrants are flowing into the UK to claim benefits. They rather arrive to find work (Van Der Wielen & Bijak, 2015). Oftentimes they are the main losers in the equation since they settle for jobs beneath their skill levels. Most of the A2 migrants were found to work for low wages and under casual employment contracts (Whyman & Petrescu, 2015). Economists’ opinions, however, are divided on the matter. Some argue that A2 migrants fuel economic growth. Others hold them responsible for national unemployment levels. Very little attention centers on the brain drain from the originating countries. After all, the sending nations are disadvantaged by the mass movement of their qualified people (Balabanova & Balch, 2010). Host societies, in turn, are benefiting from such movements. For instance, it was shown that most precarious jobs in Britain are filled by immigrants (Green, 2017). Furthermore, the Bank of England reported that Eastern Bloc migration has kept down wage inflation in the UK (Culic, 2008). Notwithstanding evidence to the contrary, some politicians have suggested (i.e., former Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith) that increased EU migration lowered the British wages by 10% (Armstrong, 2017). This wage decrease, however, was seen across the entire European continent after the 2008 crisis (Armstrong, 2017), hence it was not an isolated

phenomenon occurring solely in Britain. Contentions of incongruent values between EU2 and the national British ones, added to the rhetoric of British victimization. A2 nationals were depicted in the media as engaging in illegal activities and morally contaminating Britain with their cultural values (Light & Young, 2009). Beggars, criminals, thieves, squatters, Romanians were deemed at fault for ‘cashpoint’ fraud (Vicol & Allen, 2014), blamed for most ATMs crimes (Light & Young, 2009), represented as heavily involved in the criminal justice system (Briggs & Dobre, 2014; Vicol & Allen, 2014) and responsible for pickpocketing, begging and petty crimes (Cheregi, 2015). Romania and Bulgaria have the public reputation of being swirled by corruption and organized crime. It was publicly inferred that, by allowing EU2 entry into the nation, the UK will become Europe’s capital of organized crime (Balabanova & Balch, 2010). Hate speech against Romanian and Bulgarian migrants is what propped the far-right UK Independence Party (UKIP) to reach four million votes in the 2015 elections. UKIP former leader Nigel Farage publicly said that Britain is experiencing a “Romanian crime wave” (Carleton, 2013), that London is facing a “Romanian crime epidemic” (BBC, 2013), that Romanians will cause an explosion in organized crime (Briggs & Dobre, 2014), and that he will never want “to live next door to a Romanian” (Wollaston, 2014). When the EU8 joined the Union, A8 nationals were not as harshly represented in the British press. The debate on A8 migration was mostly carried out on a polarized cost-benefit logic. Polish people, for example, were depicted in positive and negative lights in the media. Overall, they were seen to bring economic benefits to the UK (Light & Young, 2009). The Czechs and the Estonians were barely talked about publicly. Conversely, no economic benefits were associated with the A2 migrant influx. Close to the lifting of transnational curbs, hyped-up media accounts fabricated a generalized xenophobic hysteria, apprehensive of a so-called invasion. Tabloid newspapers implied that entry numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians would exceed those of Polish migrants in 2004 and would have negative consequences for the UK, threatening the British identity, the British way of life and the British nation-state (Briggs & Dobre, 2014; Light & Young, 2009). In 2013, the British government considered launching a negative advertising campaign, titled ‘Don’t come to Britain’, to specifically target the admissibility of A2 nationals (Cheregi, 2015). Several message sheets with possible billboard suggestions were printed in The Guardian, ostensibly one of the most progressive and liberal news outlets,

reliant on an educated readership and priding itself as different from the tabloid press (Balabanova & Balch, 2010). The messages were published under the slogan ‘Don’t come to Britain’, because it rains, because it’s full, because it will sink, hence ‘You won’t like it here’ (The Guardian, 2013). They intended to show that Britain is not as good as imagined, in order to discourage EU2 arrivals (Crișan & Pop, 2014). Another example is Channel 4’s 2014 documentary - The Romanians are Coming. While the film intended to subvert stereotypes of Romanian migrants rather than to re-enforce them, it superficially brushed over the structural conditions constructing such stereotypes. The Guardian review of the film described the socio-political context that prompted Romanian migration in clichéd manners: Romanians have the choice of living in an “urban arsehole”, dissolving their brain cells into solvents and paint thinner; or, alternatively, the choice of coming to the UK, either to work hard for a better life and to boost the British economy; or either to “rob the locals blind, pick their pockets, steal their jobs, abuse their hospitality and drain their welfare state, most probably steal their women, too (once you’ve got your shitty teeth fixed for free on the NHS” (Wollaston, 2015). While such statements allegedly intend to provide both sides of the story, as in ‘working hard’ and ‘improving the British economy’ being the positive traits, they also draw on derogative representations of Romanians, benchmarked against British national qualities. On January 1st 2014, when the curbs were lifted, two British MPs arrived at the London Luton Airport to count the numbers of Romanian arrivals. Luton is UK’s lowest fare airport. Most Eastern European flights debark from there. Yet the British MPs found that the Wizz Air flight W63701 from Târgu Mureș was partially boarded (Vlad, 2014) merely with “a tiny handful of Romanians” (Davies & Malick, 2014). Not many people hurried to take advantage of the border permissions after all. The fears of invasion were unfounded, especially since England never constituted the preferred destination for Romanian migrants (Balabanova & Balch, 2010). Other EU countries, much closer culturally and linguistically, such as Italy, France and Spain, are the favored options for Romanians (Light & Young, 2009; Vrânceanu, 2015). Italy hosts the largest Romanian diaspora, of about one million people. Close to 900,000 Romanians are living in Spain (Vlad, 2014). The fear that the A2 migration will become permanent does not acknowledge that people tend to return home after periods of working abroad (Light & Young, 2009). This was also the case with the EU8. Most of the A8 nationals that arrived in the UK between 2004 and 2009, eventually returned

home (Briggs & Dobre, 2014). It is important to note that public references against Bulgarians were not as stringent. The reason might be a numeric one. About 78% of A2 nationals residing in the UK are of Romanian origin. Bulgarians represent about 22% (Office of National Statistics, 2017). Bulgarians, however, were indirectly dragged into this hateful rhetoric, partly because they are part of the A2 classification and they joined the Union at the same time as the Romanians. The media infused EU2 hysteria had no factual basis. Numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians in the UK are below those of EU8 and EU14 (Office of National Statistics, 2017). People from EU14, representing the original Union countries -Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden- have much higher residency rates within the UK. Comparative estimates of the non-British residents between 2004 and 2016 shows the numbers of Romanian and Bulgarians to be the lowest (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Estimates of non-British resident population.

* Source: Annual Population Survey (APS), Office for National Statistics, 2017.

With the 2016 Brexit vote, the UK finally halted its A2 influx. Those already in the country on Brexit day, would be given the right to stay, if they could present proof of five years residency. Those arriving after the Brexit vote would only be allowed to stay on temporary basis (Travis, 2017). It is estimated that about 170,000 Romanians and 65,000 Bulgarians will have to leave the country once the Brexit ballot will materialize in 2019 (Chiriac & Cheresheva, 2016; Romania Insider, 2016). Deportation and forced removals already occurred after the vote. A letter from the UK Home secretary, dated October 18th 2017, was informing a detained person to return to Romania to avoid becoming destitute (RT, 2017). The letter was leaked to The Observer. Hateful occurrences followed suit: an arson attack of a Romanian store in Norwich; a Romanian woman being stone-hit in Northern England; the murder of a Polish man in Harlow; a break in a Latvian home whose residents were called ‘fucking immigrants’ (Touma, 2017; Weaver and Laville, 2016). In September 2016, The Guardian contacted all EU embassies in London and inquired about their reported rates of racist and xenophobic incidents after the Brexit vote. Of the sixty incidents reported, all were perpetrated against Eastern Europeans. Three Western European embassies responded to The Guardian - Spain, France and Germany. They did not recount reports of abuse against their citizens. Most registered incidents were against Polish people (Weaver and Laville, 2016). Eastern Europeans in the UK had been confronted with hate crimes for the past decade, since the A8 wave of entry. Between 2012-2015, Northern Ireland police reported a 162% increase in racist crimes against Eastern Europeans. In 2010 a 20% rise in racist incidents against Poles was reported across Great Britain (The Conversation, 2016). The post-Brexit incidents were just the most recent round of such racist pulsations. Brexit will officially come into play in 2019. It remains to be seen what will happen with the A2 population when that time arrives. This section focused on the exclusionary treatment of A2 nationals within the UK. Despite being EU citizens and having the legal right to free movement within EU (prior to the Brexit vote), Romanian and Bulgarian migrants were not treated the same (as in equal) as other Europeans within the UK. The former transitional labour curbs and the recent Brexit vote (which was arguably a ballot against the new wave of intra-European migration) demonstrate that the A2 nationals are undesired in the British nation.

The dissertation uses the language of outcomes to map particular exclusionary aspects affecting two populations, as manifested in the labour market and within two different national contexts. On the one hand, skilled migrants to Canada, despite entering the country under the points system and despite possessing high credentials, language proficiency and employment experience, are excluded from the labour market. Their unemployment and underemployment rates are three times higher than those of their Canadian born counterparts. On the other hand, A2 nationals, despite being highly educated and despite their EU appurtenance, do not have the ability to exercise the same rights as other Europeans in terms of accessing the high end of the British labour market. Some could argue that, once the transitional labour curbs were lifted, in 2014, the A2 nationals secured the same formal rights with their fellow EU citizens in the UK. Existent forms of cultural discrimination prevent them, however, from exercising these very same rights. Moreover, their lower labour market positionality, resultant from years of transitional curbs, negatively weighs on their actual chances to upward mobility. Migrants’ desirability is connected with how they are imagined to fit (as in how they benefit) primarily the (national) labour market, and secondarily, the (national) economy. Skilled migrants to Canada are viewed to subsidy the economy. A2 migrants, to damage the British economy. In both cases, their movement gets regulated to fit national labour market needs. Admissibility to the nation and residency inside the nation become conditioned on a cost-benefit logic juxtaposed to the national economy. Critics may argue that is nothing inherently wrong with a country determining admissibility on anticipated labour market contributions. Such a perspective, however, suggests that migration process should be fostered only if they bring economic returns. It implies that migration should solely benefit the host countries and ignores that people leave behind their places of origins because socio- political and economic hardships, hence for the opportunity to a better life and not necessarily to benefit the host country’s economy. It morally divides migrants into those good enough to contribute to the economy and the bad ones who cannot easily do so. Morality, however, is not universal and cannot universally be about positive economic returns. It can be argued, in return, that people have historically relocated from one country to another and should continue to relocate for personal and structural reasons, for better life prospects, and not solely to serve the economies of their host societies.

2.3 Resolutions of inclusion and exclusion

Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion manifest in both contexts, Canada and the UK. Exclusion is covert for skilled migrants to Canada and overt for A2 nationals in the UK. The common denominator legitimizing their asymmetrical comparison is represented by their a priori right to be included into the nation. Skilled migrants to Canada are desired by the Canadian state. Selectively recruited on the basis of human capital skills, they have the right to fully participate in Canadian society. EU2 migrants are undesired by the British state, however, as EU migrants, they have the legal right (pre-Brexit anyway) to freely move within the Union, which forces the British state to tolerate them in society. A rightfulness premise is existent in both cases, either desired (Canadian state) or forced (British state) by the context. Legitimacies of belonging are not universally manifested. Resolutions to the marginalization of these migrant groups stem from the relationship that both of these populations partake with the state and subsequently from the various degrees of rightfulness attached to their legitimacies of belonging to the nation-state. Different rights are attached to differently classified groups, which in turn, differently shape their societal belonging. Not all (groups of) people are looked upon as being valuable contributors to society. Some matter more than others and have historically mattered more than others. For instance, during Medieval, Elizabethan times, differentiation was made between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Those deemed deserving were the impotent poor, the very sick or the pregnant women. The underserving poor were the able-bodied and the degenerates whose poverty was seen as a matter of their own fault. The 1834 British Poor Law reforms assumed that the poor were responsible for their own poverty and were capable to lift themselves from want through discipline and hard work. Appeals for relief were morally regulated by envisioning people as deserving and undeserving (Anderson, 2013; Graham, Swift & Delaney, 2012). A similar ideological narrative continues today. For instance, children living in poverty become the prototype of the deserving poor. They are helpless, they cannot provide for themselves, hence the state should assist them. If substance users, for example, live in poverty, the state refuses to assist them. Their poverty is deemed a matter of their own

fault and directly connected with their morally defective ways of life. This category of poor is therefore undeserving of support and the state sees no obligation to assist them. A similar logic applies to migrant populations. For instance, in relation to refugee entries, the language of ‘bogus’ asylum seekers or ‘safe countries’ of origin, divides refugee subjects into deserving and underserving. Other types of migrants are similarly divided. Skilled migrants to Canada embody the deserving prototype. They are envisioned by the Canadian state to benefit the market. Since they benefit the national economy, they become desirable, and, if excluded, state-efforts are carried out towards their inclusion. Their exclusion is interpreted as unjustified and in need of rectification. In contrast, A2 nationals embody the undeserving prototype. They are envisioned to damage the labour market. Since their presence into the nation is perceived as detrimental to the national economy, they become undesirable and state-efforts are carried out towards their expulsion from the British nation. Their exclusion is justified, hence not in need of regularization. The solutions adopted by the state to address the outcomes of inclusion and exclusion for both populations depend on how these populations are imagined to fit within national labour markets, within national communities of value, and how are they imagined to benefit national economies. The prevailing logic is similar to the one that unfolds in the context of interpersonal relationships. When we endear someone, we want to spend time with them, we want to see them and bring them into our world. When we do not, we barely make time for them. If they could stay away, then the farther they are, the better. Grounded in the desire to accommodate the wanted and the desire to reject the unwanted, the Canadian and British states have conceived two different resolutions to manage the societal participation of both of these populations. In the Canadian context, inclusionary policies and programs have been proposed as the desired state solutions to address the societal problem of immigrants’ exclusion. There is the need to (re)train, (re)frame, and change the excluded to no longer be excluded. In the British context, since the exclusion of A2 nationals is seen as justified, the state resolution has become about expulsion. Through the Brexit vote, A2 nationals are stripped of their right of free movement within the UK. Once Britain will be out of the EU, it will no longer be forced to accept entry for the undesired members of the Union. Both solutions are analyzed below.

2.3.1 Inclusion: The Candian solution

Canadian immigration policies select skilled migrants by virtue of their human capital skills as particularly indicative of potential/future productivity. As discussed in the previous section, the ulterior devaluation of such skills denies skilled migrants’ access to this much- desired productivity. Despite high educational levels, skilled migrants to Canada struggle in the labour market when compared with the native population. The government and civil society have been actively promoting inclusion as the ‘toute naturelle’ solution to remediate skilled migrants’ exclusion. From empirical models measuring integration to various public programming at all governmental levels (Thoreau, 2013; Tunis, 2013), the solution of inclusion becomes the transcendental universalistic project to shift the excluded particular (i.e., the immigrant), in need of inclusion (as an outcome), towards the included universal (i.e., Canadian). Chapter Four in the dissertation insists on the formation of this universal- particular logic and unpacks the manifestation of this logic. The idea of inclusion gets materialized into mentoring and skills training programs. As the recipient of the inclusionary transcendental project, the immigrant successfully becomes more Canadian and less of an immigrant. Once embodying national characteristics, the immigrant skills will no longer be devalued. Skilled migrants’ individuality will be reframed to overcome their problem of exclusion. The proposition of such micro resolutions - inclusionary mentoring and skills training programs- is often decontextualized from broader, macro policy approaches. The state drifts away from any assumed responsibility and transforms migrants’ lack of integration into a hyper-individualized problem. This leads to individualized solutions as opposed to those that would originate from a macro interpretative framework of systemic marginalization. Individualized approaches disregard that newcomers’ human capital attributes, although diagnosed as deficient traits, constituted, at some point in time, assets within their country of origin, and were additionally materialized into ‘selection points’ to secure entry to Canada. Such individualized programs aim to enhance newcomers’ ability to break down systemic barriers, rather than to address the generative logic that created these exclusionary outcomes (Bejan & Lightman, 2014). In many policy or program development areas, inclusion is not explicitly stated as a program or service delivery goal. Most of the mentoring and skills training programs are developed in

the name of social cohesion, integration and not specifically in the name of inclusion per se. Yet the idea of inclusion is tacitly guiding these programs. For instance, the Edmonton Career Mentorship program provides opportunities for skilled migrants to develop an understanding of “how to better integrate into the local labour market” (ERIEC, 2014). The ERIEC program is considered very successful. It involves a network of over fifty senior level Canadian employees, including Excel, Royal Bank of Canada, Enbridge and Telus (Deloitte, 2011). British Columbia’s SUCCESS program provides microloans to internationally trained professionals to help them pay for credentials upgrading once in Canada and to assist them with living expenses as they work towards professional certification (Bejan & Lightman, 2014). Sustained by a private-public partnership and operating two overseas offices, in Taiwan and Korea, the SUCCESS program functions with the overall mission of fostering integration and promoting multiculturalism. The Profession to Profession Mentoring Immigrants program developed by the City of Toronto’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Human Rights, directly brands itself under the auspices of inclusion, as one of the first programs to advance the ‘economic inclusion’ of internationally trained professionals (Bejan, 2010). Similar examples include: Ontario Bridge Training programs (Ontario Ministry of Citizenship & Immigration, 2013); the Ontario Public Service (OPS) Internship Program for Internationally Trained Individuals (OPS, 2013); the Mentoring Partnership -a program of the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council in collaboration with private employers and public and community service partners (The Mentoring Partnership, 2012); University of British Columbia’s Professional Development Program for International Teaching Assistants; the Connector program in Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Memorial University’s Professional Skills Development Program and International Student Work Experience Program (Bejan & Lightman, 2014). Many of these initiatives are generally coagulated under large networks comprised of several service provision agencies. For instance, the Mentoring Partnership relays on an alliance of Toronto-wide community organizations, including A.C.C.E.S, COSTI, Humber College, JobStart, JVS Skills for Change, Seneca College in the City of Toronto but also region-wide associations, including Dixie Bloor Neighbourhood Centre, Malton Neighborhood Services and A.C.C.E.S Brampton (i.e. Peel region), COSTI (i.e. York region) and Sheridan College (i.e. Halton) (Triec, 2006). Most skilled training programs are funded through Canada Job Fund agreements. The federal government has committed to

provide about $500 millions for such programs until 2020 (Government of Canada, 2015). Provincial governments have also showed support. In March 2012, the Ontario government established an Expert Roundtable on immigration, where several measures with the scope of advancing ‘immigrant integration’ and inclusion were actively promoting internships, mentoring and bridge training programs (Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration, 2012). Bridge training and mentoring programs have been referred to as the faster way to get immigrants into the workforce (Government of Canada, 2015). The mentors/mentees handbook prepared by the Mentoring Partnership, mandates that the immigrant needs to fit in the Canadian culture (Triec, 2006). ‘Canadian culture’ is implied to be fundamentally different from migrants’ culture from ‘back-home’. Mentors are to discuss with the mentees “terminology, body language, false assumptions, discomfort with certain culture-specific behaviours or habits, and more importantly lack of knowledge in how to address these concerns in an effective and sensitive manner” (Triec, 2006, p. 16). The onus is on the immigrant subject to be open to the guidance of what Canadian work-culture entails. A particular insistence is placed on compliance. Mentees are expected to be passive and docile. They need to be willing to listen, learn and share. The Mentoring Partnership handbook explicitly states that the scope of the program is not to find a job for the mentees. Work- placement programs would, at least in theory, spin the solution to its structural grounds, assuming they will place the onus on society to hire skilled migrants. Yet work-placement programs are rarely supported at an institutional level. Mentoring programs successfully secure funding because they do not pressure the system, they do not pressure employers, and do not solicit institutional energy to secure employment for mentees. Finding work becomes the sole responsibility of the mentee who needs to burden all change-related efforts required to secure employment. The immigrant cannot secure work upon arrival because she does not know the Canadian (i.e., national) work environment. It becomes a matter of individualized culpability, of an individualized cultural lack of knowledge on the part of the migrant. ‘Knowing’ and ‘understanding’ the national culture are processes tacitly reinforced to facilitate entry into the labour market. Once she acquires this knowledge, once she changes, only then will the migrant secure work. The solutions of inclusion somewhat acknowledge that structural barriers exist (i.e., they propose inclusion so the migrants can break down

these barriers) yet in this very same inclusionary process the onus gets placed on individualized forms of human and social capital. It is presumed that migrants can become included only when they are able to change the forms of capital that made them excluded. Mentoring and skill training programs allegedly aim to satisfy the needs of the migrant. What the migrant needs, however, is an actual job and not to understand the ‘culture’ of a job; although, for some understanding the ‘culture’ responds to some of their adaptation needs to the host society. Mentoring programs, however, also show how commitments to words are oftentimes performative (i.e, performing inclusion). They possess an instrumental function, that of circulating an institutionally fabricated image of diversity (Todd, Barnoff, Moffatt, Panitch, Parada, Mucina & Williams, 2013), without having to be accompanied by structural changes that would allow the materialization of such words. The speech act produces the effects it names, however, naming can be a way of not bringing something into effect (Ahmed, 2012). The rhetoric of commitment towards inclusion creates the illusion of such commitment, hence the performativity of inclusion. The Canadian state sees skilled migrants’ unemployment as an impediment to the development of Canadian economy and not as a setback for the migrants themselves. Such thinking was clearly articulated by Jason Kenney, the former CIC Minister, who overtly stated that skilled entrants must demonstrate their potential for economic success, so that they can fulfill the needs of Canadian economy (Black, 2013). From the perspective of the Canadian state, the problem of skilled migrants’ exclusion is not a problem of systemic inequality per se but rather one that affects the market. The symptoms of late capitalism - unemployment, underemployment, life on ‘deux bouts’, devaluation of human capital, and working below human capacity- are perceived to primarily hurt the Canadian market (let alone the market’s participation in the creation of these systems) and secondarily the migrants. The main sufferer is the market. This is exactly why inclusionary strategies for foreign-trained professionals have been strongly supported by the private sector. The chronic underemployment of skilled migrants represents a “significant cost” to the economy (Deloitte, 2011, p. 5), which is why there is an imperative to integrate landed immigrants into the workplace. If foreign born labour is underutilized, Canada loses on the opportunity to economically grow (Deloitte, 2011). In terms of employment and industry-specific gaps, the loss of these economic benefits is estimated to be anywhere between $4.1 and $5.9 billion

per year (Bejan & Lightman, 2014). Workforce integration is then promoted on behalf of the economic betterment of the market. Hiring immigrants becomes a business rather than a humanitarian imperative. Skilled migrants need to benefit the economy and the state intervenes to maximize their potential to do so. Social policy analysts refer to this logic as grounded within a so-called market-state paradigm. A market state approach re- conceptualizes the role of the state as partnering with, and supporting the market, by placing economic targets at the core of its policy directions. The tenet of welfare philosophy moves from benefiting people to benefiting the market (Graham, Swift, Delaney, 2012; Good Gingrich, 2003; Good Gingrich, 2008; Lightman & Lightman, 2017; Patten, 2012). Rather than protecting individuals from economic inequities - through progressive wealth redistribution, welfare assistance, and other educational and social programs -the Canadian government aims to integrate individuals into the market so they contribute to economic growth (Jenson & Saint- Martin, 2003). Social policies are then re-functionalized with the sole purpose of propping up economic returns (Jenson, 2010; Jenson & Saint-Martin, 2003). Such logic is reflected through a continually shifted accountability, away from the state and placed upon the individual (i.e., it is the individual in need of inclusion): newcomers are retrained to develop their employable abilities, as exclusion must not be the price paid by the state for their inability to contribute to anticipated economic returns. The market-state paradigm ideologically purports a social investment policy approach. The logic of social investment is not new within the Canadian political discourse - it was the 1980s when the social investment rhetoric began to circulate within policy-making fields (Jenson, 2010) (coincidently the time period when discrepancies in economic gains between newcomers and born Canadians started to accentuate). It is centered on the idea that the state is expected to act more like a business, to be entrepreneurial, and to make social investments that pay off (Jenson & Saint- Martin, 2003). Unnecessary expenditures are consequentially truncated: reforming social protectionism, dismantling governmental responsibility for welfare, and digging up profitable economic ratios to support the market (Good Gingrich, 2010; Jenson, 2010; Jenson, 2008). Inclusionary skills training and mentoring programs are the foreseen extension of social investment practices. A key concept within the social investment paradigm is that of time. Layered on ‘time’, the social investment logic is “centered on the present so as to build the future”

(Jenson & Saint- Martin 2003, p. 91). The idea of inclusion is conditioned in its materialization by the anticipation of a future where migrants move from being excluded into being included. The goal of any good businesses is to increase its profit margin (Jenson & Saint- Martin, 2003). Similarly, the state uses investment-type social policies to facilitate the realization of potential profits. Public investments get picked on their potentiality of yielding economic returns. Playing out on a present-future continuum, current social conditions are re- engineered to achieve future societal benefits. An investment is worthy in the present only by means of yielding revenues in the future (Jenson & Saint- Martin 2003). Inclusion is sold on its anticipated returns: integrated migrants will better the market, they will provide for themselves and will not relay on state resources to survive. Inclusion works in the present by delivering the promise of immigrants’ future undependability on the state. Which is why inclusionary programs are preferred in lieu of monetary state supports. This was clearly exemplified by the proposed policy measure brought forward by the Ontario Liberal Party in their 2011 electoral platform. The measure recommended a $10,000 tax credit for businesses to hire internationally trained professionals (Liberal Ontario, 2011). Such credits would become a “necessary social expenditure” (Jenson & Saint- Martin 2003, p. 88): hiring skilled migrants will result in a win-win situation; their employability will economically benefit all Ontarians since the government would not have to assist them later on. The solution of including the excluded, with its continual focus on re-framing and changing the ‘immigrant’ subject from ‘bad’ to ‘good’, from ‘unemployable’ to ‘employable’, seems nothing more than a band-aid solution, a doxa that paradoxically perpetuates exclusion and further differentiates between Canadians and newcomers, delegitimizing the excluded by the very act of legitimizing the included -as the one who never been excluded and having to include the excluded (Bourdieu, 1984; Bourdieu, 1979). It is why the issue of newcomers’ labour market exclusion, although defined by discrepancies in economic gains vis-à-vis born Canadians, is not publicly conceptualized as one of de facto inequality between the two groups. The rhetoric is about newcomers being unemployed and not about Canadians being employed. Social investments cannot be centered on equality. Investments need inequality for profit-making gains. The best they can do is to pave the way for the excluded to catch up to the advantageous status of the already included.

In acknowledging systemic barriers (i.e., labour market exclusion) but proposing individualized solutions (i.e., skills training programs), geared “towards combating social exclusion as an individual kind” (Good Gingrich 2003, p. 102), inclusionary strategies do not problematize the construction of newcomers’ social capital as inferior. Rather, they legitimize it as inferior. Inclusion gets promoted to increase the type of capital accumulation that is good enough to not exclude, justifying, in turn a perceived inferiority attached to currently excluded forms of capital. Solutions are framed with the aim of changing the (immigrant) deficit or moving towards a non-deficit, without questioning the labeling of this deficit as a deficit. Yet this is the very same logic that keeps newcomers’ forms of capital inferiorly legitimized. It implies that newcomers’ skills are not good enough, therefore the need for their retraining, and places full responsibility on migrants for their perceived inability to economically integrate. Their lack of success becomes individual rather than systemic in origin. It is important to also contest the mechanisms legitimizing certain forms of human and social capital as superior (i.e., Canadian) and other forms as inferior (i.e., immigrant). After all, newcomers’ skills, credentials and personal attributes were positively valued to facilitate migration to Canada. It is only upon arrival that these characteristics have been differentially devalued and subsequently inferiorized, via a weighting process comparing them with national human capital traits. Deemed good enough at some point to facilitate entry to Canada, these skills are now barely recognized. All of the sudden, something is deemed wrong with these migrants: their language is disagreeable, their accent too thick, their behavior is off, they do not know how to act in workplaces, nor how to adhere to conventional social practices. In creating a distinction between the included and the excluded, the devaluatory process of classification (Bourdieu, 1984) either infringed in law (credentialism) or symbolically (Canadian Experience) and culturally (Canadianness) inscribed, re-constructs newcomers’ human capital traits as inferior, justifying in turn their exclusion. Inclusion cannot subvert exclusion (since inclusion does not outrightly addresses the classificatory principle(s) producing exclusion). Focused on including the excluded, inclusion reproduces exclusion: its goal is to include and not to not exclude. This inferiorization of immigrants’ human capital traits is a process that locates a universal lack within the migrant. It is a logic that was oftentimes contested within the field of disability

studies for devaluing disability and superiorily valuing ability (Michalko, 2009; Morris, 1992, Oliver, 1992, Oliver & Barnes, 2012; Titchkosky, 2008). Immigrants are constructed as disabled for their lacked Canadian attributes. This is not to say that migrants and subjects with disabilities are one and the same but rather that both categories of subjects are framed on notions of ability and the lack of ability as markers of incapacity, through social processes that generate ideological constructions of what it means to be normal and respectively abnormal (Michalko, 2009). Skilled migrants’ credentials, education and work experience are seen to lack the competency to transcend from one geographical setting (homeland) to another (host nation). Migrants are perceived to possess ‘things’ that disable them from fully participating in the host society. Immigrants’ skills, knowledge and their forms of cultural and human capital are not part of who they are; their skills and education are something they have, and this something is actually deficitary. The societal expectation is for the disabled subject to adjust to disability (Michalko, 2009). A similar logic gets perpetuated with immigrant skills training programs; they aim to adjust migrants’ deficiency. Despite the rhetoric of multiculturalism, immigrants’ skills and levels of education are perceived as something that the immigrant subject needs to dispose of in order to become fully valued. Immigrantness is a condition that one might have, a contingency. If the immigrants can extricate themselves from this contingency, if they learn how to become more Canadian, if they can lose their Immigrantness, then they will be granted belonging. Otherwise they can stay in their disabling condition and continue their exclusion. Such differential discourse manifests in ableist and disabelist presuppositions and assumptions that delineate who is able bodied and included, based on already-constituted characteristics of able-bodiness. It is why the disabling judgement is mediated by the lack of ableism, the lack of Canadian experience, skills, credentials and so on. The lacked Canadian attributes are the (absent) traits that produce the disabling contingency of Immigrantness. It is only by juxtaposition to Canadian skills that immigrants’ skills are undervalued. It is not that their skills per se are inferior but rather that via comparison with the Canadian ones, via deviating from Canadian standards, and from Canadianness, they become disabling, as in lacking Canadian qualities. This lack of legitimizes newcomers’ forms of human and social capital as unworthy. Only within a context of transcending towards ableism (i.e., transcending towards Canadianness), through

inclusion, that the disabled become able. It is why the Points System operates as a risk preventative tool. The requirement of human and social capital skills is a risk protective artifact, to assure that no obstacles impede on immigrants’ capacity of becoming able, of acquiring the Canadian type of skills, post-migration. Despite its economical peculiarity, the Points System also functions as a cultural selection tool, ruling out classes of people unfit to fit within the ideal of Canadianness. The ‘points’ are the a priori protective remedy against a possible, undesired non-transcendentalism towards Canadianness. This logic has been reflected in the FSWP revisions announced in April 2014, which noted ‘adaptability to Canada’ (CIC News, 2014) as one of the key assessment criteria on the points grid. Adaptability to Canada was measured by: applicant’ period of past study in Canada, past work experience in Canada, and the presence of relatives in Canada. All these tangential connections with the holy land of the Canadian national territory are valued to facilitate entry and to manage the risk of a person not becoming part with the national. Constructed as deviant, disabled people are expected to individually adjust, to develop their own coping strategies, to be regulated and turned into people with normal productive status (Oliver & Barnes, 2012). Social policies, in this case, prompt to individualized solutions. Disabled people become objects about to be treated and changed via state supported programs and interventions. Their deviance (as sickness) is subjected to treatment (Oliver & Barnes, 2012). This is exactly what mentoring programs for immigrants aim to do. If the immigrant is unemployable because she is disabled, what needs to be done is to treat her disability, her deviance and make her able to participate in society, able to produce and untimely able to fully consume. Just as the assumption behind the problem of disability is that disability needs to be cured, or managed at the least, the assumption behind the problem of Immigrantness is that Immigrantness needs to fixed and subsequently managed via mentoring and skills training programs. The responsibility for this rehabilitation is still individualized. It is up to the individual subject to change its deviance to be fully included in society. This approach of course, might also be the preferred approach for several migrants. While the disability metaphor was used to highlight the structural grounding of the subject matter, its use must not take away from the fact that immigrants do have agency and they might willingly l choose to become fully participating economic subjects within

Canadian society and hence the contented beneficiaries of state-supported social investment policies. Strangers are included into the nation on conditional parameters, for as long as they consent to reproducing the nation (Ahmed, 2012). Participation to nation-building is what the migrant needs to give back in return. Otherwise, the migrant’s exclusion becomes readable as self-exclusion (Ahmed, 2012). Inclusion functions well if societal intentionality is about people taking on Canadian values. If societal desirability is about the well-being of the migrant, inclusion might not be the best approach. Solutions to problems can create new problems, or as Ahmed (2012) puts it, they can reproduce old problems in new forms. The resolution of inclusion falls within the faux-pas linearity of solving social problems; it is a provisional response that misses the centricity of exclusion and lacks the standalone conceptual capacity of de-centering and up-rooting exclusion. In other words, it does not eliminate the problem. The question of how to best re-formulate the problem as a non- problem continues to stand.

2.3.2 Brexit: The British resolution

Expulsion from the nation is about status dispossession. Generally speaking, immigrants are excluded not for what they are but for what they are not (Nail, 2015). A2 nationals are unvalued/undervalued in comparison with the British nationals as an idealized prototype. Their difference is not accepted by the national sameness. Although A2 subjects are European migrants and although Britain has for long been part of Europe, the British identity was always seen to encompass more than just a European identity (Green, 2017). Tied to its imperial past, Britain is much more at ease with Commonwealth migrants (not to infer that Commonwealth immigrants are not excluded from the British society) than with those from the Eastern Bloc: “The Caribbean and the South Asians all play cricket: The Poles don’t.” (Green, 2017, p. 46), some would argue. The most plausible resolution for dealing with this unaccepted difference is through forcing it out of the national sameness. Metaphorically speaking, the Brexit vote constitutes the culmination of a national centrifugal force (Nail, 2015) expulsing the undesired from the possibility of ever becoming part of the nation. This section argues that Brexit was largely a vote against the A2 migration in the UK.

It was the solution envisioned by the British state to deal with those contaminating the national community of value. On June 23rd 2016, Britain voted to leave behind forty years of EU membership. The results were 52% in favour of leaving. The referendum bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 28th May 2015 (House of Commons Library, 2015) although a draft bill was published in May 2013 by the Conservative Party (House of Commons Library, 2015). The UK applied for EU membership in 1961 and 1967. It eventually joined the Union in 1973. The UK economy was lagging behind its European neighbours, which is why the UK’s interest to join what at the time was just an aggregated economic community -EU originally formed a European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957- was more connected with free trade than to a cultural European integration (Armstrong, 2017). The 2016 referendum was not the first to cast a vote on EU membership. A former ballot took place in the UK in 1975. 67% of the population voted to confirm the EEC membership (House of Commons Library, 2015). According to the Office for National Statistics (2018), at the time of joining the Union, in 1973, UK had one of its lowest levels of GDP growth, similar to the ranks registered after the 2008 post -recessionary years, and the 1970s were not a time of economic troubles (see Figure 2). After years in the Union, the UK bounced back its money-spinning capacity. In 2016, at the time of Brexit, the UK had the second highest GDP in the EU, contributing 16% to the EU’s share, second only to Germany, whose GDP represented 21% of the Union (Eurostat, 2016). Brexit is a new phenomenon. There are few scholarly works written on the topic. Critics and supporters have both identified a combination of socio-political causes that led to this vote. Some argue that it was about a perceived lack of benefits conferred by the EU membership, some that it was about sovereignty, border controls and identity, and others argue it was about economics and the politics of British austerity.

Figure 2: Yearly estimates of GDP rates in the UK.

* Source: Office of National Statistics. Release date: 28th January 2018.

The political discussions preceding the Brexit referendum campaign were concentrated onto four key themes: sovereignty, competitiveness, the Eurozone and immigration (Armstrong, 2017). The UK was not happy with what it was getting out of the EU Membership, although some argued that, “If the EU worked well for any nation in Europe, it was the UK.” (Davies, 2016, p. 18). Indeed, the UK was very good at controlling EU’s influence across its national borders (Armstrong, 2017). It negotiated, for instance, opt- outs from the EU legislation. Opt-outs are a priori procedural clauses which exempt participation in various policy fields for certain Member States. It is important to note that not all EU states had the ability to negotiate such privileges, which is why some claimed that the EU is a differentiated political body, where not all countries are equal players at the Union’s diplomatic table (Bejan, 2016; Bejan, 2017; Bejan, Iorga-Curpăn & Amza, 2017). The UK negotiated opt-outs of the economic and monetary union, of the Schengen Agreement, of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and also in the area(s) of freedom, security and justice. The UK retained its sovereignty in the field of monetary policy through Protocol 25 of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. In other words, it was not required to adopt the Euro single currency (EUR-Lex, 2006) but was free to pursue its own fiscal policies (Davies, 2016). This exercise of freedom simultaneously placed the UK inside the EU but outside the Eurozone, conferring it “the best deal of any Member State during the 21st century” (p. 19) (Davies, 2016). The UK additionally negotiated Schengen opt-outs in order to secure

exclusive control over the management of irregular entries at its borders (Armstrong, 2017). Schengen was established as a transnational space with no internal border controls through the Amsterdam Treaty (Rigo, 2010). There are currently twenty-six Schengen states within the EU. Once a person would enter the Schengen area, she could freely move across the space, without having to go through additional controls (Bejan, 2015). If one was cleared to enter France, for example, she could travel to Italy afterwards without having to undergo passport checks. Not all EU Member States are part of the Schengen protocol. Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus and Romania are kept out due to the permeability of their borders, as the EU raised concerns about these states’ ability to control migrant entries (Bejan, 2015). The UK, however, simply refused to join the Schengen space, due to sovereignty claims over its borders. It continued its formal Common Travel Area arrangement, which gives entry clearance to the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK (GOV.UK, 2013). The UK additionally negotiated that provisions from the EU Charter of Fundamental Human Rights cannot infringe on its national laws (EUR-Lex, 2008). In relation to freedom, security and justice, it was Protocol 36 of the Lisbon Treaty that granted the British government the choice of opting out of the criminal justice measures (European Parliament, 2014). UK did, more or less, what it wanted in the EU. Despite its opt-out privileges, Britain still wanted more national control over its finances, overs its borders, over trade and over its laws (Armstrong, 2017). The Brexit campaign was initially overlaid on a binary ideological divide: The Leave and the Remain political canvasses (Armstrong, 2017). From the right, the Leave campaign was supported on the basis of British sovereignty over national matters and a refusal to abide by an EU driven policy agenda. It was centered on the slogan of Taking Back Control. Control over sameness (over British national matters) and for maintaining sameness (for protecting British national matters from anything that contaminates the national). Some argued that this slogan was reflecting an ideological orientation that combines nationalism and internationalism. The primary area of Taking Back Control was related to immigration matters; the internationalism was about the UK promoting itself as a global champion of free trade. Taking Back Control became about keeping Britishness: not only in terms of a protective labour market (i.e., British companies and British jobs) but also in terms of shutting down unwanted migration from Eastern European countries. The Brexit

vote was, for the most part, a vote against immigration. The British Election study (Prosser, Mellon & Green, 2016) asked respondents to identify, in their own words, what mattered most when deciding on the EU referendum vote. About 15,070 unique answers were collected. The responses were aggregated into ‘word clouds’ and displayed by using the frequency of the words to create a visual scaling of the text (Prosser, Mellon & Green, 2016). The largest words were the most frequently used. There are no empirical doubts that Brexit was an anti-immigration vote (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. British Election Study - Word Cloud.

*Source: The British Election Study. Release date: 7th November 2016.

Britain historically relied on border controls to manage migration (Boswell, 2003). With the EU membership, it had to partially hand over such forms of control. During the UK-EU negotiations that preceded the Brexit campaign, the UK wanted to cap the numbers of inter- EU migration, especially those of EU2 (Armstrong, 2017). This was a difficult request to accommodate, since such measures would contradict the EU Treaty Principles of free movement and labour market access for its members (Armstrong, 2017). The UK proposed a

residency requirement of four years minimum as a condition for the allocation of social assistance benefits and the restriction of EU workers’ child benefits to children with residency in the UK (Armstrong, 2017). It was estimated that child benefit and welfare payments totaled thirty million GBP, as 20,000 EU nationals were receiving payments for about 34,000 children residing in their country of origin (BBC, 2016). The rhetoric of saving money by way of restricting benefit claims was a strong point in the Leave campaign. From the center-left side of the political spectrum, supporters have argued for a vote to Remain, on grounds of reforming the EU and of electing progressive governments to block the ascension of far-right political groups (Bejan, 2016). Leaving the EU was also connected with a fear of recession, job loss and currency devaluation (Armstrong, 2017). Overall the Remain argument was weakly formulated in the Brexit campaign. It was more or less framed on supporting the status quo (Armstrong, 2017). The Remain vote was largely sustained by the Labour party and backed by major multicultural cities: London, Manchester, Bristol and Liverpool. Ireland voted with 56% and Scotland with 62% in favour of Remain. London was the major city resisting the Brexit vote. London is one of the most multicultural cities in the world: There are over 200 languages spoken daily, a third of its population is born outside the UK and London’s Mayor is a practicing Muslim (Green, 2017). There were two London boroughs, however, that yielded Leave votes: Barking/Dagenham and Havering. Not that long ago, these areas predominantly consisted of white-British ethnicity. The 2001 Census shows the white-British population in Barking/Dagenham to represent 80.86%. This number dropped to 49.46% in the 2011 Census (London Borough of Barking of Dagenham, 2015). The largest population changes were for the Black/African/Caribbean/Black British ethnicity (reported regional numbers were already conflated on ethnicity; it is unspecified how many were migrants and how many were British-born), which increased from 0.44% in 2001 to 15.43% in 2011. The second largest population increase was for those identified as White Other in the Census data (assuming these were representing mostly EU8 and EU2 migrants given the 2004 and 2007 waves of EU membership), which increased from 2.65% in 2011 to 7.81% in 2011 (London Borough of Barking of Dagenham, 2015). Nationality was not recorded in these analyses, yet anecdotal evidence suggests that entire areas in Dagenham are inhabited by Eastern European migrants (Greenslade, 2016). Population changes for Havering indicate the largest increase to be for the new EU population (reported as

combining A8 and A2 entries), from 1% in 2011 to 7% in 2011. The second increase was comprised of immigrants from Africa, from 2% to 8% (Havering London Borough, 2015). Since area-specific demographic analyses conflate nationality with ethnicity, it is difficult to append an explanation of how much these changes were related to racial or national composition. Black-British racialized subjects cannot be expelled from the nation (even if they are excluded from other societal dimensions) in the way that non-citizens, of African descent, or of Romanian and Bulgarian descent, could be. Since the Brexit vote had a strong anti-immigration rhetoric as its focal point, hence a focus towards non-citizens, it can be inferred that the changes in the A2 population in both of these boroughs had much to do with these areas swinging their vote towards leaving the EU. Indicative of this logic is also the increase in National Insurance Registration numbers for Romanians after 2014 (the lifting of transitional curbs for A2 nationals) which doubled those put forward by the EU8 nationals (Armstrong, 2017). An additional story unfolds in Havering -unemployment doubled between 2008 and 2014 (Armstrong, 2017). The post-2008 austerity measures imposed in the UK could have made the EU contributions seem unnecessary (Armstrong, 2017) in lieu of local investments in domestic social services. Yet the UK was receiving money back from the EU through the redistribution of several funds, including the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF), the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund (EAGF), the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the European Social Fund (ESF) (Armstrong, 2017). What might have bothered the public, however, was the gradual decline in the amount of these funds, decline directly associated with the enlargement of the Union. Since the new adjourning states were less prosperous, a large part of the EU funding was now going to the Eastern countries. The UK’s share of EU funds declined from 25% in 1973, to 2.5% by 2016 (Armstrong, 2017). The austerity argument rallied proponents for the Brexit vote from the left side of the political spectrum. Indeed, the nationalist right was not the only one supporting Brexit. Some on the radical left, including critical thinkers such as Tariq Ali and many writing for the Jacobin, showed a strong support for Lexit (i.e., a Leftist Brexit), as an anti-establishment, anti-austerity and anti-capitalist vote, framing the ideological premise of Lexit as analogous to Grexit, and reflecting an overall public disenchantment with EU’s neoliberal politics (Bejan, 2015; Davies, 2016; Hallward, 2016). It is impossible, however, to know if austerity

caused the xenophobic and anti-immigrant symptoms that propped the Brexit vote. There are no longitudinal studies measuring societal attitudes pre-post austerity. Moreover, the austerity in the UK was nothing like the one in Greece. Greece has the highest unemployment rate within the Union (Horvat & Žižek, 2014). This rose from 8.3% in 2008, to 12.6% by 2010, to 23% by 2012, and to 24.6% by September 2015 (Eurostat, 2015). When Greece defaulted on its memorandum terms, on 1st July 2015, Europe froze the Greek banking system (The Guardian, 2015a) and imposed firm capital controls (e.g., ATM withdrawals of up to 60 Euros maximum per person per day). The Grexit and Lexit comparisons do not hold. Greece and the UK had different levels of power within the Union. The UK possessed many privileges and it was an influential Member State. Greece did not have a say. In the summer of 2015, when the Greek people voted in a similar referendum to reject the EU austerity package (60.31%), Greece could not easily do so (The Guardian, 2015b). The only thing in common between Grexit and Brexit is the act of exiting. None of their other circumstances surrounding their ‘exits’ are remotely comparable. The idea of an anti-establishment Lexit makes sense at the abstract level, however, in aligning with the Leave campaigners, the Lexit supporters ended up sustaining a pro-establishment vote. Consequentially supported by Eurosceptics from both sides of the political spectrum -the Trade Union Socialist Coalition, the Leave.Eu supported by UKIP, or Vote Leave supported by the Conservatives Michael Gove and Boris Johnson (Armstrong, 2017) -the Leave campaigners were all about strong international trade policies to better position Britain on a global scale (Green, 2017). Labour and Conservative representatives have both united against Brexit over trade. The Conservatives wanted global trade and expansions beyond the EU area. Labour wanted to increase its domestic industries (Armstrong, 2017). The Brexit vote did not have an anti-establishment effect although the intentionality of voting Leave could have been abstractedly manifested as anti-establishment. The EU, however, has never played a major role in national matters of health, education and welfare. The fact that Britain choose to pursue a national politics of austerity and neoliberalism (Balibar, 2016), has nothing to do with the EU but with Britain’s own ideological choice (Emejulu, 2016; Khalili, 2017). While EU and the UK legislation is somewhat intertwined, data from the UK Statute Law database shows that between 1980 and 2009, out of 1,302 UK Acts, only 6.8% of the primary legislation (Statutes) and 14.1% of the secondary legislation

(Statutory Instruments) incorporated EU legal obligations (House of Commons, 2010). The proportions of EU laws integrated by other Member States range from 6% to 84% (House of Commons, 2010). This shows that the UK did not have to pursue EU obligations more than other Member States and to a certain extent, that the EU obligations were only at a minimum incorporated within the UK legislation. Again, the majority of EU laws were implemented in the areas of freedom of movement, respect for human rights, ascensions of new members, and the EU structural funding, and not in matters of internal affairs, such as education, information, culture, social security or family law. Matters of domestic control cannot be tied with an ultra-nationally imposed EU legislation, hence Brexit as an anti-interfering, anti- establishment vote against a draconian super-national body does not particularly hold. More so, many of the economic problems within the economically disadvantaged areas, could have been outset by the incoming EU funds, either through ERDF which financially supports have-not regions, or through ESF which supports labour market participation. Paradoxically for some, the regions that got the largest amount of funding back, such as Wales and Cornwall, have voted to leave (Armstrong, 2017). For others, such a dependence “on the beneficence of wealthy liberals” was seen as an unlikely recipe for satisfaction with the Union (Davies, 2016, p. 13). Others have additionally argued that the Brexit vote was misread as a working-class revolt. Higher numbers of white constituents casted their ballots towards Leaving the EU (Khalili, 2017), hence it was reasoned that Brexit was rather a ballot showing white support across class lines. Taking the vote as being associated with electorates’ identitarian features, brings little significance to associated analyses on the matter. What is more important, however, is what the vote was for (i.e., intentionality) and whose rights was the vote going to affect? Simplistic statements which conflate migration and citizenry within the notion of race, erase the fact that citizenry, prior to other identitarian markers, is the one shaping the future distribution of differential rights. Institutional measures that restricted the A2 access to the British labour market as well as the media frenzy that attacked these people for years are not, all of the sudden, one week prior to the Brexit vote, merely trivial matters. Saying that Brexit was a vote of white supremacism (Emejulu, 2016; Khalili, 2017; Pawson, 2016) erases the fact that it was primarily a vote against the A2 migration (since the negotiations that catalyzed the referendum were about capping the numbers of A2 entries), thereby erasing a dimension of marginalization that the A2 nationals

have to encounter and will continue to encounter in the years post-ceding the Brexit vote. Racialized British people will not be excluded from the nation post Brexit. It is only the non- citizens, racialized and white, that will be expelled. Non-EU citizens most likely had different (i.e., non-EU) entry routes (i.e., given the UK’s border restrictions); the ‘older’ EU subjects (i.e., from the original EU countries), the self-labeled A class migrants (King, 2017) might find some ways to stay, hence it is the B-class EU subjects that will most likely have to leave the UK. Indeed, after the Brexit ballot, growing numbers of Eastern Europeans have left and arrivals from the former Soviet bloc decreased significantly (Djankov, 2017). The UK additionally discussed the possibility of introducing visas for Poland, Bulgaria and Romania after Brexit (Gotev, 2017). There were no talks about introducing visas for France or Germany, for example. Brexit was not about imagining Britishness as white but rather about imagining Britishness as being confined to national lines. That the national is also white, wealthy and patriarchal is of course the second half of the story, albeit a story for another dissertation. Nationality, however, is key in transnational analyses comparing how states are dealing with the issues of inclusion and exclusion of migrant populations. Paradoxically, nationality is written as invisible in a vote that was all about keeping nationality. Conflating race with immigration, whiteness with nationality, and whiteness with Europeanness, leads to unilateral analyses of whiteness as victimhood in instances where nationality is accelerated to serve as the victimization platform. Some connected the anti-immigrant sentiment of the Brexit campaign with the refugee crisis that confronted Europe in 2015. UKIP put out a poster during the campaign, depicting a blown-up image of Nigel Farage next to a convoy of thousands of refugees photographed queuing at the EU’s borders. Reducing the immigration argument that propped the Brexit vote to the dissemination of this poster (Omonira-Oyekhanmi, 2016), which was clearly distributed to misinform voters, wrongfully creates the impression that the UK was duty-bound by its EU membership to settle refugees. It is important to note that the UK was not obliged to take in any asylum seekers that have entered the Mediterranean region in 2015. The UK had an opt-in on the matter (Bejan, 2016; Bejan, 2017a), meaning it was in a position to choose participation in the European Commission rules on migration (European Commission 2015a). The UK chose to not contribute to the EU’s relocation scheme, which intended to transfer, between 2015-2017, some of the persons in need of international

protection that entered the front-line states of Italy and Greece. The intention of the relocation mechanism was to implement a corrective ‘burden-sharing’ system that would ease out some of the pressure felt by the states confronted with a heavy number of asylum applications (European Commission, 2018). While Ireland exercised its opt-in right (Guild, Costello and Moreno-Lax 2017) and launched a total of 1,152 pledges, subsequently relocating 552 numbers of asylum seekers, the UK did not. The UK barely pledged to take in a number of 20,000 refugees for the next five years (Dearden 2016) solely through the resettlement scheme (Nardelli & Arnett, 2015). Of note, relocation is different from resettlement. Resettlement applies to the transfer of non-EU or stateless persons in need of international protection to a EU state. Relocation strictly refers to the transfer of persons already claiming asylum in Europe, hence already located within an EU Member State (Bejan, 2017b). A vote for Brexit in this case has no alteration effect on the numbers of asylum seekers entering the UK from the EU, since the UK’s refusal from participating in relocation efforts was legally protected by the Lisbon Treaty. The UK was already in the position to exercise control over its non-EU migration. It was the EU2/EU8 migration that was contingent on Brexit matters. Hypothetical anxieties regarding the entry of refugees within the Schengen space are additionally unfounded. The Dublin agreement (European Parliament, 2013) bounds asylum claims to the entry state as the first point of irregular entry, meaning that asylum seekers had to stay in the state of entry or, if participating in the relocation scheme, in the transfer state of their relocation. They cannot freely move within Schengen, and moreover, the UK is not part of Schengen. The projected fear of the non-EU migration was a media artefact. Britain, however, was unable to legally stop the increased Eastern European influx. At the time of the referendum, the numbers of EU migrants were the highest ever -284,000 (Armstrong, 2017), although, these figures still represented lower percentages than those of other EU states. At the time of the referendum, EU2 migration constituted 25% of all EU entries (Armstrong, 2017). Indeed, there was a spike in the A2 numbers but only because people were allowed to finally enter the UK. It is inaccurate to compare the post-2014 period with antecedent years (when A2 entries were restricted) and be shocked to observe a difference. People would noticeably come in upon lifting the border controls. Brexit, however, became the necessary step towards the expulsion of EU2/EU8 from the nation, who were perceived to invade the UK. Paradoxically, defining the Brexit

vote as one against a loosely defined term of ‘immigration’ erases questions about who are the immigrants that the vote was against. Resulting primarily from the desire to protect national borders and to fight against the right of free movement within EU, Brexit was an effort to impose Britain as Britain and to negate what contaminates Britain. The negation of A2 nationals frames the understanding of what UK gets to be in relation to, but also away from Europe. It delineates in turn, the idea of Britishness and the parameters of Britain as a national community of value. The Brexit vote disposed of those unfit to fit in, not only for whom they represent but also in behalf of what Britain represents. Brexit has turned symptomatic of protecting a vague ideal of Britishness mapped on national terms. This Chapter showed that the outcomes of inclusion and exclusion are not universally manifested across particular geographies. In Canada, the excluded are high-skilled, racialized migrants. In Britain, the excluded are low-skilled, white migrants. Both societies exclude racialized, white, high-skilled and low-skilled people. The solutions envisioned by the state to address the situations of excluded populations are again particular, based on how these populations are imagined to fit within national labour markets and within national communities of value. For desired migrants, state-efforts are carried out to include them. For undesired migrants, state-efforts are carried out to further exclude them. The next chapter moves the discussion towards some of the explanations framed for these problems of inclusion and exclusion, in order to examine the idea of whiteness as an explanatory parameter in grounding interpretations of inclusion and exclusion as they relate to migrant populations.

2. Explanations of inclusion and exclusion

3.1 The Rubik’s Cube

Various parameters in society determine the composition of national geo-political spaces. Identitary markers, such as those of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc., are oftentimes used as taxonomic descriptors to assess ontological sameness and difference within the framework of the nation-state. Such descriptors are appended to classify groups and to

analyze the distribution of inclusionary/exclusionary outcomes for the members representing such groups. Take the Rubik’s Cube as a metaphorical example. To solve the Cube, one needs to arrange its different colours by certain criteria of sameness. Each layer/facet of the Cube needs to contain singular colours. The logic of attributing coloured sameness for every layer of the Cube divides ontological interpretations of what is deemed same and different for each facet of the Cube but also of what is deemed same and different a priori, for every colored square within the Cube, squares singularly juxtaposed to prototypically coloured facets, whose prototypical attributes result from the logic dividing the quadrants of the Cube, logic that posits, in return, how the squares within the Cube are imagined to fit within its parameters. Following the Rubik logic, the Cube is solved when colour is homogeneously highlighted on every facet. It is a logic that transforms heterogeneity into homogeneity. Imagine you are trying to solve the Cube and you encounter an impasse: there are two red squares within the blue facet (and evidently two blue squares within the red facet, but let us say, for the sake of the argument, that you simply examine the blue facet). Since the layer should be coloured blue, in principle, the red squares are regarded as different, and their difference becomes the main obstacle in solving the Cube. If only they were blue, the Cube would be easily disentangled. By way of their different colour, the red squares are excluded from what constitutes blue, homogenous sameness. The red squares, however, are deemed different for being red simply because the logic of solving the Rubik Cube requires that each facet of the Cube has to contain the same colour, and for the particular facet in question, the colour should be blue. In other words, the red squares are not excluded because their colour is red but on the basis of a logic that holds that within the blue quadrant all the squares should be blue. There are two ways of exiting from this impasse and solving the Cube: finding a logical method to move the red squares into the blue quadrant or painting the red squares blue so that their red attributes would go unnoticed. Analyses of inclusion and exclusion for marginalized populations oftentimes use the characteristics of diverse groups (i.e., their identitarian markers) to explain why segments of the population are included in society while others are excluded. They define what makes the red squares red and how the colour red explains exclusion from the blue quadrant. Solutions are then concentrated either on how the red squares can be made blue to no longer be excluded or on how to reform the blue quadrant to include additional coloured squares on its facet. The first approach,

abstractly speaking, would resemble assimilation, since group characteristics need to be changed to facilitate inclusion (in practice however, processes of assimilation are not unidirectional since immigrants’ presence also changes the character of the host society). The Second Chapter showed that mentoring and skills training programs for landed immigrants in Canada follow the logic of assimilation, by changing the migrant subject to become worthy of inclusion (in practice again, Canadian workplaces also change by aiming to accommodate migrants, yet the power differentials between born Canadians and immigrants continue to subsist). The second solution would resemble the ‘tolerant’ politics of diversity and multiculturalism. Pressure is placed on specific quadrants of the Cube to extend their parameters in order to abide by access and equity programs and to include diverse groups. Such solutions, however, pertain to those with legal status and citizenship within the nation. Migrants are differentially entitled to diversity rights, based on whom they represent as migrants. For instance, employment positions across regularized industries and sectors within Canada show preference towards applicants that already hold permanent residency or citizenship. Migrants can take advantage of access and equity programs only if they possess Canadian residency. Diversity works for citizens or for the soon-to-be citizens. Formal citizenship pathways confer the right to ask for rights, such as the right to be included in employment equity actions. A migrant cannot access nor ask the state for rights immediately upon entering the nation. Diversity is blended on assimilationist principles. It specifically caters to citizens and would-be citizens. Moreover, diversity tends to be solely focused on the symptom of the problem rather than the deeper roots of the problem: forcing the inclusion of diverse squares into a homogeneous facet of the Cube does little in terms of altering the logic that constructed coloured homogeneity as a requirement for solving the Cube. The issue is not that the national never changes by including immigrants and solely intends to keep its homogeneity. At stake here is the logic that differentially positions subjects as included and excluded in relation to a benchmark that originates in a presumed homogeneity of the national as principle of differentiation. Parameters of sameness and difference are not universal but context specific. The Rubik’s Cube will be differently solved every time, depending on how the differently coloured squares are pre-arranged prior to solving the Cube. The logic of solving the Cube is universal, that is, the dialectical logic of positioning the standard of homogeneity and

heterogeneity by coloured parameters, however, the squares making up the parameters of sameness and difference are differentially pre-arranged, metaphorically speaking, in different socio-political contexts, and contingent on contextual factors, themselves determining not only the descriptive but also the interpretive characteristics of the parameters. The category of whiteness (and race) constitutes one such parameter alongside many others in society, including gender, class, sexuality etc. This parameter is oftentimes framed to explain the descriptive arrangement of a particular facet of the Cube and framed to infer that characteristics associated with particular squares (i.e., white or racialized) within the facet are the ones that confer meanings of inclusion and exclusion. If the logic of the Cube determines that a singular parameter should be white, for example, the particular characteristics of the squares (i.e., identitarian features) become appended to describe the outcomes of inclusion and exclusion as they pertain to specific (white or racialized) elements within the particular quadrant. Such an explanation, however, brings little illustrative insight to the logic that positions identitary boundaries. This chapter addresses the inadequacy of ontological whiteness as a universal taxonomy of analysis to confer explanations of inclusion and exclusion for migrant populations. Before proceeding with this discussion, an overview of explanatory suppositions that pertain to the exclusion of both types of migrants, skilled migrants in Canada and respectively A2 migrants in the UK, are provided below. It is important to enumerate what other rationalizations, besides the taxonomy of whiteness and race, have been framed to discuss matters of inclusion and exclusion for the migrant populations in question.

3.1.1 Skilled migrants in Canada

Skilled migrants’ exclusion from the Canadian labour market has been primarily explained within the literature via three analytical viewpoints: social capital; racialization; and state-supported neoliberalism. Two of these theoretical accounts - the perspectives of social capital and that of racialization- heighten the differential traits of the migrants (i.e., the differential characteristics of the squares within a Cube) as explanatory for their exclusion from the Canadian labour market. The third one, the hypothesis of neoliberalism orientates the matter structurally, as it focuses on the logic determining the composition of the Cube.

The social capital perspective has long been used in migration studies as the traditional lens for contextualizing newcomers’ labour market exclusion and for documenting skilled migrants’ earnings, employment outcomes and job-related trends over time (Phythian, Walters & Anisef, 2010; Reitz, 2001). It mirrors a typical economic theory, which attributes the lack of participation in the economy to individualized human and social capital deficits. It is the shortfall of one’s skills that generates one’s experience of poverty (Hunter, 2010). Lack of Canadian work experience, lack of transferable skills and unfamiliarity with Canadian workplace practices, have been framed, through social capital perspectives, as the lacked prerequisites that would otherwise confer economic success (Schuller, 2000). Lacking qualifications becomes the explanatory basis for unemployment and downward economical mobility among skilled migrants (Bejan, 2012); legitimizing migrants’ human capital as deficient, diagnosing it as a social problem (Webb, 2001) and transferring the responsibility for exclusion on newcomers’ themselves (Bejan, 2011). The assumption that economic performances are determined by human and social capital attributes that one brings to the labour market- economic, linguistic, cultural, educational, professional skills and credentials (Bauder, 2003; Dowding & Razi, 2006; Reitz, 2001; Simich, Beiser, Stewart & Mwakarimba, 2005) -infers an intrinsic individual culpability for instances where newcomers are unable to integrate economically (Phythian, Walter & Anisef 2010). Claims that skilled migrants’ credentials may differ in “productivity enhancing content,” that “an immigrant’s education may be less relevant to the needs of the Canadian labour market,” (Boyd & Thomas, 2001, p. 113) or that one’s place of birth has an effect on occupational status (Boyd & Schellenberg, 2008), trigger an ‘immigrant fault’ explanation for the problem of exclusion. For instance, documenting migrants’ lack of information vis-à-vis the assessment of foreign credentials, infers an individualized culpability for their unfamiliarity with Canadian labour markets demands. Considering linguistic skills as liable for migrants’ disadvantageous position in the labour market unjustly compares their language levels to those possessed by native English speakers. Attributing occupational discrepancies between medically-trained (born Canadians) and newcomers to immigrants’ lower average years of schooling (Boyd & Schellenberg, 2008), reproduces the assumption that quality of education equals quantified years of Canadian formal enrolment. Having the ‘Canadian experience’ requirement as the benchmark for conferring labour market integration, disregards the fact that it is nearly

impossible to acquire such experience for newly arrived immigrants (Bejan & Lightman, 2014). Such myopic reasoning erases the power differentials existent within the labour market between native Canadians and landed immigrants, where the appropriation of material (i.e., economic, employment earnings) and symbolic (i.e., Canadian experience) goods is skewed in favour of those born in Canada, thereby impeding on newcomers’ ability to exit their subordinated positions. Those lacking the desired attributes (i.e., Canadian experience, familiarity with workplace practices) are the ones excluded either tangibly or symbolically, having to adapt to the very same conditions that invalidate their forms of capital. Social capital perspectives draw attention away from structural matters. They legitimize the rhetoric of newcomers’ educational credentials as being inferiorly different, without contesting the devaluation practice that created them as different in the first place. Implying that foreign credentials are of mediocre caliber does not question the devaluation process that rendered foreign credentials as being of lower value. Stating that “the purpose of accreditation is to assure public health and safety” (Boyd & Schellenberg, 2008) fails, for example, to question what public health and safety mean and how such terminology legitimates an exclusionary accreditation process. Skilled migrants are required to pass the Medical Council of Canada’s Evaluating Examination (MCCEE) on the basis of public health safety concerns. Why is it de facto assumed that different forms of knowledge are dangerous to Canadian public health? And why are not such assumptions made the other way around? How different, after all, is one human body, from one corner of the world to another? Suppose that evidence can be provided to show that Canadian medical training differs in quality from other countries, and that ununiformed standards would lead to problematic practice models, the state could, in this instance, provide subsidies for upgrading the existent skills and knowledge sets possessed by newcomers. Otherwise, a reductionist reasoning gets perpetuated, which decontextualizes the construction of Canadian regulatory processes as benchmarks for credential assessment. It concomitantly reinforces the ‘innate ideal’ as the comparative standard and legitimizes the inclusionary path that newcomers are expected to follow -towards Canadianness and away from Immigrantness. A study conducted by the Medical Post found that physicians trained outside North America have been facing professional disciplinary measures, more often that Canadian nationals (Belluz, 2012). These measures were defended on claims that doctors are not used with the Canadian system and

they are prone to commit mistakes, which is why the requisite for foreign-trained doctors to abide by Canadian standards should be the one to guide medical practice. If medical knowledge is below these standards, physicians should be mandated to conduct additional training (Belluz, 2012). It is only after foreign professional standards are altered to the level of Canadian standards that physicians should be licensed by the Medical Council of Canada (MCC) and allowed to enroll in the Canadian Medical Register to fully practice in Canada. Despite the argument of presumed differences in the culture of medical practice (i.e., appointment keeping, disclosure of patient information, professional relationships) and not in the actual practice, the MCC licensing requirement starts from the assumption that immigrants’ skills are below the national standards and they can only achieve ethical parity once the foreign trained professionals pass the MCC Qualifying Examination. The Canadian standard is explicitly labeled on national grounds and particularly defined via the juxtaposition to what is not part of the national. Policymaking speaks the positivist language. Numbers constitute the primary means to shed light on an issue, to define a problem or to frame it as commendable or as deserving of public attention. A higher number of differentially positioned red squares within the blue quadrant would definitely lead to greater incentives for discussing these squares’ contextual situation. Discrepancies in employment outcomes between Canadians-born citizens and newcomers reflect a problem of numbers. There is no intent here to diminish the usefulness of positivist approaches in informing policy positions. Numbers draw attention to the factors contributing to skilled migrants’ exclusion. However, this model of operationalizing the problem, where migration management is grounded within an epistemological framework of positivism and objectivism that quantifies migrants as numbers, as ‘objects’ to be managed, leads us to falsely reason that equalizing the numeric equation will ultimately solve the problem. How we understand things also determines how we name, define and conceptualize them. An exclusively positivist frame of interpreting skilled migrants’ exclusion deflates from analytical examinations that could critically interrogate the logic framing the issue of exclusion as directly connected with the lack of human capital attributes on the part of skilled migrants; the logic reproducing the devaluation of their educational levels, their field of study, or their level of language proficiency; and the logic reconstructing accreditation processes to qualitatively compare educational standards with Canadian, national

benchmarks. Numbers subsequently reproduce the very same phenomenon they aim to elucidate. Newcomers’ economic exclusion becomes the objective reality, the status quo, the orthodoxy, the ‘what is’, the structuring condition that triggers the use of inclusion as the rightful vision of the world (Bourdieu, 1985). Assumed that exclusion diminishes social capital (Caidi & Allard, 2005), the state invests in whatever efforts necessary to generate new forms of capital that will no longer exclude (Hyman, Meinhard & Shields, 2011). As discussed in the preceding chapter, inclusion becomes the misguided solution, delegitimizing the excluded by the very act of legitimizing the included. It disregards that people were selected on human capital attributes that qualified them for entry to Canada. It was in Canada that these attributes no longer served as assets but were transformed into liabilities, into forms of capital that exclude. Social capital perspectives take for granted the logic of capital distribution. They focus on creating access for the excluded through the acquisition of legitimized (i.e., national) forms of capital, without ever questioning the cultural processes that hierarchize various forms of capital to justify labour market marginalization. Social capital interpretations are complicit in perpetually reproducing exclusion. They attribute the outcomes of exclusion to migrants, due to their perceived lack of capital (Good Gingrich, 2008), rather than to a supervening logic that determines inclusionary/exclusionary societal positioning. Social capital perspectives explain why the red squares are red within the Cube and how their red characteristics determine their exclusion from the blue quadrant. However, at no point do they explain why the quadrant follows the blue aesthetics of positioning in the first place. A second explanation for the outcomes of exclusion in the case of skilled migrants to Canada is that of racialization. The leading works over the past two decades or so argue that discrepancies in employment outcomes between landed immigrants and born Canadians, have accentuated once Canada expanded its immigration policies to select higher numbers of racialized individuals from the Global South (Nichols & Tyyskä, 2015; Valiani, 2010). Starting with the 1967 points system and the removal of nationality-based restrictions, Canadian immigration policy shifted away from recruiting European migrants and diversified entries on racialized countries of origin (George, 2010; Hyman, Meinhard & Shields, 2011). From 1999 onwards, the top source countries of immigration to Canada were the Philippines,

China, India and Pakistan, each of them contributing more than 28,000 migrants per year (George, 2010; Satzewich, 2015). These countries were followed by entries from the US, France, Iran, UK, Haiti and the Republic of Korea (Satzewich, 2015). Despite higher entries of racialized subjects, it was claimed that Caucasian immigrants continued to be preferred, a favoritism tied with discretionary visas-granting regimes (Satzewich, 2015). For instance, until 2002, FSWP applications contained a ‘personal suitability’ rubric, which was seen to carry racial bias, since it relied on visa officers’ judgements (Satzewich, 2015). The personal suitability requirement was removed in 2012 with the introduction of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (Satzewich, 2015). Racialized discrimination is oftentimes pinned as the main determinant of precarious economic outcomes for newly arrived immigrants. As Canada became more diverse, discrimination based on racial grounds started to accentuate. Racialized immigrant workers were relegated to the lowest segments of the labour market and this materialized into high levels of racialized poverty (Block & Galabuzi, 2011; George; 2010; Nichols & Tyyskä, 2015; Snyder, 2010). In other words, this analytical position argues that immigrants are succeeding less in accessing the labour market because of their identitarian racial markers and the ways these markers are perceived within the Canadian workplace culture. Unrecognition of foreign credentials (George, 2002), challenges related to re-accreditation (Boyd & Schellenberg 2008), issues of linguistic, cultural and educational bias (Dowding & Razi 2006) and employers’ discriminatory demands for Canadian experience (Reitz, 2001; Sakamoto, Chin & Young, 2010), have all been conceptualized as markers of racial discrimination. The Canadian experience requirement was particularly theorized as a tool of alleged de-racialization that devises racialized effects (Bhuyan, Jeyapal, Ku, Sakamoto, and Chou, 2017). It was argued, for instance, that the prerequisite of Canadian experience compels one to be proficient in English or French, a requirement regarded as denoting familiarity with a white work-culture (Bhuyan, Jeyapal, Ku, Sakamoto, and Chou, 2017). Such unilateral reasoning is disputable. For instance, FSWP applications require language proficiency in English and French at the application stage, hence preceding the Canadian experience constraint. A migrant from Hungary, Albania or Greece for example, will be in a similar situation with someone from Bangladesh or Pakistan vis-à-vis the Canadian experience requirement. Moreover, English/French linguistic proficiency is not

geographically confined to the British and French territorial states, hence it does not constitute the sole appendage of white nations. For instance, English alone is spoken fluently by more than half of the population in 45 countries beyond the UK, including the racialized nations of Jamaica, Dominica, Philippines, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Ghana, Malaysia and Nigeria. Conversely, in the so-called ‘white’ nation of Russia, less than 10% of the population speaks English (Smith, 2017). It is far-fetched to imply that the prerequisite of Canadian experience solely favors entries from the so-called white countries and disregards nationality. For instance, visa selection procedures discriminate not only on racial but also on nationality grounds. Prior to the removal of the personal suitability requirement, Canadian immigration officers were instructed to apply additional scrutiny for applications from the peripheral nations of Europe (i.e., the Balkans) on presumptions that applicants were formerly involved in war atrocities (Satzewich, 2015). Moreover, the type of migrants (i.e., skilled) entering the FSWP program, both racialized and white, are proficient in English; otherwise they would be unable to apply to the program. What differentiates them from those unqualified to apply is that they are wealthy enough in their countries of origins to afford the associated costs of immigration. Economic ability is the privilege possessed by the elite of the originating societies. Moreover, the requirement of Canadian experience can also be a marker of national assimilation: a marker for drawing in people invested in nationally shared ideals of capitalism, individual property and economic consumption. Implying that the national is just white masks that the national is economically based. The mobility of global capital transverses across all nation-states (Chibber, 2015; Prashad, 2014). Canada center itself as a global economy and not necessarily as a global white nation per se. What matters in the globalized flow of capital are the economic indicators and not the racial composition of the nation. White and racialized demographics are equally sustaining the nation’s market orientation. This is particularly evident through the institutional incorporation of diversity. Concerns about access and equity are skewed towards improving diversity in GAP advertising or within the workplace composition at Facebook and Google. Fewer concerns are vociferated about shopping at GAP or about the excessive use of Facebook and Google. That we should all shop and indulge in capitalist consumption is rarely contested, since consumerist practices represent the ideal of a successful life. There is little indication that the capital-centered economic

system in Canada will grind to a halt. Canadian nation-building is tied with the maintenance of capitalism, the sustenance of a strong economic system, and the support of the market, all aimed to promulgate Canada as a global economic force. The racialization argument takes away from the commodification of migrants by these very same capitalist principles and ignores the global economic relations that underpin the national decisions regarding immigration. The former chapters demonstrated that Canadian immigration policies have always been economically regulated. Momentarily, Canada cares less if landed immigrants are racialized or not, as long as they are able to fully participate in the economy and the labour market. The right immigrants are the economic ones. White applicants are naturally assumed to integrate better due to shared universals based on their countries of origin: Western societies, with former colonial ties with Canada. But for as long as one can share the capitalist universals, including the primacy of the private market, the fantasy of owing property, the entrepreneurial business spirit, the economic efficiency and productivity, the Canadian state will consider such a person a model migrant and a future model citizen. In an interview with the Herald (2016), former Immigration Minister, Chris Alexander was quoted to say that: “We need [immigrants] who are adaptable to the very fast-pace of change in our Canadian economy and in the global economy. We’re looking for the best and the brightest, but for people who are driven to contribute to innovation, to starting up new businesses and enterprises, and to working at that cutting-edge efficiency and productivity”. Similar to the social capital perspectives, the explanation of racialization keeps the reasoning contained within a singular parameter of the Cube. It places the onus on migrants themselves by saying that exclusion has something to do with their race, hence with an identitarian marker possessed by racialized subjects (i.e., skin colour). Such logic is conceptually simplistic. It deflates attention from the fact that it is the national that responds to the idea of race: it is the blue quadrant that responds to the differentially positioned red squares. Institutionalized racist practices always existed within the Canadian socio-political context. Notorious examples include: the residential schools system for Aboriginal people; the 1885 Chinese Immigration Act which imposed a fifty dollars head tax on Chinese immigrants, raised to 500 dollars by 1903 and replaced in 1923 with a ban on immigration

from China that lasted until 1947 (Siemiatycki, 2015; Vineberg, 2015); the 1908 Continuous Journey regulation which prevented the mobility of people from British India; or the 1908 Agreement between Canada and imperial Japan which restricted immigration from Japan to 400 people per year- this was subsequently reduced to 150 by 1928 (Sharma, 2015). These reminisces will not evaporate because Canada opened its borders to racialized subjects from the Global South. Racist practices continue in different forms. Yet these trends cannot be solely attributed to numeric changes in the originating countries. The exclusion of skilled migrants has more to do with a certain idea of the national that has been floating around since the inception of the Canadian nation-state and was propped up as an ideal imaginary on behalf of which some would be excluded and others included, and less with migrants’ countries of origin. Canadian society is racist, but this has always been the case. One could argue, by contrary, that, with the introduction of the official policy of multiculturalism, Canada is the least racist it has ever been. The analytical model of racialization works well for domestic considerations of inclusion and exclusion within the parameter of the nation- state (i.e., access and equity for racialized citizens). However, the same model falls short as the matter concerns transnational considerations within global structures. The third explanation proposed in the literature is that of state supported neoliberalism. The 1980s were the turning years towards neoliberal social policies and programs; and this neoliberal approach could have caused the gap in income and employment earnings between landed immigrants and born Canadians (Jenson & Saint- Martin, 2003; Picot, 2004; Schellenberg & Hou, 2008; Wayland & Goldberg, 2009). During the post-war era, skilled immigrants were reaching up to par, economically, with their Canadian counterparts (Omidvar & Richmond, 2005) and these were the years when Canada had a strong welfare state. By 1980, the Canadian model of welfare provision moved away from the institutionalist perspective that characterized the 1945-1973 period, to the so-called market-state paradigm described in the antecedent Chapter. Examples of social policies from the institutional era include: universal healthcare, family allowances (provided to all Canadian mothers with children before the age of 16), Canada Assistance Plan (CAP), which shared the cost of welfare between federal and provincial levels. There was a lack of interest in funding social programs once the state ideology shifted towards the market-state approach. CAP was replaced with Canada Health and Social Transfer and the federal contribution to

provincial social welfare diminished. Social programs switched from universal to selective plans and the Family Allowance was substituted with the Child Benefit (Graham, Swift, Delaney, 2012). Many of these factors accentuated domestic inequality. The 1980 recessionary context further residualized welfare and led to a concentrated attack on working people, on unions, which resulted in a growing contract workforce and a lack of good jobs (Graham, Swift, Delaney, 2012). This was a period characterized by government cutbacks, decreased public spending, deregulation, diminished barriers to trade and overall, by the implementation of an ideology centered on the neoliberal values of limited state and freedom of the market (Hyman, Meinhard & Shields, 2011; Satzewich, 2015; Snyder, 2010). This road was soon embraced by all political parties within Canada. Former ideals reminiscent from the welfare period, where the state envisioned itself as responsible for citizens’ assistance, shifted on the neoliberal trajectory towards principles of individual responsibility, productivity and economic self-sufficiency (Hunter, 2010; Lightman & Lightman, 2017). Individuals could no longer be passive recipients of welfare. A person needed to be actively looking for work and/or to undertake unpaid work in exchange for assistance (Hunter, 2010; Snyder, 2010). Mass privatization of social services followed; it began in the 70s and accentuated under the Harper regime, when many public-private partnerships embroidered under the new model of mixed welfare pluralism (Lightman & Lightman, 2017). The economic discrimination of skilled migrants to Canada accentuated after the 1980s. Canadian immigration policies changed their selection criteria on racial lines, the neoliberal ideology triumphed and migrants’ human and social capital skills continued to be benchmarked against national standards. Many other explanations could be formulated to account for landed immigrants’ labour market exclusion. The mentioned ones are some of the central accounts describing the visible facets of the Cube. Despite the problematics stated above, most of them make sense to a certain extent. Underpinning a sole explanatory account as the causal one would denote a rushed conceptual approach. The national composition of the country changed after 1980s. Canada became more diverse as a nation but also more focused on economics, handed less power to the state, decentralized its public services and positioned itself towards public-private partnerships in delivering social services. It is difficult to pin down a one-size-fits-all explanation for newcomers’ labour market

discrepancies. These are probably due to the combination of the many factors presented above. Institutionalized racism has clear effects but so do the policies of neoliberalism. The social capital explanation does not hold commonsensical ground. FSWP is a program that selects migrants on human capital skills. It is impossible that such skills would be objectively devalued after someone embarked a plane to enter Canada. The explanation of social capital is a concealment hiding that national Canadian standards are assumed to be of superior value. The racialized hypothesis and the explanation of neoliberalism are considered, in this text, to have a combined effect on skilled migrants’ exclusion from the labour market in the Canadian context.

3.1.2 A2 nationals in the UK

Several hypotheses could similarly explain the exclusionary treatment of Romanians and Bulgarians in the UK. The previous chapter showed the marginalization of A2 nationals to be legally and culturally encased. Between 2007 and 2014, the A2 nationals did not have the same formal, as in legal rights, to access the British labour market as other EU citizens. Formal restrictions were waved in 2014 yet the issue of cultural discrimination persisted. Explanatory accounts pertaining to formal restrictions have more to do with how Britain envisions itself as a national community of value. Explanations describing cultural discrimination relate to how the A2 nationals are perceived by Britain as a national community of value. Three general accounts could have incited the introduction of transitional labour curbs to restrict the movement of A2 nationals. First, the high number of A8 entries in the UK, after the 2004 EU enlargement, could have led to anticipated fears of a repeated situation with the A2 wave. Several EU countries introduced transitional curbs for the A8 nationals after the 2004 enlargement. The UK did not, since it predicted lower entry numbers (Vargas-Silva, 2013). There was no historical data to use in projecting the movement of EU8 nationals, since this was officially the first time they were allowed to migrate to the UK; official estimations were predicted on data from the former ascension waves in Spain and Portugal (Vargas-Silva, 2013). A8 migration was the largest in the UK’s history. In the beginning of the twentieth-century, migration to Britain totaled 80,000. This number dropped to about 19,000 entries per year between 1931-1961, increased to 20,000 between 1961 and

1981, and picked up after 1991, to reach about 100,000 yearly admissions (Hawkins, 2018). The number of A8 citizens working in the UK was estimated to sit at 658,000 in 2012 (Vargas-Silva, 2013). By 2016, the Labour Force Survey showed the highest number of migrants living in the UK to be from Poland (1,002,000). These figures were followed by Ireland (335,000), Romania (328,000), Italy (233,000), and Portugal (213,000) (Hawkins, 2018). EU8 entries stabilized by 2008. The UK, however, was afraid the scenario would repeat with the A2 nationals. The EU8 antecedent prompted the UK government to introduce transitional curbs for the EU2 and restrict their formal rights in accessing the UK labour market. A second explanation rests in the economic situation of the A2 countries. Romania and Bulgaria represent EU’s poorest nations. Their fiscal outlook could have prompted to imagined anxieties that more people will enter the UK than in 2004. EU2 rank the lowest in the Union in terms of poverty and lower wages, with a living standard below most Member States (Bejan, Iorga-Curpan & Amza, 2017). In 2015, the minimum wage in Bulgaria was 184 Euros per month and 218 Euros in Romania (Eurostat, 2015). These numbers slightly increased by 2018. Bulgaria has a minimum wage of 261 Euros per month and Romania of 408 Euros (Eurostat, 2018). Romania registered the largest minimum wage increase in the EU. This, however, is still below the 500 Euros a month benchmark set within the Union. Economic welfare was the main migration driver for the A2 nationals (Vrânceanu, 2015). In the transition from communism to democratic capitalism, the newly free-market entrepreneurship blended with post-communist driven consumerism (Briggs & Dobre, 2014) led to a state of substandard economic conditions in these countries. Both states underwent fundamental transformations. They privatized most of their public sectors, strongly supported foreign investment, and liberalized trade (Christova-Balkanska, 2010). For instance, 82% of assets were privatized in Bulgaria by 2001, with many sold at one dollar (Ivancheva & Christopoulos, 2015). Despite its devastating economic and political consequences, neoliberal restructuring was supported in the entire post-socialist region as the main tactic for facilitating EU integration (Tamás, 2014; Türkes & Gökgöz, 2006). In Romania, the privatization reform involved the denationalization of the share of capital and not necessarily of the assets per se. About 84% of the total share of capital was sold to foreign investors between 2001-2004 (Asafteri & Parmeter, 2010). Coupled with a public mishandling of EU

funds and a politically corrupted environment, these changes led to the disappearance of previously state-based, stable and secure jobs. Both of these countries’ economies function because of money transferred from abroad. Official statistics of remittances sent to Romania showed these to amount to two billion Euros in 2002, comprising 44.3% of the foreign currency reserve, 10,3% of Romanian exports and accounting for 3.37% of the GDP (Culic, 2008). According to the Romanian National Bank, these numbers went up to about four billion by 2006. They dropped stagnant at about four million Euros from 2009-2013. Main contributor countries included Italy, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and France (Banca Naţională a României, 2014). According to Bulgarian National Bank, remittances increased since 2004, from about 351.2 million Euros, representing 1.77% of GDP, to about 693.4 million in 2009, representing 2.07% of the GDP (Christova-Balkanska, 2010). Some argued that remittances are underestimated, since migrants do not just send money via Bank Transfers but also through Western Union (Christova-Balkanska, 2010). In Bulgaria, Western Union opened 1200 locations over the last years. It is well known that relatives at home rely on remittances to cope with financial instability and poverty (Christova-Balkanska, 2010). The UK had objective reasons to fear that it would become part of such statistics. Domestic low incomes prompted to assumptions that Romanian and Bulgarians will leave their homes and arrive at Britain’s doors in unprecedented numbers. The public British rhetoric emphasized that wages in Romania and Bulgaria are five times lower than in the UK (Cheregi, 2015). Over the years, Nigel Farage’s speeches at the EU Parliament continually accentuated that free movement cannot work in the EU once the Union accepted members that are poor. In other words, EU does not work for the under-class (DeGenova, 2008). A third explanation accounting for the introduction of transitional labour curbs for the A2 migrants, reasons that the post-2008 British polity of austerity has led to a protectionist sentiment toward British workers and British jobs. In 2004, at the time of the EU8 enlargement, the UK was in good economic standing (Clark & Drinkwater, 2014). Unemployment was low, hence there was no reason to fear that foreigners will invade Britain and take British jobs. The situation is much different nowadays. The UK was unable to bounce back its economic power after the 2008 recession. British workers are living with job insecurity, in non-unionized environments and working under zero-hours contracts (Briggs &

Dobre, 2014). Within the zero-hours agreements, there is no obligation on the part of the employer to provide hours of work. Scheduled hours can be cancelled without notice and employers are not legally bound to provide holiday and sick pay provisions (Bejan, 2016). The gradual dismantling of the welfare state raised the competition for blue-collar service jobs and made access to social benefits difficult (Briggs & Dobre, 2014). It is unsurprising that, within such an austere environment, concerns over the NHS abuse by the A2 nationals, reflect deep seeded consequences of the devolution of service provision. Within the last decade, the NHS system, which provides the British Medicaid, cut down on its universal principles. This has nothing to do with the migrant use of services, but rather with the fact that British Medicaid turned towards modeling the US provision of medical care, by privatizing many of its segments (Ali, 2015). The antecedent chapter insisted on the arguments that tied the Brexit vote with austerity concerns, especially in relation to the areas that voted to leave the EU. Austerity was oftentimes linked with the raise of nationalist, xenophobic and right-wing political discourses (Bejan, 2016). When resources are scarce, the shortage of economic opportunities gets blamed on foreigners entering the nation. Two additional explanations are proposed to interpret the cultural discrimination of A2 nationals in the UK: the hypotheses of racialization and balkanization. The racialization theory would imply, in this context, that the A2 nationals are unwanted in the British nation because of the high percentages of ethnic Roma (i.e., ‘gypsy’) amongst the Romanian population, hence, grounded within the conceptual conflation between Romanian and ethnic Roma, the anti-Romanian sentiment masks an anti-Roma sentiment (Cheregi, 2015b). Empirical research has shown that Romanians themselves seem to attribute the anti- Romanian xenophobic sentiment in the UK to this conflation in terminology (Briggs & Dobre, 2014). Such reasoning reflects an inclusionary-exclusionary logic between the Romanian natives on the one hand, and Roma people on the other hand, logic that primarily manifests within a national plane (i.e., the Romanian nation-state) and continues the historical othering of the ethnic Roma minority within Romania. Romanians are working hard but the Roma people are cheating the British system and harming the reputation of Romanians abroad (Cahn & Guild, 2008), so goes the prejudiced Romanian rhetoric. This is an example of how marginalized subjects are not universally marginalized in all socio-

political circumstances. Despite being marginalized in Europe, Romanian people, at home, further marginalize those who do not belong to Romanian ancestry. It is impossible to know how many Romanians of Roma ethnicity live in the UK. Statistical information on Roma migration is ambiguous. Census classifications mainly collect data on nationality and the ‘gypsy’ category tends to refer to the Irish Travelers already within the UK. Roma ethnicity would be categorized in the UK Census as an ‘other ethnic group’, however, Roma people could also classify themselves as ‘white other’, since not all Roma are racialized in terms of skin colour and many identify as Romanian nationals (Office of National Statistics, 2013). About ten million Roma are estimated to live in Europe (Cahn & Guild, 2008). Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia represent the states with at least 5% of Roma population. Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia are those with at least 10% of the population of Roma origins (Cahn & Guild, 2008). Current numbers of Roma in Romania are estimated to sit between 819,446 and 1,000,000. In Bulgaria, numbers of people of Roma ethnicity are estimated to sit between 640,000 and 830,000 (Dimitrova, 2011). Roma people arrived in Romania from India between the ninth and the fourteen centuries (Achim, 2004). They were initially slaves to the Tatars. Following the Romanian battles with the Tatars in 1200 they transferred hands as battle enemies and were kept in servitude until their emancipation in mid-eighteen centuries (Achim, 2004). In 1918 Romania became a national state and the Roma people became Romanian citizens. During the inter- war period, they constituted the sixth largest ethnic group in Romania, after Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians and Russians. An official differentiation was made between the nomadic Roma and the residential ‘types’. For instance, those participating in the war were given land parcels, however, the nomadic ones did not benefit from the land reform. At the time, Romania was going through a strong process of nation-building, which paved the way for ethnic assimilation. This led to the Romanization and the sedentarization of the ‘gypsies’, and to the disappearance of nomadism (Achim, 2014). During the Communist times, the state carried out a predetermined effort to homogenize groups on ethnic grounds. The Roma were employed in the party apparatus and further assimilated within the national culture. This ideological approach materialized into formal rights for the Roma population although it did little in terms of their cultural discrimination. Overall social

benefits can be attributed to the Communist regime. By the 1980s, most Roma ethnics were in fixed housing settlements and were fully employed. Their equal access to education and service provision was guaranteed under the law. With the democratic capitalist regime change, issues of formal discrimination came back into play. There was no longer a state to look out after the excluded in society. Rural co-operatives dissolved and the Romani people lost most of their jobs (Achim, 2004). Recent studies show an alarming situation for the Roma community in Romania: a well-below standard of living in the community, high illiteracy levels as well as high rates of infant mortality and low life expectancy. About 79.4% of Roma people have no formal profession. Amongst Roma employees, levels of professional qualifications are extremely low: 59.4% hold unqualified positions; skilled positions account for about 38.8% (Achim, 2004). The situation in Bulgaria is similar. About 39.4% of Romani people barely have elementary education. Their unemployment rate sits at 70% (Dimitrova, 2011). With the EU enlargement, a concentrated racialized attack against Roma migration manifested across Europe. In France, under the presidency of Nicholas Sarkozy, official efforts attempted to repatriate Roma migrants back to Romania (Briggs & Dobre, 2014). Other EU states implemented similar efforts. Roma people were expelled out of Italy, Germany, Denmark and Sweden (Cahn & Guild, 2008). The UK did not implement official repatriations. Native gypsy travelers in the UK constitute 0.40% of the population (Cahn & Guild, 2008) and the British are somewhat used with having a nomadic ethnicity within the nation. Nevertheless, Tony Blair’s government instructed border services to curb entry for Romani groups (Cahn & Guild, 2008). There was a case when a Roma person from the Czech Republic was stopped at the Prague airport from boarding a flight debarking to the UK (Cahn & Guild, 2008). The racialization hypothesis works best to explain the marginalization of Roma people within Romania. However, it is limited in providing a comprehensive account regarding the exclusionary treatment of the A2 nationals within the UK. Once Eastern and Central Europe joined the EU, the UK received, indeed, Roma entries originating from these countries (Morris, 2016). These numbers, however, were unrepresentative of the Romanian migrant population. Several arguments are provided below to demonstrate the limitations of this hypothesis within the UK context. First, the number of Romanians of Roma ethnicity in

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the UK is low. Estimates of Roma people sit between 80,000-300,000 (Morris, 2016) yet these figures include the Indigenous gypsy and Traveler categories within the UK, hence they unreliably categorize migrant entries (Morris, 2016). Romanian activists and journalists in the UK approximate the number of Roma people to be anywhere between 5,000 and 6,000 (Morris, 2016). These numbers might be underestimated (i.e., data on Roma ethnicity is difficult to collect since most immigrant statistics record nationality), however, even if they would be ten times higher, they would still be low if juxtaposed to the figure of almost half a million of Romanians in the UK. Second, the Roma people that left Romania due to discrimination were less likely to have entered the UK under the self-employed work arrangements and more likely to have solicited refugee status within Western Europe. The little research on the topic shows that Roma migration does not follow a linear path. For instance, Roma from the Czech Republic tend to migrate directly to the UK, yet Roma from Romania and Slovakia tend to migrate primarily to the Czech Republic (Cahn & Guild, 2008). It would have made more ‘sense’ for the UK to introduce transitional labour curbs for the Czech Republic yet this was not the case. Moreover, many Roma from Romania and Bulgaria are likely to choose Greece, Italy, Spain, and France as final destinations (Cahn & Guild, 2008). The countries with the highest numbers of Roma migrants are Austria, Germany and Italy. The estimates for Roma peoples in Germany sit between 70,000 and 140,000; in Italy, between 120,000 and 160,000; and in Austria, between 20,000 and 30,000 (Cahn & Guild, 2008). Third, Romanian migrants and Roma Romanian migrants settled in different parts of the UK. Most Romanians reside in the North-West London suburb of Burnt Oak, which became something of a Little Romania (Clej, 2016), while most Roma migrants of Romanian origin reside in Govanhill, Glasgow, Sheffield and Derby. The Roma people living in London mainly reside in the borough of Redbridge (Morris, 2016). The highest increase of Roma in Sheffield, for example, was registered between 2009 and 2014 (Morris, 2016), long before the A2 nationals could freely move, hence most Roma migrants in the UK are probably originating from the EU8. Fourth, the British media specifically propagated an anti-Romanian rather than an anti-Roma xenophobic rhetoric, contrasting the Greek, Italian and Swiss tabloids, which explicitly broadcasted anti-Roma messages (Cahn & Guild, 2008). There is little evidence of

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conflict in the UK between Roma and non-Roma migrants. The divisive boundary seems to remain between nationals and non-nationals (Morris, 2016). Unlike France, the British public dialogues did not target Roma migrants per se but they employed national classifications against the A2 entry into the nation. Many other countries have large numbers of Roma migrants, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Spain, yet these countries were not subjected to transitional labour curbs. Entry for these countries’ nationals was not restricted. The divisive principle in migration is nationality, which is why the racialization hypothesis merely explains a partial story. The analytical taxonomy of ‘Balkanism’ is employed as the last explanation to contextualize the exclusionary treatment of the A2 nationals in the UK. This perspective posits that the differential treatment of these two nations is connected with them being ‘Balkan’ nations and results from a historical account that traditionally perceived the ‘Balkans’ as Europe’s other (Light & Young, 2009; Todorova, 1997). It is important to look at the A2 states as being Balkan states and not just largely part of Eastern Europe. Being de facto included into the notion of a ‘common’ Europe (i.e., EU) does not translate into an equal belonging for all Member States. Just as the idea of Europe is hierarchically differentiated, the idea of Eastern Europe is similarly shaped by tiered levels of heterogeneity. Historical thinking is necessary to understand the triple division of Europe into Western, Central and Eastern, as well as the Southeastern (Balkan) division of the subdivision (Todorova, 2005). The broadly defined category of Eastern Europe is difficult to pin down due to a lack of consensus on what Eastern Europe constitutes. The most economically developed parts of the region claim their unique place on the map as Central European nations. The Central European idea, initially originated from the German-centric concept of Mitteleuropa and was supported, later on, by Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, when they formed the Visegrád Group to further their European integration. Eastern Europe ‘proper’, which traditionally included Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine, is in continual definition, in terms of who is in and out of the region. The shifting Southeast subdivision of the East/Central division refers to the area delineated by the Carpathians Mountains in the North, the Black Sea in the East, the Aegean Sea in the South and the Ionian and Adriatic waters in the West (Todorova, 1997); it is represented by the so called

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Balkan states that came out of the Ottoman empire: Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania and Bulgaria, as well as the former Yugoslavian nations, and Albania. Their geographical boundaries are in perpetual definition and re-definition (Baconschi, 2015; Bjelić, 2003). A homogenous understanding of Eastern Europeanness does not exist in historical terms. The attempts of Central Europe, after the fall of the Soviet bloc, to dissociate from Eastern Europe, as a more civilized space of rationalism, humanism, tolerance and democracy, and hence to oppose Russian barbarity, translated into the introduction of the idea of Central Europe as a standalone concept within Western European institutionalism (Todorova, 1997). Poland, Hungary and the former Czechoslovakian states were the countries with a stake in the Central European concept. The region was soon defined as such in cultural literary works (Milan Kundera, Czeslaw Milosz) and in historical terms (historian Jemo Szűcs), For example, in a 90s article from the Chicago Tribune, it was stated that Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic are going towards democracy while Romania and Bulgaria are sliding into Balkan backwardness (Todorova, 1997). Once the Central European states secured EU membership, the symbolic division of Europe into two sections, East Central and South-East Europe further cemented. This division is not solely representative of a geographical boundary but also of a symbolic boundary delineating those deemed more European from their lesser counterparts. There is no coincidence that, when the Balkan states started the EU integration process, the name of the region was suddenly changed to Southeast Europe (Türkes & Gökgöz, 2006). It was a term constructed from above (i.e. ‘Südosteuropa’ originated in the 1900s from German Philosopher Theobald Fischer) to displace the stereotypical footprints of the former Balkan appellation. Europe was wary of accepting the Balkan states into its membership, but the less derogative South-East appellation could be more or less integrated. Some argued that the Südosteuropa geopolitical name is just another empty signifier created to keep the area within the same derogatory parameters (Bjelić, 2003; Voinea, 2007); its meaning stayed intact, only its form has changed (Todorova, 1997). History constructed the Balkans relationally. Not as an outcome of an antithesis (East/West or West/East) but rather as neither, neither Eastern nor Western (Milevska, 2007), quasi-located within the middle point of relationality; no longer Orientals but not yet Europeans (Todorova, 1997). Since the 1830s’ designation of the Balkan Peninsula as “La Turquie d’Europe” (Todorova, 1997), the Balkans were dialectically constructed at

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crossroads; not as the anti-world but as a bridge between two worlds (Milevska, 2007): “semi-developed, semi-colonial, semi-civilized, semi-oriental” (Todorova, 1997, p. 16). In Orientalism, classifications epitomize oppositions but in Balkanism they typify ambiguities. Balkan subjectivity is partially included (physically belonging to geographical Europe) yet simultaneously excluded (this belonging is left out the European imaginary) vis-à-vis the notion of Europe (Bjelić, 2003), a duality that places this subjectivity within a space of in- betweenness. It is this very same in-betweeness that makes the Balkans incomplete (Todorova, 1997). The European gaze constitutive within the Balkan subjectivity is also reflected by the ongoing EU integration aspirations of the Balkan states (Kolozova, 2001). The ascension candidate countries need to carry out EU imposed reforms to assess their Europeanness (Kolozova, 2011). Their integration progress is continually monitored and evaluated not only in administrative, technical ways but also politically, when warnings from Brussels flag certain political behaviours (i.e., corruption) as non-European, therefore the ascension process becomes about disciplining these countries and monitoring “their normalization into “Europeanness” (Kolozova, 2011). Since the Balkans are barbaric, it is only through EU integration that they become civilized. In 2009, Financial Times wrote about the EU enlargement towards the Western Balkans as a process of de-Balkanization of the Balkans. In 2012, The Guardian assessed the outcome of the Greek elections as a refusal to go back to the Balkan past (Marinkova, 2013). In relation to the EU ascension plans for the region, Chris Patten, the EU External Relations Commissioner stated that oftentimes, the Balkans take two-steps forward, and one-step back (Türkes & Gökgöz, 2006). As “a backward and disorderly place manipulated by Russians” (Todorova, 1997, p. 72), Balkans are also a placeholder of Soviet reminisces which blocks them from becoming Europeanized. Romanian politician Teodor Baconschi (2015) wrote that it is irrelevant if Romanians buy smart phones or shop for brand name clothes (i.e., markers of civilization) if, in their veins, still flow the ex-communist items of Cenaclu Flacăra (cultural and artistic movement in the communist Romania), Cutezătorii magazine (pioneers’ literary magazine), Șoimii Patriei (youth communist organization), Eugenia (the prototype communist biscuit), the Pegas bicycle (soviet bicycle), Daciada (Dacia was the Romanian state owned car manufacturing company), and the two hours a day forced official

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television. The idea is that even the patterns of consumption should be Occidentalized, if Romanians want to leave behind their backwardness and become Europeanized. Always in crisis with respect to its pretended/intended European character, the Balkan subjectivity is in continuous frustration by its never fully attained European identity. Europe as a whole was formed on the denigration of its other (Kolozova, 2011); and the Balkans, as the other from within, are a European invention, just the same with the categories of ‘Eastern Europe’ or the false transcendental ‘East/West’ divide (Light & Young, 2009). Slavoj Žižek argued that what is known as Orientalism parallels what is known as Balkanism, a projection, construction, fantasy and not necessarily the real Balkans as they are geographically defined (Vaske, 2013). Balkan identity is continually negotiated vis-à-vis the relational categories of West and East, the West symbolizing Europeanness and the Occident, while the East, the Orient. For instance, Slovenia, located within Mitteleuropa (and embedding historical connotations of the Habsburg era) sees itself as the Switzerland of the region (Kirn, 2015). The Balkans are seen, by the Slovenes, to begin in Croatia or Bosnia; for the Serbs, they begin in Kosovo or Bosnia; and for the Croats they begin in Serbia; “A Serb is an ‘easterner’ to a Slovene, but a Bosnian would be an ‘easterner’ to the Serb although geographically situated to the West; the same applies to the Albanians, who situated in the Western Balkans, are perceived as Easternmost by the rest of the Balkan nations” (Todorova, 1997, p. 58). Romanians perceive themselves as a “Latin case at the oriental gates” (Baconschi, 2015, p. 56), hence not Balkan (Kolozova, 2011; Todorova, 1997). For Italians and Austrians, the Balkans begin in Slovenia, for some Germans even Austria has a taint of Balkanness, whereas even the Germans are Balkanites to some French (Kolozova, 2011). For some English that oppose the EU idea, even “Continental Europe is a new version of the Turkish Empire, with Brussels as the new Istanbul” (Žižek, 1999, p. 3). Greece is generally placed outside Balkanism, since the Greek culture is perceived as the foundation of European culture (Ivancheva & Christopoulos, 2015). The Macedonians define themselves through a process of exclusion and denial of neighboring nations, by not being a Serb, Greek, Bulgarian, or (former) Yugoslav (Milevska, 2007). The Balkan countries are self-adding or subtracting themselves from belonging to the area, based on their own political ideology vis- à-vis this classifying discourse.

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The term ‘Balkans’ first appeared in the English literature in 1794, when British traveler John Morritt, in his itinerary from Bucharest to Constantinople, crossed the Shipka pass in Bulgaria and traversed the Aemus (ancient Greek)/ Haemus (Roman) mountains, which he then called the Balkan Mountains (Todorova, 1997). Once named, the area was depicted, through novels, travel journals, and the psychoanalysis literature within the eighteen and nineteen centuries, mostly British and later American, as an uncivilized space of ethnic contradictions, carrying negative traits of distrust, disregard for women, conspiracy, opportunism, indolence, cruelty, boorishness, instability and unpredictability (Todorova, 1997; Voinea, 2007). Labeled as the ‘handicap of heterogeneity’ by the American professor Joseph Roucek, the Balkans have been much blamed for several conflictual instances: the area where all the wars originated, the Crimean war and both of the world wars (Miller & Kagan, 1997), and the area from where Hitler got the Holocaust idea (Bjelić, 2003). Americans might be unable to point on the map the Balkans, yet they well know how to refer to them in pejorative terms: “Some hundred and fifty thousand young Americans died because of an event in 1914 in a mud-caked primitive village, Sarajevo” (Todorova, 1997, p. 119). Nowadays the Balkans continue to be perceived through a pigeonhole, cliché perspective, as Western Europe’s undeveloped, poor and uncivilized relatives (Horvat & Žižek, 2014; Voinea, 2007). For instance, the Yugoslavian wars were described in the media as a bunch of ‘tribes fighting’ (Ivancheva & Christopoulos, 2015), which is why the US had to intervene “to save Europe from catastrophe” (Nougayrède, 2016, p. 2). A whole derogatory process, Balkanization, which initially referred to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire into small national states, became a hyperbole in characterizing the region and describing political fragmentary situations (Todorova, 1997). Used for the first time in a New York Times entry on December 1918 (Todorova, 1997), the rhetoric of Balkanization, dislocated from its ontological base, detached from its historical groundings, and abstractedly recreated outside topographical locations (Bjelić, 2003; Todorova, 1997), ended up publicly disseminated as a metaphorical epithet to describe any fragmentary situations across the globe: the Balkanization of Middle East, of urban America, of South Africa (Bjelić, 2003; Marinkova, 2013). A quick search into YouTube yields various uses of the term: “The Balkanization of America”, “The Balkanization of America, Ferguson Riots Recap”, “Balkanization of Russia”, “Balkanization of India”, “ISIS and the Balkanization of the

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Middle East”, “Balkanization of Pakistan” and so on. The discourse of Balkanization was sporadically used within the social work literature. In a book titled Community Practice: Theories and Skills for Social Workers, the authors wrote about the construction of race in terms of misplaced Balkanization (Hardcastle, Powers & Wenocur, 2004). Some equated social work professionalization with Balkanization (Kuosmanen & Starke, 2011) while others attributed the findings on income polarization within the preeminent Toronto’s Three Cities research to the city’s diversity becoming Balkanized (Mehler, 2010b). The explanatory hypothesis proposed here works similar to the theory of Orientalism. The analytical use of Balkanism marks the otherizing processes and reminiscences of these processes that have excluded and continue to exclude people originating from the Balkan region. Partaking in the idea of a ‘common’ Europe, the UK inhabited such tiered understanding of Europeanness. The Second Chapter showed how national membership within the Schengen space reflects such differential positioning. EU2 citizens are perceived as second-class citizens (Ivancheva, 2007) by the British and by other Europeans and Eastern Europeans alike (Briggs & Dobre, 2014). Although part of the Eastern European taxonomy, the Central European states, the EU8, have been historically considered superior to their Eastern counterparts. Not at par with the Western states but just below the West and above the East. After all, Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungary empire. The historical trajectory of the Balkans, however, is devoid of imperial identification. Balkan nations lack the imperial pedigree needed to confer them symbolic appurtenance amongst the Western colonial powers. Located outside the influential sphere of dominant powers (Todorova, 1997), the Balkan nations secured their backwards place in European history. This section outlined several possible explanations to elucidate discussions regarding the exclusion of A2 migrants in the UK: the economic situation of the EU2, the policy of austerity that continues to impact the British standards of living, as well as the hypotheses of racialization and respectively, Balkanism, to contextualize issues of cultural discrimination contoured throughout time and across racial lines. Sole explanations are reductionist, since they infer a cause and effect linearity and deflate from contextualizing complex situations as contingent on multiple socio-political variables. Societies are complex and social problems can be hardly explained through linear interpretations. It is important to note that, a combination of factors usually leads to exclusionary societal instances for migrant

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populations. Just as the Rubik’s Cube contains many facets and many colours to match, analytical approaches need to similarly factor in several variables to explain how the Cube matched its colours. Both societies exclude highly skilled, lower skilled, racialized and white migrants. In Britain, the excluded are the low-skilled, white migrants. In Canada, the excluded are the high- skilled, racialized migrants. If you have to imagine a migrant, most likely you will imagine a racialized subject. After all, the North American epistemology has always conflated the two. Since the migrant is imagined as racialized and since processes of racialization categorize her first as a migrant, and second as an excluded subject within the nation, orthodox explanations of exclusion get framed around the lacked marker that confers meanings of racialization. Racialization as explanation implies that migrants are excluded because of their racialized features. Or, in other words, because of their lacked whiteness. Whiteness par excellence is the attribute that bestows the presence of something needed, desirable, or customary. When the imagined-as-present attribute becomes absent, the lacked whiteness becomes indirectly explanatory for racialized migrants’ exclusion. Whiteness and not race is what underpins racialized hypotheses. Exclusion is solely attributed to the lacked benchmark to which racialization compares itself with and against -the fixed ideal of whiteness. It is the homogeneity of a benchmark that constructs it as a benchmark. Demonstrating that heterogeneity exists within the benchmark annihilates its desirable traits. Thus far, the dissertation showed that processes of inclusion and exclusion exist in both contexts, in Canada and the UK; that different type of migrants are excluded in both contexts; that different state solutions are reasoned to address their exclusion; and that different interpretations are propped to explain why these migrants are societally excluded. The next section insists on analyzing the parameter of categorical whiteness that qualitatively benchmarks the attributes of those measured against it. Ideas of racialization and whiteness are widely discussed within North America, in Canada and the US, well outside academic circles and well into the popular culture. Such principles are analytically used in domestic dialogues examining the exclusion of racialized citizens within the nations of Canada and the US but also in transnational enquiries discussing the exclusion of migrant populations. Transnational populations, however, are embedded in their own historical realities, which oftentimes cannot be explained through a one-size-fits-all interpretation constructed within

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the American lands. The last sections of this Chapter demonstrate that the analytical parameter of categorical whiteness is inadequately used in transnational analyses of migration. It demonstrates that whiteness is unfixed and that racialization cannot be conflated with immigration. Whiteness does not work as a universal explanatory parameter. It works in particular contexts, within the perimeters of the nation-state but not when analyzing movements in-between nation-states.

3.2 Whiteness as an explanatory parameter of the Cube

Social identities, metaphorically speaking, are utilized to theorize the composition of the Rubik’s Cube. The taxonomy of whiteness oftentimes constitutes a primary explanation in the coloured make-up of the Cube. Two sets of arguments are provided below to demonstrate that whiteness is falsely interpreted as dissecting all facets of the Cube when assessing inclusionary/exclusionary outcomes for migrant populations. The first set of arguments challenges the assumption that whiteness is ontologically fixed. The second set of arguments contests the epistemological interpretation of ontological whiteness as resulting from a relation of equivalence that conflates colonialism with Europeanness, Europeanness with whiteness, and whiteness with colonialism.

3.2.1 Ontological whiteness

How did understandings of whiteness become ontologically fixed? The term ‘white people’ entered the English vocabulary in 1613, with Thomas Middleton’s play The Triumphs of Truth, where Africans, Italians, Spaniards, Arabs, Indians and the Irish were considered dark (Simon, 2017). The Oxford Dictionary defines whiteness as a racial category describing a human group with light-coloured skin; it is a description that takes biologic appurtenance (i.e., the colour of one’s skin) as the referential point. Similar to the relational delineations of inclusion and exclusion, that were presented in the Second Chapter, understandings of whiteness follow analogues bounded grounds. Whiteness is conceptually linked and notionally bounded with other racial categories. From its inception, whiteness was dialectically juxtaposed to the idea of blackness, an association resulting from colonial involvement with African slavery (Alba & Foner, 2015; Alcoff, 2015; Baker, 2018; Eddo-

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Lodge, 2017; Morgan, 2007; Painter, 2008; Williams, 2014). The Portuguese exploration of West Africa began in 1440. After Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas, African people were transported to North America, South America and the Caribbean for purposes of forced labour (Williams, 2014). By 1600, the Dutch, the Spanish, the French, the Danes, and the English ushered in colonial enslavement. These empires were different in their concentration of power, hence their exploitative efforts varied. For instance, the middle-range empires of Denmark and Sweden were less involved in African enslavement compared to the British and the French (Baker, 2018). The British Empire was trading African slaves since 1562; it abolished the Slavery Act not that long ago, in 1833 (Eddo-Lodge, 2017). England heavily colonized what later became the US and relied in this venture on African labour (Williams, 2014). Slavery lasted in America for about 250 years, until it was abolished in 1865 by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment (Williams, 2014). In Canada, black enslavement was introduced in the 1600 by French colonialists. It lasted 200 years on average, until it was officially abolished in 1834 (Henry, 2016). England, France, Netherlands and Germany showed interest in settling the new lands, however it was England that ended up dominating the newly-formed colonies in the North-American world (Morgan, 2007; Painter, 2008). By the sixteen-century Britain created a triangular slave trade-from British ports to West Africa, from Africa to the Eastern Costas of North America and the West Indies, and from North America back to Britain. By 1820, four times as many Africans as Western European colonizers were living in the new lands (Williams, 2014). It is no coincidence that the ‘white’ terminology was used to describe the colonizers and to differentiate the colonizers from the enslaved along racial lines. The taxonomy of whiteness was constructed in relation to black slavery, away from African blackness, and through negating the non-white difference contained within blackness (Alcoff, 2015; Simon, 2017). Over time, once North America became multicultural, the dialectical whiteness-blackness relation changed to juxtapose whiteness to the idea of race more generally (Alba & Foner, 2015; Alcoff, 2015; Eddo-Lodge, 2017). Nowadays, the dichotomy of whiteness- racialization represents the conceptual floor where the politics of race are regularly played out. An understanding of whiteness similarly requires an understanding of the idea of race. Race is commonly defined as the belief that groups or categories of people are characterized by native and static physical differences (Alba & Foner, 2015). After Kant

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introduced the idea of race, differentiating between species and races, taking all races as representative of human species yet hierarchically separated (Simon, 2017), race was for quite a while defined in biological terms: through skin colour, facial characteristics or blood (Lee, 2015; Lundström). Uncontested biological groundings led to a genetic reductionism that was used to legitimize beliefs about the inferiority and superiority of races based on phenotypic differences. This epistemological undercurrent became the prototype of what is now termed scientific racism. That race is an objective reality, since racial traits (i.e., physical biological characteristics) can be comparatively observed (Banton, 2015), was a common idea in the beginning of the nineteen-century. Nowadays, most scholarship on race considers it a social and a historical construction that in turn, yields racialized effects. Subjects enmeshed in racial processes and affected by the consequences resulting from these processes become racialized subjects (Glasgow, 2010). Racialization refers to the objective process of applying in practice the idea of race (Baker, 2018; Shields & Bauder, 2015; Glasgow, 2010; Saloojee, 2005). Racial thinking materializes into an ideology of racial distinction through attaching meanings of difference to physical traits in order to positively racialize dominant groups and to negatively racialize subordinated groups (Alba & Foner, 2015; Shields & Bauder, 2015). Generally speaking, white subjects are constructed as ‘included’ and racialized subjects as ‘excluded’. It is not the case that everywhere in the world social belonging was categorized on racial lines. For instance, in Soviet Russia, where socialist modernity saw itself in non-racial terms, race was deemed inadequate for identity construction (Zakharov, 2015). In the Soviet rhetoric, the term identity, marked as ‘face’ (litso), was conceptually entrenched with two other markers: class (klassovoe) and political identity (politicheskoe). Mixed ethnic origins within Russia as well as the inferior cultural position of the Slavs within Europe, impeded on the development of the racial hierarchies that were pertinent in the West (Zakharov, 2015). When Du Bois visited the Soviet Union, he remarked that people are unconscious of race (Alcoff, 2015; Zakharov, 2015). Indeed, the Soviets considered race as something specific to the West; the history of racialization was interpreted as an American history; hence taxonomies of race and types of people were considered flawed imports from abroad (Zakharov, 2015). More attention was bestowed upon the notion of class. Lenin argued that the biological idea of race is meaningless; Stalin, that the national boundaries containing race

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and ethnicity are in continual process of fluctuation (Zakharov, 2015). Russian scholars viewed the concept of race as being inseparable from ethnicity and nationality; social formations (e.g., tribe, folk, nation) were thought to possess their own ethno-social divisions (Zakharov, 2015). The study of racialization is generally limited to the American, British and Western European contexts. Recent scholarship has proposed new interpretative paradigms for theorizing race, ranging from eliminativism to race-replacement philosophies. Right-wing eliminativism favours colour-blindness, an approach professing that race goes unseen and that coloured differentiating lines amongst people are invisible (Alcoff, 2015). Left-wing eliminativism centers on deflating the essentialist tendencies contained within racial taxonomies in order to further demystify the entrenched beliefs in racial differentiation. This perspective contends that racial categories create the idea of race as well as the racialized consequences for racialized subjects (Appiah, 1993; Appiah, 2005; Dean, 1996; Gilroy, 2004). Other viewpoints argue for replacing the idea of race altogether. In an article written for the Journal of American Philosophical Association, titled Deflating Race, Lionel McPherson (2015), from Tufts University, proposes the terminology of socio-ancestry to replace the rhetoric on race: “For example, Americans who formerly would be recognized as racially black have a reasonable foundation for identifying with the particular mode of socioancestral blackness constitutive of […] a Black American social identity: namely, they have some traceable African ancestry and (a) strongly identify as descendants of slaves in the United States, or (b) when not descendants of slaves in the United States, strongly identify with them via distinctively African physical features. […]. This type of strong identification […] is more historical and sociological than cultural-which is why socio-ancestral identity should be distinguished from ethnicity and its emphasis on a shared cultural tradition” states McPherson (p. 676). If a child born with visible racial markers is placed for adoption, the child’s race stays the same regardless of the racial features of the adoptive family. In using socio-ancestral thinking, the child’s socio-ancestry would be understood as changeable within the context of social dynamics that enmesh the adoptive family. Taking socio-ancestry as reflective of identity-formation deflates attention from racial thinking, McPherson states. Conceptualizations of race seem contained, more or less, within a mobile terrain. Amongst North-American scholarly works, writers engage with sophisticated viewpoints to

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theorize the race idea. Popular culture similarly develops varied perspectives within racial thinking. Racialized subjects are reasoned to embody a multifarious group, differentiated by religion, class or taste, for example (Boom, 2018). Despite considerations of ‘race’ as socially constructed and of racialization processes as practices transforming subjects into racialized subjects, at the other end of the dialectical pole, the category of whiteness is understood as unassailable, indisputable and ontologically fixed. Whiteness is imagined as being devoid of heterogeneity and as typifying ontological homogeneity for those sharing the visible biological marker of white skin. If I were to walk to the bus station and ask a random person to identify my race, the stranger would most likely place me within the white taxonomy. No questions would be posed in the process of establishing such racial classification. Someone’s skin, the visibility of one’s skin tone becomes the attributive marker in assigning racial identity. Light skin is constructed as the essence homogenizing people who would otherwise be unalike on other differentiating scales, such as class, gender or sexuality. ‘White people’, ‘white women’ (Eddo-Lodge, 2017), ‘white perspectives’ (Dolezal & Reback, 2017); ‘white sounding names’, ‘white feelings’ (Eddo-Lodge, 2017); ‘white fragility’ (DiAngelo, 2011) are attributes retained within the common public rhetoric to infer a certain tribal sameness. It is disputable, however, that people, feelings, perspectives, and names, are easily homogenized on a singular identitarian marker that hypothetically cuts across all imaginable national, classed, cultural and ethnic grounds. Similar modes of analysis play out in scholarly works: ‘White ethnics’; ‘white identities’ ‘white way of being in the world’ ‘white turmoil’, ‘white reaction’, ‘white subjectivity’ (Alcoff, 2015) ‘white orientations of social work classrooms’; ‘white norms’ (Bhuyan & Jeypal, 2016); ‘white therapists’ (Lee & Bhuyan, 2013), ‘white neurosis’ (Matias & DiAngelo, 2013), ‘white ignorance’ (Baker, 2018) and so on and so forth. Through gross generalizations, both in popular culture and in academic circles, the implication remains the same: there is an essence of some sort in the shared colour of one’s skin, which in turn determines one’s behavioural and emotional being in the world: “whites do tend to have, however, their own peculiar inclinations, affects, practices and mode of perception” (Alcoff, 2015, p. 84). An essence that makes all possessors of the biological marker share the same habits, perspectives, feelings, temperaments and the same type of collective subjectivity. In the introductory part of this dissertation, the notion of habitus developed by Pierre Bourdieu

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(1985) was briefly discussed with reference to one’s disposition to position in the world. Bourdieu used the term of habitus as juxtaposed to sociopolitical fields (i.e., economic, cultural, artistic, etc.) One’s habitus would be impacted by one’s position within the field, position shaped, in turn, by particular dynamics varying within specific socio-political fields. The belief in a collective white unconscious disposition, in a universal white habitus crossing all imaginable socio-political dynamics, is reductionist. Romanian and Bulgarian migrants in the UK, for example, would have their dispositions framed by a different socio-political context than the Romanian and Bulgarian migrants living in the US or Canada. If a low- skilled Romanian worker enters Canada from the UK, she will be catalogued as white and placed within the white privileged taxonomy, based on her skin colour, although her habitus, her disposition to position in the world was shaped by the British context and not by North American socio-political realities. Such a person did not inhabit a ‘white’ understanding of differentiation but one where nationality mattered more in terms of positioning a migrant as included or excluded in society. A reasoning that strictly theorizes habitus on racial lines would render as invisible her former experiences of marginalization, through her assignment within a taxonomy specific to a geo-political space that classify her differently compared to her former existence embodied by her habitus. Ontological essence is generally assumed within whiteness studies. Scholarly inquiries on the idea of whiteness are less centered on exploring what the categorical idea means and more centered on examining the societal practices associated with the so-called reproduction of a normatively white identity formation (Alcoff, 2015; Lundström, 2014), this without a thorough examination of the ontological groundings underpinning the concept. It is assumed that whiteness universally represents light skin and is expressed homogenously for all those possessing the marker of light skin. An Albanian would be the same as an American born since they are both white. A CEO would be the same as construction worker since they are both white. Whiteness is thought to cut across anything and everything. It becomes the magnifying glass to identify those to be labeled as racialized (and oppressed) and those to be labeled as white (and privileged). This analytical model disregards that both concepts are produced by the same logic that dialectically binds together the ideas of whiteness and race. Remember the Rubik’s Cube. The red squares were deemed different because their colour was not blue. This had nothing to do with the squares per se, with their colour being red, but

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rather with the logic governing the Rubik’s Cube, logic designating that the facet in question should be coloured blue. If one is racialized as racially ethnic, another is similarly racialized as white. Race cannot be compared to an abstract idea of whiteness interpreted as non-raced. If the logic spinning the Rubik’s Cube defines the red squares as red and the blue ones as blue, then both types of squares are produced as differently coloured squares. That the blue colour is the marker of comparison does not imply that the colour blue was produced through a non-colorizing logic. To establish a comparative ground within dialectical racial interpretations, both identitarian formations (i.e., white-racialized) need to be understood as reflective of racialized processes. Erasing that whiteness is equally racialized, erases the processes by which people are made white. It simultaneously disregards that light skin colour does not equally delineate outcomes of inclusion and exclusion in all societies across the globe. In a book titled Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race, British author Reni Eddo-Lodge (2017) writes that: “the neutral is white. The default is white. Because we are born into an already written script that tells us what to expect from strangers due to their skin colour, accents and social status, the whole of humanity is coded as white” (p. 85). Whiteness is taken as the marker containing all other markers of differentiation. The assumption is that (racialized) skin colour, (foreign) accents, and (low) social status are attributes of racialization, while (white) skin colour, (British) accent, and (high) social class are attributes of whiteness. In reality, foreign, non-British accents likewise exist within whiteness, as exemplified by the case of A2 nationals. Low class similarly exists within whiteness, as exemplified by poor British subjects or low-skilled white migrants. In an essay written for As Us, a literary journal for writers of colour, scholars Rupaleem Bhuyan and Daphne Jeypal (2016) write that: “as a construct, whiteness refers to a constellation of preferred racial, gender, class and ableist characteristics”. In other words, whiteness contains markers of class as well as markers denoting other taxonomies of differentiation. The theory of intersectionality presumes that multiple dimensions of differentiation intersect in multiple social circumstances to create differentiated outcomes of inclusion and exclusion. Extracting one segment from multiple intersections, conferring on it a universal explanatory residence and investing it with the legitimacy of crossing all societal segments (without interrogating the assigned prospect of this identitarian marker holding other possible markers) bestows

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absolute power to the marker. The pyramidal logic placing race on top of the pyramid to dissect all markers of prejudice (Alcoff, 2015; Eddo-Lodge, 2017), disregards for example, that Romanians’ and Bulgarians’ exclusion is connected with other distinctive markers of differentiation: xenophobia and class prejudice. The belief that whiteness crosses class and nationality allegiances in all social circumstances manifests in the association of whiteness with the attribute of privilege. White appurtenance gets interpreted as a powerful element in one’s life (Alcoff, 2015), a form of cultural capital (Lundström, 2014), a privilege, since white-skin determines the accumulation of unearned social and economic advantages (Alcoff, 2015; Eddo-Lodge, 2017; Lee & Bhuyan, 2013; McIntosh, 1988). The word ‘privilege’ originates in the Old French, from the Latin ‘privilegium’. Oxford Dictionary (2015) defines it as ‘a special advantage, available only to a particular person or group, a ‘special honour, or an obligation exempt.’ The French Larousse (2015) defines it ‘as a particular advantage, possessed by an individual or a group, which confers a subsequent right to an individual or a group.’ Other works define it as an ideological “manipulative, suffocating blanket of power” (Eddo-Lodge, 2017, p. 92), demarcated by the absence of structural discrimination, and conferring unearned dominance to those catalogued as white (Alcoff, 2015; Lee & Bhuyan, 2013; Dolezal & Reback, 2017). Two conceptual incongruences unfold within the language of privilege. First, such rhetoric interprets privileges as owned, as resulting solely from determinable processes that produce determinate outcomes of advantage and/or disadvantage that one may universally possess in every social circumstance. What constitutes an advantage in one context, however, can comprise a disadvantage in another. One can be privileged because skin colour (whiteness), unprivileged because of gender (woman), privileged as a result of cultural capital (occupation), unprivileged as a migrant (vis-à-vis the national population), hence simultaneously implicated in systems allocating outcomes of inclusion and exclusion, of privilege and oppression. Taking privilege as the conclusive feature of the oppressor and lack of privilege as the sole characteristic of the oppressed, positions the privilege-oppressor logic within a conceptual loophole that could perpetually inverse, ad infinitum, the ‘contents’ of these outcomes, in mutually exclusive terms. One does not have to look that far back into history (i.e., the Israel/Palestine conflict) to see oppressor-oppressed examples conceptualized into zero-sum binaries. Such logic unilaterally blames a universal subject as

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the sole carrier of oppression; alike legitimizing NATO bombing Serbia in 1999 because of what the Bosniac Serbs did in Srebrenica in 1995. This is a dangerous logic. One should equally condemn the Srebrenica genocide as well as NATO’s bombing of Serbia. One should equally criticize anti-Semitism as well as Israel’s politics in Gaza. One should equally condemn all forms of oppressions, despite their attached identitarian attributes, especially since outcomes of oppression are differentially personified in different circumstantial spaces. Second, appending an earned/unearned logic to describe privileged outcomes, keeps the discussion within the ideological allegory of meritocracy. It implies that if something is ‘earned’ it is legitimate. Such thinking is ethically incompatible with anti-oppressive practice. Stock-brokers on Wall Street definitely earn their money. It is arguably unethical that their wealth is unshared, even if their money is earned. It is on the grounds of such logic that Canada disappoints in introducing a wealth tax for example; family money was earned at some point, through wisely participating in the market, hence it is the process of ‘earning’ that legitimizes accumulated family wealth. Framing the rhetoric with references to earned/unearned characteristics perpetuates a market-based reasoning of merited advantages that assign legitimacy to the meriting process in itself. Redistribution is welcomed for unearned advantages and unwelcomed for earned returns. The deserving/undeserving logic producing societal imbalances remains unchanged. In other words, inequalities should be remediated only if they are unwarranted. Merited inequalities resulting from individual faults are fine to be maintained. Societal goals become about increasing equality of opportunity, as in creating access for individuals to develop their ‘earning’ capabilities. The pursuit of equal results, towards a redistribution of material advantages (and not only of the conditions determining such advantages) are abandoned. An egalitarian perspective would imply that, regardless of privileges being earned or unearned (whereas earning capacity is not simply a matter of free choice but one rather structurally contextualized), such advantages would need to be equally distributed (i.e., proportional/progressive taxation is in theory one such form of equalizing economic advantages). The earned/unearned rhetoric is neoliberal in its tendency; it centers on capacity and deflates attention from collective redistributive efforts which would use a proportional distributive logic (i.e. societal contribution would depend on one’s ability to contribute) rather than one based on moral understandings of deserving/underserving attributes.

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The privilege rhetoric translates into the practice of checking one’s privilege as a way of denoting awareness of (and/or complicity in) the systems allocating advantages and disadvantages. The problem with the ‘privilege-checking’ habit is that it keeps the matter within the performative realm. One can ‘check’ their privilege, acknowledge it, and then go on with their daily life without having to change anything in the lives of those impacted by such privilege nor in the conditions that created the distribution of underprivileged/privileged societal outcomes. It does nothing to disrupt the material consequences resulting from the privilege-attributing logic. Privilege-acknowledgement on singular identitarian markers (e.g., white) deflates from one’s implication in other systems of allocating advantages and described on different identitarian markers. When Reni Eddo-Lodge (2017) argues, for example, that white people need to confront their complicity in white privilege, one could argue that she similarly needs to confront her complicity in national privilege (i.e., based on her British citizenry). The rhetoric of white privilege wades in muddy waters. It starts from the uncontested assumption that whiteness is ontologically the same and ignores the role of lived experiences in grounding distributive explanations of advantage/ disadvantage. Lived experiences, however, do not extend universally across the globe according to an abstract identitarian appurtenance. A white American in the UK is an expat (Eddo-Lodge, 2017) while a white Romanian in the UK is still an immigrant. They are both white. Yet they are not both privileged in taxonomic terms. Despite its assumed fixedness, whiteness, as an idea, meant different things at different points in time. The next pages present an account of former taxonomies of whiteness as well as a comparative discussion of current racial classifications contained within national data collection forms in the US, Canada and the UK, in order to demonstrate the incongruence of whiteness with a presumed ontological homogeneity. In 1923, Carl Brigham published the results of a study on American intelligence that was conducted for Princeton University (see Photo 1). Brigham quantified ‘mental age’ by race, through administering arithmetic and language tests to army soldiers and those from the reserves. The study is a staple work within the erstwhile current of scientific racism. Race, in Brigham’s time, was seen as encompassing blood along with skin colour. Whiteness was divided along racial lines and was taught to comprise three types of biological races. These were based on blood lineage despite their assigned geographical labels: Nordic, Alpine and

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Mediterranean. Sweden was the single country in Europe which was assigned 100% Nordic blood, followed by Norway (90%), Switzerland (85%), Denmark (85%), Scotland (85%) and England (80%). Appurtenance to the Northern European heritage was deemed equal with an ideal form of whiteness. Romania, for instance was classified as containing 0% Nordic blood. Bulgaria was not even included in the list of European nations. It was listed under Turkey along with two other Balkan nations, Serbia and Montenegro. Notwithstanding its proximity to England, Ireland was seen to possess 30% Nordic blood; the rest of its lineage was regarded as being of Alpine origins. British North America was seen as comprising 60% Nordic blood (see Photo 2). Findings implied that a Nordic ancestry was a marker of intelligence (see Photo 3), hence the most intelligent subjects were those originating from the Northern European states. Racialized subjects were classified at the bottom of the intelligence scale. It is important to note that current understandings of racialization were not identical as those projected at the time. ‘Colored’ draft referred to African-Americans. Other subjects, which today fit under the racialized, POC category, from Turkey for example, were classified under the Mediterranean type. In Carl Brigham’s study, people from Turkey were regarded as possessing higher intelligence levels than those from Russia, Italy and Poland. An interesting division can further be observed between the ‘native born white draft’ and the ‘foreign born white draft’. Intelligence was conceptualized as the appendage of national appurtenance or as the outcome of national assimilation. What made a person smarter, in Brigham’s analysis, was not her whiteness per se but rather her cultural ties with the North American soil. This emphasizes one’s capability of adapting to the national culture. Paradoxically, the logic of training skilled migrants to acclimatize to Canadian work environments unfolds in similar ways. It is based on the analogous idea that human and social capital skills, which are similarly taken to denote intelligence, can be bettered by adhering to the national ideal. Only after personifying national traits, the skilled migrant will exude intelligence. This is why Brigham’s questions on intellectual aptitude were cross- examinations of one’s familiarity with North American cultural habits. Soldiers were asked, for instance, why should a married man have his life insured, and the choice of answers included: a) Because death may come at any time; b) Insurance companies are usually honest; and c) His family will not suffer. Such questions have nothing to do with one’s intellect but rather with one’s ability to share the values (i.e., responsibility) upheld within

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the national space (e.g., life needs to be insured). Brigham’s analysis was representative of the eugenic perspective of the time. Influenced by social Darwinist philosophy, this approach used genetics to describe not only a person’s physiognomy but also one’s behavior and personal capabilities. For instance, in Britain, class was equally considered to be determined by biological factors, such as intelligence, health, and moral values (Eddo-Lodge, 2017). Photo 1 Photo 2 Photo 3

Brigham’s analysis was not the sole one for classifying white races. Earlier, in 1899, William Ripley published a book titled The Races of Europe, which secured him a professorship at Harvard University. Ripley considered the cephalic index (i.e., the shape of one’s head) as indicative of race (Painter, 2008). He similarly classified three white races: Teutonic, Alpine and Mediterranean. Long-headed people had light hair and light eyes. Round-headed people had dark hair and dark eyes. The first ones were Teutonic and superior. The second ones were Alpine and inferior (Painter, 2008). It is through the knowledge production apparatus that ideas of genetic determinacy conveyed beliefs of scientific truth around different types of white superiority and white inferiority. These examples demonstrate that whiteness had different ontological significances during different periods of time. The taxonomy of whiteness, as it is understood today, as static, stable and universal, was imposed later on, from above, trickled down from the academic realm. By the 1940s, anthropologists decided that a new classification should be

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officially imposed. It would only contain three races: White, Asian and Black, with no sub- races and no sub-categories (Painter, 2015). Historian Neil Irving Painter showed that such classification was primarily supported by scholars yet its formation was connected with the political reality of the Nazi regime at the time (Painter, 2008). Nazism was based on theories of racial differentiation (Painter, 2008). Ideas that not all white people from the Caucus are white and that Europe produced many types of white races, led to the racialization of Jewish people. The three-race classification represented a form of resisting/disputing the theoretical formations that racialized the Jews (Alcoff, 2015; Painter, 2008). Franz Boas, the modern founder of anthropology, was the primary proponent of the new classification. Boas was of Jewish origin and his ideas arouse from an anti-racist perspective. He argued that it is impossible to differentiate the European people by race since races were just those scientifically ‘labeled’ as races: The Caucasian race, the Mongoloid race and the Negroid race (Painter, 2008), matching the continental ancestry of the European, Asian and African regions (McPherson, 2015). The important distinction, for this thesis’ argument, is that before 1940, whiteness was seen as containing several differentiating races; after 1940, the discipline of anthropology commended that all white races should be amalgamated into a single, homogeneous term. It is on behalf of this ideal homogeneity, that the taxonomy of whiteness established itself as a referential benchmark. Despite slight variations, the 1940 classifications are more or less what the Anglophone world shares today; examples from the US, Canadian and the UK Censuses are discussed below as cases in point. The Census classifications in Canada and the UK are of particular interest for this thesis’ argument. The US classification was added to complement the discussion on categorical whiteness. Since the idea of whiteness originated, as a construct, as a label, as a category, within the North American epistemological space, not just in Canada, but mainly in the US, and since Canada historically adopted American principles of differentiation, and continues to import, to a certain extent, American intellectual systems of classifying the world, a look at how the US classifies the idea of whiteness in its national statistics, is deemed futile for discussion. The 2010 US Census included three major races in its classification: White; Black/African American and Asian. The category of American Indian/Alaska Native was additionally included as a stand-alone taxonomy. The category of White pertains to people

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originating from Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. A person from Poland is deemed the same with a person from Iran or Libya- white. The category of Black or African American pertains to those originating in any of the Black racial groups of Africa. An African-American from the US is deemed the same with an African from Zimbabwe, or an African from Kenya the same with an African from Somalia (despite the conflictual situation between these two states). The American Indian or Alaskan Native category pertains to the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America). The category of Asian pertains to the original people of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam. The Asian category is the only that contains some taxonomic variation; the US Census provides an option to complete this rubric by nationality (Census Bureau, 2010). Following a policy proposal from Obama’s time, the US government intends to include sub-categorical information in its 2020 Census. Ethnicity would be conflated with race; hence the Hispanic taxonomy would become a racial classification (Census Bureau, 2018). Those identifying within the Black category, for example, will have the choice of identifying their origins (Wong, 2018): Jamaican, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Somali. Those identifying within the White category would be able to select their national origin: German, Irish, Lebanese, Egyptian. The taxonomies of race will not change essentially although more information will be added on the origins of identities (by recording nationality). However, this is an important change, because it dilutes the assumptions of homogeneity contained within racial classifications. Pierre Bourdieu (1985) pointed out that the real political struggles are over the systems of classification, since these are the ones classifying groups and creating classified subjects. Official taxonomies matter in the allocation of rights. “Principles of division {…} function within and for the purposes of the struggles between social groups, the very groups which produce the principles and the groups against which they are produced. What is at stake in the meaning of the social world is power over the classification schemes and systems which are the basis of the representations of the groups and therefore of their mobilization and demobilization” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 479). Systems of classification produce social groups. It is through categorical affiliation that belonging to a group of excluded subjects legitimizes claims to societal inclusion. Based on the 2010 US

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Census, if one originates from Iran, one is considered white. Iran can hardly be labeled as a white country producing white privileged subjects. Deemed white in essence and privileged by inference, Iranians in the US cannot access equity programs --this at the time when anti- Iranian (and anti-Muslim) sentiments are reaching heightened levels in the US. This at a time when discussions about Iran topped the latest G7 summit’s agenda (Ljunggren & Wroughton, 2018). Freedom of movement is limited for holders of Iranian passports. An Iranian could tally on her fingers the number of countries to which she can freely travel. An American would need about thirty hands to do that. It is absurd to equate an Iranian-born with an American-born in terms of skin related privileges. Although a differentiation within whiteness exists in this case, this differentiation is made invisible by the system of classification. Some state that Middle Eastern Americans constitute ‘honorary whites’ in the US, alongside Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans and Chinese Americans (Lundström, 2014). Islamophobic sentiments, however, make one doubt such claims. The Canadian Census similarly homogenizes race. Canadian official classifications prompt to racial self-identification through recording visible minority status. The classification of visible minority was adopted on June 2009. It refers to “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour” and primarily consists of the following groups: South Asian, Chinese, Black, Filipino, Latin American, Arab, Southeast Asian, West Asian, Korean and Japanese (Statistics Canada, 2015). Canadian racial taxonomies are officially (as in legally) grouped on genetic imparted physiognomies, whereas the lack of white skin colour becomes the predominant feature to attribute racialization (Statistics Canada, 2017). This despite the fact that many groups included in such taxonomies contain sub-differentiated identities within their assigned categorization, identities shaped by local, regional, ethnic, historical and cultural lines (Tsang, 2001). Those from the People Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong-Kong and Vietnam are grouped together under the taxonomy of ‘Chinese’, despite the fact that many Taiwanese, for example, do not self-identify as Chinese (Tsang, 2001). China, however, sees the Taiwanese as Chinese. In a recent controversy over a GAP t-shirt which portrayed a map of China without Taiwan, GAP ended up sending an official apology to China for failing to ‘correctly’ reflect territorial claims (Denyer, 2018). Despite existent contentions over the

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Taiwanese and Chinese identities, both groups are amalgamated together under the same taxonomy. Although the scholarly rhetoric moved away from accounts interpreting race as an objective biological fact (Hyman, Meinhard & Shields, 2011), official systems of classification continue to assign racial difference to observable physical traits (Zakharov, 2015). It is for the visible minority taxonomy that Canadian multiculturalism was theorized on ethnic and cultural diversity lines, while American multiculturalism was conjectured on racial lines (Alba & Foner, 2015). The terminology of visible minority refers to those who are not white, hence Canadian multiculturalism is arguably coded on racialized-white binaries. There is no variation in the Canadian Census within the Black nor the White categories. A white Canadian or a British Canadian is considered the same with a white Central European, with a white Eastern European or with a white South-Eastern European. Notwithstanding an assumed homogenization within the white category, Canadian visa regimes operate independently of official racial classifications. For instance, Canada waved the visa requirements for Romanians and Bulgarians just a few months ago in December 2017. Restrictions loosened just a little before, in May 2017, for the A2 nationals that formerly held a Canadian visitor visa in the past ten years, or for those currently holding a valid US non-immigrant visa, who were now allowed to enter Canada by completing an electronic travel authorization (eTA) (Government of Canada, 2017). The removal of the visas in December 2017 did not come about as an act of benevolence by the Canadian state. For many years Canada promised to remove the visa requirements for the EU2, though it went back on its word several times. In 2016, Romania and Bulgaria threatened to not sign the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) unless Canada publicized an official decision to remove the visas (McGregor, 2016). There is a contradiction at play here: official systems of classification homogenize white subjects as one and the same. If whiteness is privileged and ontologically the same, that would mean that all white subjects would be treated the same in the eyes of the law. In terms of rights to freedom of movement, however, the Canadian state differentiates on nationality. Romanians and Bulgarians are white, hence they should be legally afforded the same rights as other white subjects, as the US citizens, as the British and the French, or as the Poles or the Slovenians, meaning they should not need travel visas just as no visas are requested by the Canadian state for

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British/French migrants or other EU citizens. Or meaning, at the minimum, that these travel requirements should have been waved when Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU. The UK Census records race since 1991 (Eddo-Lodge, 2017). Compared to the US or the Canadian classifications, British national taxonomies (Official National Statistics, 2011) include inter-variation (i.e., subcategories). The Asian/Asian British classification comprises those of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Chinese origins. The option to write down national backgrounds is provided. However, race (e.g., Asian) is conflated with nationality (e.g., Asian British). Clearly there are differences between people of Asian ancestry who are British citizens or were born in Britain, between Asians who entered Britain as Commonwealth subjects through the 1948 British Nationality Act, or between the migrant population of Asian origin who just entered the country. Yet it is formally assumed, by the state, that all subjects within the Asian category are on equal foot as it relates to formal rights and the ability to equally access such rights. Within the Black/ African/ Caribbean/Black British taxonomy there is an option to identify as Black British or as originating from Africa or the Caribbean (Office of National Statistics, 2011). The recent Windrush scandal is reflective of the material effects resulting from different set of rights attached to differential taxonomies. The Windrush generation refers to people of Caribbean descent that were granted entry in the UK after the Second World War. Many arrived as children on their parents’ passports and did not transition to British Citizenship. Their residency was prolonged on landing cards. Similar to how a person would stay indefinitely in Canada on their permanent residency card. In 2010, the British government destroyed the post-war landing cards indicating arrival dates to the UK. Some people could no longer prove their arrival period and were about to face deportation. Due to public pressure, the British government broadcasted assurances that it would rectify the situation and that no one would be deported (Serhan, 2018). The White taxonomy within the British Census includes four types of whiteness: Welsh/English/Scottish/Northern Irish/British; Irish; Gypsy or Irish Traveler; and Any Other White background (Office of National Statistics, 2011). Irish are differentiated from Northern Irish in terms of their whiteness. Interestingly, the Gypsy population is deemed white although in other parts of Europe this is a population constructed as racialized. Yet again, the White Other taxonomy implies homogeneity. It could hypothetically include the

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Poles, the Romanians or the Albanians. Yet these are groups that historically possessed differentiated formal rights within the UK. Two additional racial categories are included within the UK Census: The Mixed Multiple Ethnic Groups: (i.e., White and Black Caribbean; White and Black African; White and Asian; and Any Other Mixed/Multiple Ethnic Background) and Any Other Ethnic Group category (i.e., Arab; or Any Other Ethnic Group which prompts towards individual descriptions). Ambiguity is likewise contained within this last classification. Would an Iranian mark the Arab checkbox? Would a Turkish descendent identify as European or as an Arab? What would a Kurdish person mark on such forms? Compared with the Atlanticized classifications, British taxonomies include some categorical differentiation. Most official statistics collecting racial information in these three Western, Anglo-American, white nations, despite a homogenization of geopolitical spaces when assigning group identification and despite ontological assumptions of in-group sameness, do not unanimously record race. The taxonomy of whiteness is of one type in Canada and the US and of four types in the UK. Blackness is of one type in Canada and the US and of three types in the UK. On the one hand, the Asian category includes differentiation on nationality (although these differences are conflated within national lines) yet on the other hand, the Asian race is regarded to cut across nationality in all three settings, Canada, the UK and the US. What the Census argument shows is that ‘whiteness’ as taxonomy, the category of whiteness, the label used to classify people, is not fixed nor stable and it does not exist as imagined (i.e., ontologically homogenous). Not even the various forms of national Census classifications are able to measure it in a fixed, universal way, as a detached identarian feature applied to similarly looking subjects. The fact that national classifications tangle whiteness with nationality shows the inadequacy of the category in analyses of migration. Common discursive assumptions of racial taxonomies as fixed, universal and essentialized on identitarian lines, do not hold when examining differentiated categories of assigning identity within official classifications. In a recent talk on Brexit, on February 2018, at the European Studies Centre, St. Anthony College, University of Oxford, preeminent migration scholar Adrian Favell was pointing out that the category of whiteness is assumed as fixed in the UK and as fluid in America. His argument was based on the co-optation of certain subjects (i.e., the Irish and the Poles) into the American version of the term (Favel, 2018). The expansion of the

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category does not imply that its ontological meaning has changed, as Favel presumes. That certain groups of subjects entered its parameters is unrepresentative of the permeability of the category in itself. What changed overtime in the American case, is the type of subjects admitted within the ontological base of the category. In other words, it is the classified that changed and not the classification that classifies the classified. The classification stayed intact- homogenous, static and defined by light skin colour. When a taxonomy enlarges to include more people within its boundaries, when it expands who counts as white and who has the privilege of becoming white, it (in)voluntarily attributes the identitarian marker of whiteness as a symbol of distinction. The white taxonomy is in fact more fluid in the UK particularly because it contains four types of whiteness. While the Polish in the UK would be assigned, on their physiognomy, to the white grouping, they would mark a differential type of whiteness (i.e., ‘White Other’) on their Census forms. The state acknowledges to a certain extent that whiteness from Poland does not carry the same level of privilege as British whiteness. By contrary, the Canadian state assigns the white identity to all those with light skin colour yet it tacitly differentiates, through visa regimes, for example, between types of white subjects. If such differentiation is not recorded in official figures, it does not actually ‘exist’. Invisibility becomes the consequence of the powerless whites. What conclusions are to be drawn from the examination of various national taxonomies categorizing whiteness and race? A first point is that an ontological essence of whiteness is inexistent. The socio-political rhetoric interprets whiteness as universally fixed. The term, however, had, and continues to have, varied historical interpretations. Knowledge producers attributed its ontological meanings, starting from assumptions that genetic features (skin colour; blood or the shape of the head) can characterize all those sharing certain observable traits. It is the knowledge production apparatus that fabricated the idea of whiteness as fixed. The state nowadays uses it as fixed and the popular culture follows these ready-made essentialized lines. Whiteness becomes ontologically the same and ontologically privileged. It is critical to recognize the impact of the systems of classification, of state- supported taxonomies, on producing not only classified subjects but also differentiated mechanisms of distributing outcomes of inclusion and exclusion for the classified groups. Let us return to the example of a Romanian migrant placed within the white taxonomy upon entering North America from the UK. It is the system of classification that assigns a white

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identity to the Romanian migrant worker, an identity that consequentially classifies her as privileged, as included. This position will materialize in enhanced societal benefits for the Romanian migrant, who is now positioned within a system that distributes outcomes of inclusion and exclusion on racial taxonomies. The bait works: it is difficult to refuse the part in a taxonomy that no longer excludes and that will advantageously position one within a system of distributing societal advantages. One can forget about former experiences and participate, from now onwards, in nation-building developments that strengthen the institutions that created one’s place within this much-desired classification. Who would not accept a trajectory of homogeneity when former heterogeneity could impact on the distribution of societal privileges and rights? When Canada opened its visa regimes for Romanians and Bulgarians, in December 2017, many in the Romanian community were opposed to new entries. Anecdotal evidence, drawn from messages shared on online platforms, such as Facebook, shows that fears in the Romanian community were framed around the anticipated negative impact that possible entries might have on the public image of the already established (and esteemed as white) Romanian migrants. Most Romanians within Canada are highly skilled. As visas were closed until fairly recently, their main entry option was the points system. The A2 nationals in Canada represent ‘the best and the brightest’ of Romanian society, those wealthy enough to afford the immigration and relocation costs, those fluent in English or French, and those possessing at least an undergraduate degree. Chapter Two provided strong evidence to show that the points system is a highly selective migrant recruitment program. The Romanian migrant population in Canada is much different than the Romanian migrant population in the UK. The reasoning shared on these online platforms insinuates that those already in Canada (since it was difficult to enter until now) are worthy of belonging to the Canadian nation; they are ‘better’ than those about to enter under open borders, walking in with no restrictions and finding unorthodox ways to stay. The fear is that the new, economically disadvantaged entries will destroy Romanians’ appurtenance in the notable category of whiteness. A2 nationals are not discriminated in Canada. They are lumped together with those originating from other European nations and classified as privileged whites. Hundreds of poor Romanians in Toronto might flush down the drain the reputation of A2 nationals as white Europeans.

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A second point to be drawn from various interpretations of national taxonomies, is that interpretations of whiteness are geographically contingent. Homogenizing the essence of whiteness on privileged characteristics, constructs whiteness as a global advantage. The differential treatment of white-skinned A2 migrants in the UK, however, indicates that whiteness is mediated through particular contextual situations. Not all white migrants have the same formal rights to migrate to other nations. Attributes of privilege, for example, are locally contextualized. There are many types of whiteness within Europe. People no longer speak of three European races, but tiered levels of heterogeneity cutting across regional, national and ethnic lines emphasize the problematics of applying the idea of whiteness as de- historicized from site-specific peculiarities. Third, defining whiteness through skin colour, maintains a racial logic that attributes categorical group appurtenance on biological grounds. Skin colour taxonomies might replace blood or one’s shape of the head yet they keep intact the assumption that biology matters most in assigning racial identity. In the 2015 KXLY interview that exposed Rachel Dolezal as a white woman passing as black, the reporter asked her to self-identify her race on biologic terms; he asked if her father was of African-American origins (determined by blood) and if she was African American (determined by skin colour) (Dolezal & Reback, 2017). Such reasoning shows that current societal understandings of whiteness and race are not far away from those of Carl Brigham’s time. The practice of classifying white and black on skin colour, locates identity in the body and marks as different those deviating from an imagined ideal of ontological purity. The habit of essentializing identity was noted as a predominant practice within the North American society (Tsang, 2001). Assumptions that whiteness consists of observable natal marks are likewise evident in Rachel Dolezal’s case. Physical markers (e.g., a blue-eyed blonde from western Montana) were referenced to attribute Dolezal’s whiteness and to subsequently indicate her lack of blackness: she dyed her hair and darkened her skin (Dolezal & Reback, 2017). Identity, however, can hardly be confined to categorical lines, which is why, identity shifting, in-between and across categorical lines, has taken a lot of ground. It is generally assumed that people transcend identitarian classifications because they feel burdened by their unchosen appurtenance to an assigned taxonomy. In an exercise of agency, some turn towards alternate identities. Take the category of gender for example. In Albania, there has been a long tradition of women

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transitioning to the livelihoods of men, in terms of changing their physical characteristics and switching to male-dominate occupational positions, way before the non-confirming gender categories secured legitimized transitioning vocabularies within Western societies. These men-women called Burneshas choose to live as men as a way of navigating a patriarchal society. Burneshas refer to their gender transition as a ‘re-birth’ conferring them the same respect traditionally bestowed to males in Albanian society (Stories, 2015; Prtoric & Malfatto, 2014). To acquire male privileges and to be openly recognized as men, Burneshas have to swear celibacy, to take an oath to virginity and to promise they will stay unmarried for the remaining of their lives (Stories, 2015). Their transition can be interpreted either as an act to attain agency through transcending an unchosen biological gender and expressing a new gender identity, or as an act of diminished agency, assuming the patriarchal embodiment encompassed within the new identity. Similarly, the transgender movement within the liberal, western societies, theorizes gender identity as independently framed from biological sex. The fluctuation from the biologically assigned gender to an identification on non-gender conforming categories is partially accepted nowadays. Bill C-16, for example, amends the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code to recognize gender identity and gender expression among the taxonomies conferring anti-discriminatory rights, along with race, national/ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, as well as mental or physical disability (Bejan, 2016). Transgenderism secured legislative legitimacy and constitutes an acceptable form of moving in-between already assigned gender categories. Similar fluctuations in-between race or disability taxonomies are not equally recognized, despite the common-place rhetoric theorizing identitarian classifications as social constructions. Trans- ableism for example, which refers to a person electively choosing to transcend from an able to a disabled identity (e.g., by amputating a leg, an arm, etc.) has drawn quite a lot of criticism. Trans-ableism is assumed to disrupt the societal functionalism which traditionally centers on transforming abnormality and disableism into normality and ableism (Mackenzie, 2008). Anti-ableist advocates argue that, since trans-abled identitarian change happens by choice, trans-abled people are falsely disabled; they fetishize marginalization and steal resources from those genuinely disabled (Baril, 2014). Trans-racialism is similarly theorized. Race-passing from a white to a racialized identity (within a context where the transracial terminology moved away from traditional understandings of trans-racialism as referring to

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the assignment of family members to diverse racial classifications) is generally not accepted. The idea of race seems insufficiently permeable to allow inter-categorical movement. However, there have been cases when people transitioned racial taxonomies to navigate systems of power in societies. Historically, these movements followed a unidirectional course, from racialized to white taxonomies. Ellen Craft, for instance, escaped from slavery in 1845 in the US and fled to England by disguising herself into a disabled white man (Samuels, 2014). Similarly, Salome Müller claimed a white immigrant status to escape her enslaved position from an 1845 trial in New Orleans (Samuels, 2014). The main argument against trans-ableism and trans-racialism is framed around the idea of choice. A disabled person cannot choose between ability and disability. The choice is available only to the able person. This might change later on, if technology advances, but today, for the most part, disability does not offer a transitioning choice. Similarly, a racialized person possessing visible markers of racialization (e.g., black) cannot choose her racial taxonomy since it would be impossible to alter physical features, such as skin colour, to this extent. As Rachel Dolezal’ case showed, it is much easier for a white person to embark on such transition. It is specifically on the presumption of exercising a privileged choice that Dolezal was faulted for racism. The difference between Craft and Müller, one the one hand, and Dolezal, on the other hand, is that Craft and Müller were trying to escape a marginalized situation while Dolezal was leaving behind a privileged position (i.e., of being included within the white taxonomy) to enter one of marginalization. Dolezal was accused of epitomizing the ultimate white privilege -it was through the advantage bestowed by her skin colour that she could choose (or not) to be black (Dolezal & Reback, 2017). The moral impetus legitimizing inter-categorical movement rests within the material societal outcomes of either privilege or oppression, of either inclusion or exclusion, envisioned as determined by a categorically defined ontological essence. There is a corresponding relation between what something is envisioned to embody and what that embodiment determines in physical terms. Dolezal encountered strong criticisms for her decision. When the story broke out in June 2015, it was on the front page of all major news outlets in North America for weeks. If Dolezal was black and wanted to become white she would not have had to encounter such public disapproval. Certain examinations weigh on the matter, supposing that associations between identitarian-assumed ontological essences and physical manifestations of such

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identities do not always follow congruent lines. The repulsion showed by the public opinion in regards to this woman indicates a certain level of societal disgust at the idea that a white person would aspire to be black. It indirectly denotes that blackness cannot be seen as desirable. Moreover, the impossibility of transcending the taxonomy of race because one’s skin colour is white implies that the primary determinant of one’s identity is biological in essence. The same old racist idea that biological features are superior (i.e., white) gets regurgitated. Philosopher Adrian Paper stated the anti-racism test is not about someone wanting to end racism but about someone imagining oneself as black (Alcoff, 2015). By constructing an ideal image of whiteness as ontologically fixed, the idea of whiteness gets invested with exceptionalism. The exceptional cannot mix with mediocrity. Seeing whiteness as exceptional and other races as ordinary or inferior, partially explains why society cannot accept that Dolezal wanted to change her race. Furthermore, her intentionality was primarily framed as a way to gain material benefits. Criticisms did not address the possible incongruence between her felt identity and her embodied identity. It could be that she experienced her ‘self’ marginally (i.e., through marginalized life experiences) yet invisibly positioned within a taxonomy conferring universal meanings of privilege. Her social, mental and cultural circumstances were perhaps disjointed from her felt marginality. Few viewpoints interrogated if Dolezal choose the transracial path to escape an incongruent assigned identity. Little is known about her intentionality. Some argued that her decision was strictly opportunistic. For instance, she won the presidency of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)-Spokane chapter, over a black candidate, James Wilburn (Sottile & Phillip, 2015). Dolezal denied any unprincipled gains (Dolezal & Reback, 2017). Indeed, her positions at North Idaho College and Eastern Washington were adjunct, hence remunerated by the course (Dolezal & Reback, 2017). As per her own narrative, she details that whiteness did not describe who she felt she was, that identity comprises much more than physical features and DNA tests, that having physically black parents does not make one black, that identitarian checkboxes have little meaning in relation to one’s life, and that being unable to choose one’s identity denies one’s right to self-determination (Dolezal & Reback, 2017). These sound as reasonable arguments within a context of an intellectual discussion on race. “According to other people’s perception of racial categories” (p. 85), she writes, she would be identified

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into the White/ Caucasian/ European American checkbox yet she does not belong to this assigned identity, which is why, she continues, her story is not about wanting to pass as black but about wanting to express feeling black (Dolezal & Reback, 2017). She does refer to the metaphor of a ‘fish out of the water’ to describe her inadequacy within community: “I wasn’t a white woman, but no one saw me as a Black woman either” (Dolezal & Reback, 2017, p. 227)” This is the very same metaphor that Pierre Bourdieu (1984) used to refer to the situation when one’s habitus is disjoined from one’s surrounding environment. When the Dolezal affair came into the public eye, Gerald Hankerson, the national NAACP president avowed that this was the perfect debate society should have about race (Dolezal & Reback, 2017). Years after the story passed, those bringing up philosophical considerations on the topic were welcomed with hostility. In an article written for the feminist journal Hypathia, Rebecca Tuvel (2017) argued for the extension of the transgender logic to matters of trans-racialism. Within days after publication, Tuvel was accused of epistemic violence and white ignorance. An open letter signed by several scholars was asking the journal to retract the paper (Engber, 2017). In dealing with systems of classifications, it is important to interrogate how and why fluidity amongst categories is accepted for subjects of singular taxonomies (i.e., gender) and not for all others (i.e., race). These are not moralistic questions. Primarily, they are queries that interrogate the circumstances making possible one but not the other within a conceptual milieu invoking a similar logic: the transition from one categorical identity to another categorical identity. The desire to transcend situations, contexts or assigned identities, might surface from feelings of inadequacy within the assigned identity, from oppressive circumstantial contexts, situations or identities, or from opportunistic tendencies. How one interprets such intentionality depends on one’s view of the world, of one’s interpretation of their own society, and on one’s perspective in regard to the nature of people. Through a Rousseauian angle, for instance, which assumes people are ‘good’ by nature, societal actions would generally be interpreted as ethically orientated. Through a Hobbesian account, which assumes people are ‘bad’ by nature, societal actions would be interpreted as immorally orientated towards self-interest. Attempts at self- identification are generally attempts to gain agency and autonomy (Alcoff, 2015). That such acts are solely interpreted as spurring from malevolence, shows a grim picture of the subconscious state of our society. Immigration, after all, is a process of similarly

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transcending, not taxonomies, but particular social, economic and political identities as well as socio-political contexts. The refugee/economic migrant dichotomy perpetually played out within the public rhetoric, follows a similar way of adjudicating legitimacy. Migration is seen as legitimate for the Syrians who want to escape a conflictual political climate and illegitimate for the Zimbabweans who want to flee their country due to economic hardship. Zimbabwe is not bombed at the moment; hence the Zimbabwean migrant possesses abridged legitimacy for moving, despite the fact that both the Syrian and the Zimbabwean are doing the exact same thing - escaping challenging political or socio-economic contexts. Questions concerning how and why similar circumstances provide dissimilar legitimacies for moving in-between taxonomies need to be relatedly asked. Forth, ontological fixity implies that an essence of sameness is contained within the difference juxtaposed to the standard of sameness. The sameness within difference reflects the lack of ontological essence traditionally conveyed by the benchmark of sameness. In other words, a certain sameness is presumed amongst those deviating from the ideal marker of possessing white skin. Racialized people become racialized not because of their race per se but because they lack whiteness (Shields & Bauder, 2015). Racialization vocabularies (e.g., Canadian visible minority) group together everyone who is not white, despite the heterogeneity existent amongst racialized groups. It is the lack of whiteness that creates a new form of commonality, as implied by the POC terminology: “anyone of any race that isn’t white” (Eddo-Lodge, 2017, p. xvi). That an identitarian essence of sameness exists within the difference from whiteness, within the non-white, in whatever lacks whiteness, reflects a reasoning not that far off from Brigham’s definition of ‘coloured’ draft used for the army-reserves study. Defining the essence of racialization through an absence of whiteness cements the desirability of whiteness by poignantly implying that the lack of whiteness is deficitary for one’s identity. Fifth, conflating whiteness with and over national boundaries erases differentiating confinements contained within the national. National axes can equally differentiate in the allocation of inclusionary/exclusionary outcomes for white subjects, as exemplified by the A2 migrants in the UK. Migrants move from nation to nation and not in- between racialized geo-political spaces. National visa regimes in host countries, originating nations’ position in the global hierarchy of power, are determining factors in the management

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of migrants. When Reni Eddo-Lodge (2017) states that low skilled work in Britain is carried out by Pakistani, Black African and Bangladeshi people, she refers solely to British citizens, to those already part of the national fabric, and overlooks the A2 migrants who overpopulate the low skill sector in the UK. American philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff writes that white employees might not prioritize a four-week vacation amongst their work demands yet this will be important for immigrant workers (Alcoff, 2015), hence implying that immigrant workers are racialized workers. Racialization and immigration on the one hand and whiteness and nationhood, on the other hand, become the same. In equating national identity with a white identity, the role played by the national gets erased at the expense of a sole focus on racial lines. Take the following statement as example: “every time a new curry house opens, every polski sklep that opens…it’s a symbol that white brits are sleepwalking into new minority status (Reni Eddo-Lodge 2017, p. 129). The reference to the Polski shop implies the Poles are not necessarily perceived as white; they are signified as marginally minoritized, taken to represent, in juxtaposition, what is not part of Britishness, yet having their marginality erased through their homogenization into the notion of whiteness. After all, they are de facto classified as white based on their skin colour. The Second Chapter shed light on the aspects of structural discrimination faced by white Eastern European migrants in the UK. Their experiences of marginalization, however, are not breaking through, since these are white subjects deemed to carry white privilege. Conflating racialization and immigration erases the fact that immigration is not synonymous with race since not all immigrants are racialized. Britishness, for instance, does not just denote whiteness; it equally denotes class, accent, symbolic and cultural capital. Discussions on Brexit had primarily pinned a loosely defined perception of ‘immigration’ as the catalyst for the Brexit vote without naming the categories of immigrants the vote was against. In a recent lecture on Brexit at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, Matthew J. Goodwin from Rutherford College, University of Kent argued that the public perception in the UK was against immigration since the 1970s. Britain being anti-immigration is not a new thing, according to Goodwin (2018). Yet in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s and so on, Britain did not vote to leave the EU because of immigration. Chapter Two showed that the UK negotiated opt-outs and did not have to participate in the EU’s relocation scheme of internally distributing newly arrived asylum seekers. In other words, Britain did not have to

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legally settle any non-EU migrants that entered the Union during/after the 2015 refugee crisis. Likewise, Britain was not opposed to migration from France, Italy or Spain, otherwise it would have voted to leave the EU a while ago. In fact, Britain wanted nothing to do with the Eastern Bloc migrants. In the late 50s, signs in London were reading ‘No Blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ (Eddo-Lodge, 2017). In 2018, they read ‘No children, no dogs, no Eastern Europeans’ (Taylor, 2017). In the 70s in London, mugging was seen as a Black crime (Eddo- Lodge, 2017). In 2018 in London, mugging is seen as a Romanian crime (BBC, 2013; Carleton, 2013). The anticipated hate crimes after the Brexit vote were projected to affect the non-white/ non-British people (Eddo-Lodge, 2017) yet it especially affected the Eastern Europeans, as shown in the first section of the Second Chapter. The Brexit vote is not publicly interpreted as a vote against the Poles, the Romanians and the Bulgarians, but loosely as a vote against ‘immigration’. In turn, immigration gets conflated to solely represent racialization, despite the fact that David Cameron’s negotiations with the EU, prior to proposing the referendum, were about limiting the number of EU entries in the UK and ending the right of EU workers to claim social assistance benefits (Armstrong, 2017). The reasoning that conflates racial constructs over national ones produces as irrelevant the A2 population in Brexit-related immigration analyses. Race gets conflated with immigration over nationality to strengthen the argument but nationality criteria have their own differentiating logic. In referencing taxonomies of whiteness within migration contexts, whiteness gets universally reinstated and re-installed in different spaces (Lundström, 2014), erasing, in return, site-specific socio-political situations. Sixth, homogeneity constructs an ideal purity of its intrinsic sameness. Identitarian homogeneity implies that an essential similarity originates from ancestral descents. An essence of sameness produces the marker of homogeneity as emblematic of a desired and imagined ideal of sameness. In psychoanalysis, Freud’s theory of ego-formation explained how the subject internalizes a false image of herself (Alcoff, 2015). Later on, Lacanian ideas showed that there is always a gap between one’s ideal image and one’s mirrored image (Fink, 2016). Homogenous whiteness is a false imaginary, constructed to symbolize something qualitatively distinguished. This false imaginary is internalized even by those marginalized within whiteness. Examples of paraphernalia within white-supremacist groups (i.e., photos of white attractive women, white thin bodies and perfect hair) represent

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an ideal of whiteness that the subjects themselves lack yet they desire to embody. It is in behalf of this imaginary that group belonging gets legitimized. The white imaginary similarly sustains the classification of whiteness. Reasoning that whiteness is superior (only something deemed superior could confer privilege) and defining it as ontologically delineated by biological markers (i.e., white skin) leads to attributions of ontological truth to white superiority in the same way that accounts of scientific racism credited ontological truth to racial inferiorities. A fake (standard of) homogeneity gets created as a socially desirable differentiating marker through the sole identitarian possession of white skin. However, the idea of fixed ontological whiteness, as this section showed, is a matter of imagination, a fabrication, just as the idea of race. It lacks the homogeneity needed to be universally applied within and in- between national communities of value across the globe.

3.2.2 Epistemological whiteness

The terminology of whiteness and race originated from theorizations of colonial involvement with African slavery. Scholarly analyses have been examining white identity formation and racialized processes through historical references pertaining to a singular post- colonial, North-American context (Jeyasingham, 2012). The epistemology of whiteness, of what is known of whiteness, is framed through a false relation of equivalence that synonymizes colonialism, Europeanness and whiteness within the settled North-American lands. Such reasoning attributes the formation of white-racialized social identities to colonial enslavement; it conjecturally interprets colonialism as European expansionism; and it constructs the idea of whiteness as synonymous with a homogenously assumed idea of Europeanness (Alcoff, 2015; Baker, 2018; Eddo-Lodge, 2018; Lee & Bhuyan, 2013). These theoretical assumptions shape North-America as a post-colonial auxiliary space spurring from Europe and Eurocentrism (Alcoff, 2015; Lazarus, 2011) rather than an autonomous area with a geo-political logic of its own. America is not America. America is the post-colonial reminiscence of a white, homogenously European colonialism. From the academic literature to the popular culture, these three terms -colonialism, Europeanness and whiteness- are engaged in a false relation of assumed equality. Starting

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from the presumption that properties of one premise (i.e., colonialism; or Europeanness) carry over other premises (i.e., Europeanness; or whiteness), these three terms are conceptually swapped to denote the same thing in post-colonial analyses of systemic privilege (Bhuyan, Bejan & Jeypal, 2017; Lazarus, 2011): slavery was an international trade dominated by white Europeans (Eddo-Lodge, 2017) since Eurocentric racist reminiscences guided Atlantic immigration policy (Satzewich, 2015); white Europeans created the basis of the American relations of imperialism and slavery (Garner, 2007), since colonization was implemented by European arrivals (Montgomery, 2005); European imperialism shaped the global racial formations (Baker, 2018); America and Canada formed their white identity by incorporating white subjects from Europe (Alcoff, 2015; Montgomery, 2015); America inhabited fair-skinned Eurocentric views about race (Dolezal & Reback, 2017), Eurocentric standards of beauty (Eddo-Lodge, 2017) and Eurocentric aesthetics (Alcoff, 2017; Dolezal & Reback, 2017; Montgomery, 2015) and so on and so forth. The social work discipline similarly grounds the idea of whiteness into an abstract notion of homogenous Eurocentrism: “the North American social work knowledge base is posited as Eurocentric, Anglo-centric, or Western-centric” (Sakamoto, 2007, p. 110); and the very same “Eurocentric social work discourse” (Waterfall, 2010, p. 226) and “Eurocentric social work models” routinely “assume the whiteness of the social worker” (Sakamoto, 2007, p. 109). Whiteness becomes “a standpoint that promotes Eurocentric ways of thinking” (Lee & Bhuyan, 2013, p. 100) and contextualizes the recognition struggles of non-European people (Lee & Bhuyan, p. 103). The terminology of “European indicates that we continue to need the term white in order to communicate” what is meant by privilege (Alcoff, 2015, p. 114). Whiteness and Europeanness cannot be separated in pervasive post-colonial interpretations. They complementary indicate the imagined texture of North-American society: white and European as intertwined through and resulting from colonialism. Several arguments are presented below to de-center the false equivalence paralleling colonialism with homogenous Europeanness and Europeanness with an abstract idea of whiteness. Equivalence refers, in mathematics, to a relation of equality between three variables, a, b, and c, which needs to simultaneously satisfy reflexive, symmetric and transitive properties to establish itself as equivalent. Reflexivity implies that a=a (i.e., colonialism equals colonialism; Europeanness equals Europeanness; and whiteness equals

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whiteness). Symmetry implies that if a=b then b=a (if colonialism is European then everything deemed European is commensurate with colonialism). Transitivity implies that if a=b and b=c then a=c (if colonialism is European and if Europeanness is white, colonialism is always white). All premises need to be satisfied to establish a relation of equivalence. The next few pages demonstrate that properties assumed as symmetric and transitive in the equation synonymizing colonialism with Europeanness and whiteness, are based on falsely theorized presumptions: that the North American colonialism was European in quintessence; and that Europeanness denotes a homogenous history of white colonialism. Reflexive properties entail that an element or a set of elements levelled by the equal (=) symbol (all within the set of a, and respectively b, and c) are ontologically the same. Each element needs to be equal to itself to possesses reflexivity. Chapter Two showed that Europeanness is not equal to itself. EU8 and EU2 subjects are not same nor equal with other EU subjects, as shown by their differentiated formal rights as compared with other Europeans. Europeanness lacks reflexivity due to its heterogeneity. The first section from this Chapter showed that whiteness similarly lacks ontological sameness. The attributes of what constitutes whiteness changed throughout time, hence whiteness is unequal to itself. Out of the three elements presumed as reflexive -whiteness, Europeanness and colonialism- it is just colonialism that takes on reflexive properties. Colonialism denotes expansionism and imperialism. It signifies a universal situation, in which people from certain countries settle and occupy other countries. The reflexivity premise is not satisfied in the equivalence analysis since the notions of whiteness and Europeanness encompass heterogeneity; only the notion of colonialism can be universally applied as equal to itself. Symmetric properties entail that one element or all elements within a particular set (all elements within a) are related to another particular element from other particular set (all within b) if and only if both of these markers are equally interrelated (a=b). In other words, colonialism can be synonymized with Europeanness only if all colonialists are European and all European are colonialists. Such symmetry, however, is falsely assumed. The colonial expansion in North America was primarily British and not essentially European. There are forty-nine nations in Europe if Vatican City and Russia are also considered. The states actively involved in colonizing represented about 14% of all European nations. Some European nations colonized the new world. However, not all European participated in geo-

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political enlargements. What is commonly described as a European imperialist expansion over Africa and the Americas was conducted by seven European states: Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Spain (Iweriebor, 2011). In turn, the colonial expansion of the Americas was carried out by five European nations. Spain and Portugal expanded over the South-American lands. England, France and Netherlands covered the North of the continent. Within the context of this dissertation, North America is referenced in geo-political terms, to encompass the lands of Canada and the US; Mexico is considered part of the Global South, although geographically positioned in the Northern part of the hemisphere. The expansion over North America, which started in the fifteen-century, was primarily conceded by the British and the French empires. Spain was a strong power at the time, however, the colonial parameters of ‘New Spain’ were mostly confined to South America. By mid-sixteen century Spain extended over Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean Islands and all of South America except Brazil, which was under Portuguese influence (Taylor, 2013). In the North, Spanish expansion settled parts of what nowadays represents Florida in the US, in particular the town of St. Augustine (Taylor, 2013). The French too discovered Florida around 1560. Anticipated fears of Spanish dominance, forced the French to re-orient towards the North, predominantly towards Canada. French trading posts were soon set up around the St Lawrence river in Quebec (Taylor, 2013) and by seventeen-century the French established a new colony near the Mississippi river, in Louisiana. The Dutch initially occupied the areas around Fort Orange (i.e., Albany) and Manhattan Island (i.e., New York). They struggled in attracting colonialists, which gradually weakened their position. Following the Anglo-Dutch wars between 1652 and 1674, the Dutch surrendered their settlements to the English (Taylor, 2013). There was also a small German presence (around 300 people) between 1683 to 1709 (Lambert, 2017). By the 1700s the English Empire strengthened its base at home. It absorbed Scotland and developed into the British Empire. A new political preoccupation emerged with populating the new lands and establishing them as strong commercial centers to sustain the largest empire in the world. About 100,000 Germans were brought by the Britons to populate its colonies (Taylor, 2013). By 1732, the first Scots were landing in New York (Bennett, 2004). Towards the nineteen- century, immigrant ships from Scotland to Canada were en-route on regular basis. What differentiates the British settlements from the French and the Dutch occupations, is that the

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British Empire was not primarily relaying on British immigrants/colonialists to settle the new world. Most immigrants populating the British colonies were enslaved Africans brought for work. While the French Louisiana had about 4,100 slaves, more than 1,500,000 slaves were forced into the British American new colonies by the eighteenth-century. This number is estimated to be three times higher than the number of free immigrants (Taylor, 2013). Enslaved labour became a quotidian reality in early America. In the Northern colonies, slavery was not as much incorporated in domestic labour, although it was quite preeminent around New York City; the highest numbers of slave entries were in the Southern part of the US (Kidd, 2016). In other words, Britain colonized the American lands by making use of slavery. “British America was a land of black slavery as well as a land of white opportunity.” (Taylor, 2013, p. 102) and this established America’s story as “the story of white people” (Alcoff, 2015, p. 103). Between 1689 to 1763 the French and the British waged four imperial wars to deter dominance over North-America (Rushforth & Mapp, 2016; Taylor, 2013). Britain’s victory legitimized its upcoming expansion in full swing. Some referred to this period as the Anglo-speaking settler revolution (Carrey, 2011). The purpose was to transport Anglo-Saxon values all over the world and to establish an Anglo supremacy through creating a union of white, Christian, English-speaking people across national boundaries as well as through maintaining strong allegiances between the home empire and the Brits from the colonies (Carrey, 2011). Between 1815 and 1840, one million people left the British Isles; between 1850 and 1900, seven million people departed Britain for the colonies (New Zeeland and Australia included) (Carey, 2011). By 1920, Canada had larger British and Irish populations than either Scotland or Ireland alone (Carey, 2011). Britain imposed itself as the main force against the Dutch and the French, and quickly came to dominate the new American colonies. What is nowadays called North America originated from British America. The American story, however, narrates its colonial past as originating from a European rather than a British enlargement. It conflates Britain and Europe to infer that Europe colonized, despite the fact that out of all European nations, three nations had settlements in North America, and these were taken over by the Brits. The Dutch could not withstand the British influence and the French were irregularly scattered in smaller areas. The Spanish and the Portuguese mainly expanded within Central and South America. British colonial history is recounted in official narratives as European colonial history. Since Britain

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geographically belonged to Europe at the time of North-American colonization (although Britain’s European appurtenance is highly disputable, as evidenced by the recent Brexit vote), the orthodox reasoning inferred that the colonizers of America were European. Initial migration patterns to the North of the continent similarly show that North America’s colonialism was primarily of British origin. Scholarly accounts on early migration to Canada describe Canada as a European formation and as a destination country for European migrants (Paraschivescu, 2011; Vinberg, 2015). However, figures from the 1871 Canadian Census indicate that people from the British Isles were the main source of immigration to Canada. British entries were close to half a million people and accounted for 83.6% of the foreign-born population until 1871. Numbers of immigrants from the United States (10.9%), Germany (4.1%) and France (0.5%) were far behind (Statistics Canada, 2016). In the beginning of the nineteen-century, when Canada started to promote itself as a destination country for Northern Europeans, British entries continued to be preferred (Boyd & Vickers, 2000; Vinberg, 2015). At the time, Eastern European migration constituted about 7% of all new entries (Statistics Canada, 2011). Merely one hundred Romanians settled in Canada by 1901 (Culic, 2012). In the US, the 1897 American Immigration Restriction Act was drafted to specifically keep out Eastern Europeans (Anderson, 2013). The Immigration Restrictive League, a pressure group lobbying for protectionist laws was cataloguing migration from Eastern and Central European as ‘suicidal’ for the American race (Todorova, 1997). The 1924 US National Origins Act was blatantly excluding Southern and Eastern Europeans (Briggs & Dobre, 2014; Hannan, 2015). By the 1920s, Central, Eastern and Southern European entries were somewhat tolerated in Canada (Pitsula, 2013), however, numbers were generally low. About 12% of all immigration to Canada was catalogued as Eastern European (Statistics Canada, 2011). Despite the broadly defined Eastern European taxonomy, the majority of these migrant entries were from Russia and Poland (Statistics Canada, 2014). In 1921 about 52.4% admissions were from the British Isles and 19.1% from the US (Statistics Canada, 2011). Anglo-Saxon entries continued to be favoured. Numerous incentives were provided by the state to attract British immigrants. For instance, in 1925, the Canadian government paid a fifteen dollars bonus for those willing to relocate to Canada (Pitsula, 2013). In 1926, James Coyne, president of the Royal Society of Canada argued that admissibility should be restricted to those of Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Scandinavian and

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Celtic races (Pitsula, 2013). In 1928 in Regina, Saskatchewan, in front of the legislative building, a protest of unemployed men was carried out against Eastern Europeans. These new migrants were seen to take jobs from the residents of the Dominion of Canada (Pitsula, 2013). The Ku Klux Klan’s proposed policy on immigration, which was presented at the Saskatchewan Royal Commission on Immigration in March 1930, recommended that entries from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe be stopped for five years. In modelling the American system, a quota scheme was endorsed for those not originating from British, French or Scandinavian backgrounds (Pitsula, 2013). Proposed allocations included: 6210 Germans; 676 Dutch; 396 Russians; 356 Chinese; 94 Japanese; and 7 cumulative numbers for Romanians and Bulgarians (Pitsula, 2013). After the Second World War, immigration extended from those of British origins to those from Western Europe (Germany and Netherlands), Southern Europe (Italy, Greece, Portugal), Eastern Europe (Russians, Polish, Ukrainians) and South-Eastern Europe (i.e. Yugoslavia). Yet admissibility was smoothly demarcated. Canada divided the European migrant entries into preferred and non-preferred types. Preferred entries were those from Britain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland (Pitsula, 2013). Non-preferred entries were those from the Central and the Eastern European states. Certain restrictions were set in place for the non-preferred entries, for instance people had to show proof they are able to set up farms (Pitsula, 2013). Scholarly works define the first waves of migration to Canada as European; conceive Canadian identity as being of Eurocentric nature (Satzewich, 2015) and dominated by persons of European heritage (Hyman, Meinhard & Shields, 2011); and intermittently synonymize British history with European history (Paraschivescu, 2011; Szto, 2016; Vinberg, 2015). Statistics Canada similarly tabulate immigration data to display that until the 70s, migration to Canada was 90% ‘European’ (Statistics Canada, 2011). The unquestioned application of a loosely defined and homogenously assumed ‘European’ term erases the fact that not all European nations nor all nations from Eastern Europe were equally allowed entry. The largest numbers of Eastern European migrants arrived in Canada in 1931 (18%), 1941 (19.7) and 1951 (21.5%) (Statistics Canada, 2011). Similar to the 1920s, these migrants were mainly of Russian and Polish origins. Records indicate that in 1931, 133,869 immigrants were from the U.S.S.R and 171,169 from Poland. Romanian numbers, for example, were much lower. Romanian

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migrants were merely welcomed as agriculturalists, farm labourers or as sponsored family members (Culic, 2012). About 40,322 Romanian immigrants resided in Canada in 1931. These figures were similar to those of Chinese origins; about 42,037 Chinese resided in Canada in 1931 (Statistics Canada, 2014). Numbers of Romanians dropped to 28,454 in 1941 and then again to 19,733 in 1951. Chinese numbers similarly dropped; about 29,095 Chinese people were residing in Canada in 1951. Numbers for those originating from the U.S.S.R were sitting at 188,292 and for those originating from Poland at 164,474 (Statistics Canada, 2014). It is merely the Polish and the Russian entries that are taken as representative for the Eastern bloc migration. The reduction in Romanian numbers, from 1931 to 1951, may be indicative of home returns. A pattern of return emigration for the South-East Europeans was documented in the 1920s in the US. For instance, only one tenth of Bulgarians, Serbians and Montenegrins that emigrated in the US between 1908 and 1923 settled. Similarly, about two thirds of Romanian and Hungarian migrants returned home (Tudoroiu, 2007). Cultural differences, long distances and truncated social mobility were the significant reasons for these returns (Tudoroiu, 2007). Figures for Bulgaria were not specifically accounted in Canada at the time. Bulgarian entries were most likely recorded under the ‘Other’ category. The 1952 Canadian Immigration Act continued to restrict entry for racialized persons and limited access for Eastern Europeans under the sponsored relatives stream. For the next decades, numbers of Romanians stayed around twenty thousand (Tudoroiu, 2007). Entries were low for the decade between 1966-1975 and amounted to about 4,670 people (Culic, 2012). Few more people arrived under the East European Self-Exiled Persons stream between 1979-1989, doubling the entry figures of the previous decade. It was only after the fall of the Soviet Bloc that a steady wave of Romanian migrants was now admitted - about 3000 to 5000 entries on yearly basis (Tudoroiu, 2007). The 2001 Census recorded 60,000 Romanian immigrants living in Canada (Tudoroiu, 2007). Between 1995 and 2004, Romanians were the first or the second most important immigrant group originating from Europe. Romanians in Quebec represented the fifth to eight population flow between 1997 and 2002 (Tudoroiu, 2007). The 2006 Census recorded about 82,645 Romanians living in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2011). About half of these figures represent post 1990 arrivals (Tudoroiu, 2007). These numbers are low considering Romania’s mass emigration. Romania represents the second country, globally, after Syria, with most of its citizens migrating for

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work; it is the country that produces the highest numbers of immigrants amongst the states without armed conflicts and civil wars (Bechir, 2016). In 1962, Canada passed an Order in Council (PC 1962-0082) to officially allow all people to apply for immigration irrespective of race and nationality (Vinberg, 2015). This was followed by the introduction of the points system in 1967. Chapter Two showed that the points system was conjectured as the end of a racist selection that preferentially facilitated entry of ‘European’, ‘white migrants’ to Canada (Satzewich, 2015; Vinberg, 2015). It was shown, thus, that not all white migrants from Europe were desired by Canada. Country of origin placed a similar weight as the racial attributes on desirability. For instance, Romanian and Chinese entries were managed at similar levels for decades. After the introduction of the points system, Canada continued to discriminate on nationality. Generally speaking, entries from the Eastern parts of Europe were accepted after 1962, but the Canadian state further differentiated between Central, Eastern and the South-East division of the Eastern European region. It was only after the fall of the Soviet Bloc that entries from other communist countries, beside Poland and Russia, have increased. These numbers doubled between 1996 and 2000 compared to the numbers entering before 1995 (Adamuti-Trache, 2015). Contrary to the common rhetoric, not all European migrants have been desired historically. A2 nationals were not exactly a preferred choice for Canadian immigration. Moreover, Canada refused to lift the visitor-visa for Romanian and Bulgarian nationals until very recently, in December 2017. The US still require travel visas for the nationals of Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland and Romania (U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, 2018). These restrictions are waged, according to the US law enforcement authorities, on so-called security concerns, summed up under these states’ high visitor visa refusal rates and immigration violations. That such matters constitute threats to American national security are arguable claims. A so-called visa-war between Brussels and Washington unfolded over the issue, with the EU threatening, in 2017, to introduce visas for the Americans traveling to the EU (Morris, 2017). Restricting admissibility through visa regimes is a strategy of managing entry into the nation. Visitors to Canada and the US are usually screened on anticipated premises of wanting to remain unlawfully in the country, to claim refugee status and to work illegally (Satzewich, 2015). Two months after visas were lifted for Canada, by mid-February 2018, 232 refugee claims were filled by Romanian nationals

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(Levitz, 2018). These numbers placed Romania within the top ten asylum claimant countries of citizenship for 2018, after Nigeria, India, Mexico, Turkey, Columbia, Pakistan, and the US (IRRC, 2018). Claims were much lower when visas were in place. In 2016, about 120 claims were filled. The increase in asylum claims prompted Ottawa to ask for a meeting with the Romanian ambassador to manage the situation. Rumors imply that, if claims reach a certain number, travel visas would be re-imposed (Levitz, 2018). Paradoxically, while the number of asylum claims from the US is equally high, there are no official talks about introducing Canadian visas for the US citizens. Migration in the new world was historically regulated through managing admissibility. British America restricted entry to the well-developed parts of Europe. Canada and the US, the reminiscent states originating out of British America, continue to differentiate in the admissibility of different type of European people into the nation. When racial diversity increased in Canada after 1960, it proportionately opened towards racialized subjects, originating from racialized nations as well as towards degenerate whites from poorer white nations. Canada’s diversity is falsely envisioned on racial lines. The years with an increase in the numbers of racialized migrants, from China, South Korea, Iran and Pakistan, also seen an increase in the numbers of South-East Europeans. Those from peripheral Europe were seen by the Canadian state the same with racialized subjects and different from their Western European counterparts. The tendency to essentialize Europe within the conceptual parameters of colonialism over-generalizes the implications resulting from British colonialism to the entire continent of Europe. Conflating Britishness and Europeanness gives birth to the inference that Europeanness is all-encompassing white since the British are white. Within the North American political context, and more so, within the American academic discourse, all nations of geographical Europe get lumped together as one and the same, to define a totalized cultural construction of the continent that mismatches the geo-political boundaries of the region. Such rhetoric withholds a homogenous American-centric understanding of Europeanness as synonymous with whiteness and synonymous with privilege and colonialism yet it deflates attention from the Anglo normativity associated with Canadianness and Americanness (Szto, 2016). When Alexis de Tocqueville published his famous piece in 1835, Democracy in America, he noted that the British roots of the region

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distinguished America as an exceptional society (Painter, 2008) specifically on the commonly accepted presumptions that the British were “the finest race in the world” (Eddo- Lodge, 2017, p. 130), the “greatest of governing races the world has seen” (Pitsula, 2013). The Canadian state historically differentiated between European races, however, in recounting histories of colonization, Europe is referenced as producing homogenous, white- skinned subjects. The subsequent subalternness encompassed within the (perceived) homogeneity of Europe (as a concept) has been made invisible. If Europe was homogenous and European entries were equally preferred, as the scholarly work suggests, it would have meant that all Europeans, originating from all European countries, should have been equally admitted within the Canadian nation. Yet hierarchies exist within Europe and within Eastern Europe. The main settlers during the first 300 years of North-American colonialism were of British origin. While some Europeans were encouraged to settle, these did not represent all Europeans, nor all Eastern Europeans. Romanians, for example, historically accounted for about 10% of all Eastern European migration. The assumed symmetrical equivalence between Europeanness and colonialism does not hold. The colonial reminiscence in North America is British in essence. Transient properties entail that, if an element or a set of elements within a marker (a) is equal to a second element or second set of elements in another marker (b), and if this second element or second set of elements is equal to a third element or a third set of elements (c), then the first element or set of elements is equal to the third ones. In other words, if a= b and b =c, then correspondingly, a=c. For the relation between colonialism, Europeanness and whiteness to be equivalent, there needs to be a transitory synonymy between colonialism and whiteness. The transient property would establish that forms of coloniality are white, whereas the colonizers are white and the colonized are racialized. That the peripheral regions within Europe have been similarly colonized by Europe is what problematizes the equation. There are several historic instances where whites colonized other whites. Post-colonial vocabularies that construct colonialism as universally applied by subjects with white skin colour do no longer hold when the association between colonialism and whiteness loses its synonymy. If whiteness is the kernel of colonialism, white countries should not have colonized other whites. The next pages demonstrate that processes of colonialism did not follow unidirectional trajectories. At the same time the new world was settled by first tier empires,

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the British and the French, second tier empires within Europe, those located below the British and the French colonial powers, were colonizing Europe’s peripheral lands, those not fully Western nor fully Eastern (Marinkova, 2013; Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2006; Tlostanova, 2006). When treatises about African Americans and Native Americans were spurring racism, colonial differences were likewise produced in other parts of the world, within the Ottoman, the Russian or the Habsburg empires. Differences did not just exist vertically, between empires and their colonies, but also horizontally between colonizing imperial powers (Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2006). Some argued that two Europes, Eastern and Western, with two modes of modernity, have always co-existed, from the 1500s to the Cold War years, while others argued that Europe produced, in fact, multiples modernities, multiple Europes with different intersecting hierarchies (Boatcă, 2015). The European expansionism over its periphery and the impact of imperial hierarchical classifications (Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2006) on historically produced forms of coloniality, are rarely talked about within the post- colonial mainstream literature. Topical conversations on the forms of colonialism conducted outside the influential British and French spheres, carry low cultural capital. The geopolitical distribution of cultures of scholarship historically followed the trail of the first world colonizing powers. For instance, between 1850 and 1945, most academic scholarship was developed in five countries (i.e., France, Great Britain, Germany, the Italy and the US) or was about these five countries (Boatcă, 2007). The South-East partition within the Eastern European division changed several times throughout history due to the conflicted interests of the so-called big powers in the area (Miller & Kagan, 1997). The nowadays independent states in the region were under colonial dominance at some point: The Tsarists, the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, the Soviets and now American-centered economic colonialism. The Tsarist empire was instated by the first tsar, Ivan IV “the Terrible” in 1533 and stretched from Central Europe to the Pacific Ocean. It included Finland and parts of Poland, Armenia, Georgia, the Muslim emirates of Bukhara and Khiva and the Romanian province of Bessarabia. The Tsarist expansion was officially described as a form of re-settlement and not as colonization (Sunderland, 2003). It was after the 1860s that the term ‘kolonizatsiia’ appeared in official public correspondences and Russian settlers were labeled as colonialists (Sunderland, 2003). Regardless of terminology, Russian re-settlement practices were

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typically colonial. In Bessarabia, the Romanian language was excluded from public institutions, schools, courts and official administrative bodies; the printing of newspapers and books in the Romanian language was forbidden; and entire villages were settled with ethnic populations from Russia and the Ukraine (Stoica, 1919). The Tsarist Empire lasted until the 1917 Bolshevik revolution (Noga, 2011). The Habsburg and the Ottoman empires both dominated the South-Eastern European region for centuries (Mendelski & Libman, 2014). The territory of Romania was split between the two kingdoms and exposed to two different forms of coloniality, from indirect Ottomanization to direct magyarization (Mendelski & Libman, 2014). The regions of Walachia and Moldova were overpowered by the Ottoman Empire while Transylvania was under Habsburg occupation. At the beginning of the twenty-century, the Habsburg Empire was one of the biggest powers in Europe. It settled about 13% of the European population from the nowadays states of Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland and Hungary (Sked, 2001) and generated about 10% of Europe’s GDP (Schulze & Wolf, 2011). The empire collapsed after the First World War. The North-West part of Romania, Transylvania, was under Habsburg influence by 1526 yet in somewhat autonomous terms (Stoica, 1919). After the Habsburg-Ottomans wars, in late seventeen-century, Transylvania was well incorporated into the Habsburg monarchy (Levkin, 2014; Mendelski & Libman, 2014; Rady, 2017). The Habsburgs carried out an aggressive politics of assimilation (Mendelski & Libman, 2014). During 1875 and 1890, Hungarian Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza actively pushed the principles of magyarization: state promotion of official mono-lingualism (i.e. Hungarian language), official changes of Romanian and Slovakian last names into Hungarian, the annihilation of Romanian press and the prohibition of Romanian language in churches (Blomqvist, 2014; Mihálik & Marušiak; Syrný, 2017; Levkin, 2014). District names were additionally changed. For instance, the town of ‘Satu Mare’ (in Romanian) became ‘Szatmár-Németi’ (in Hungarian) (Blomqvist, 2014). While other ethnicities in Transylvania had political autonomy, Romanians were excluded from the political life, as most electoral representatives were of Hungarian or German origin (Levkin, 2014). The Habsburgs were using the pejorative designation of “stinking Wallachians” [büdös oláhok]’ to designate Romanians as shepherds coming from the Balkans (Blomqvist, 2014; Levkin, 2014). In 1878, compulsory

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teaching of Hungarian was introduced in the Romanian schools. Romanian language was taught as an optional dialect for about four hours a week (Blomqvist, 2014). Efforts were carried to convert most Transylvanian Romanians into Catholicism. Romanian churches were demolished and Hungarian cathedrals were built instead. The Apponyi School Law adopted in 1907 closed the Romanian schools in about 600 Transylvanian villages (Blomqvist, 2014; Levkin, 2014). The Ottoman Empire similarly exercised dominance over the area. The Turkish occupation lasted from the fourteen to the early twentieth centuries (Todorova, 1997). The Turks created a slightly unorthodox empire that did not emulate Western colonial patterns. For instance, there was less discrimination on faith, race or ethnicity (Milevska, 2007) compared to the Habsburgs. Minorities could retain their specific culture and ethnicity; Christians and Jews were tolerated as long as they accepted the supremacy of Islam, and although they had subordinate status they enjoyed a degree of autonomy in their religious and social affairs (Milevska, 2007; Todorova, 1997). In fact, following the Jewish persecution in Spain in the sixteen and the seventeen centuries, many Jews migrated to the Balkan parts of the Ottoman Empire (Vermeulen, Baldwin-Edwards, van Boeschoten, & Vermeulen, 2015). The Romanian regions of Wallachia and Moldova were very impoverished, easy to dominate and became Ottoman vassals in the fifteen and sixteen centuries (Levkin, 2014). The role of a vassal state, meant, at the time, having a certain level of autonomy yet paying the Turks an annual sum of money (i.e. ‘bir’) in return for this autonomy. Vassal tenancy gave to the Eastern and Southern parts of Romania a bit more independence from the Ottoman ruling compared to other countries, for instance Bulgaria, which was completely centralized under the Turkish rule. The Bulgarian culture hardly survived during the Ottoman times; its largest centers were settled with Jewish, Armenian and Greek public officials (Curtis, 1993). More so, Romania did not have to abide to the ‘devshirme’ blood tribute, which forcibly collected young children (eight to eighteen years old) from the surrounding Balkan villages for enrollment in the Ottoman army. In Romania, Turkish domination was mainly exercised through the Phanariot regime (Mendelski & Libman, 2014). Although Greece was under Ottoman occupation, the wealthy and influential Greeks were often appointed as Phanariots (i.e., governors) over the Romanian Principalities after paying a tribute to the Sultan. Following the Romanian revolts against the Greek rulers, the Turks started to gradually fade

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the Phanariot regime in 1821 and appointed rulers for the Principalities from amongst the Romanian nobility (Stoica, 1919). The Phanariot regime vanished by 1834 (Levkin, 2014). By 1800, the Ottoman Empire was already labeled ‘The Sick Man of Europe’ (Curtis, 1993). Weakened by the Balkan Wars it disintegrated once the independence movements in the region flared up (Vermeulen, Baldwin-Edwards, van Boeschoten, R. & Vermeulen (2015). After the Second World War, Eastern Europe and the Balkans entered the Soviet sphere of dominance (Miller & Kagan, 1997). In 1944 Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin drafted the Percentages Agreement which carved the spheres of influence in the Balkan region. Churchill seemed to have said to Stalin: “Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans. Your armies are in Rumania and Bulgaria. We have interests, missions, and agents there. Don’t let us get at cross-purposes in small ways. So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have ninety per cent predominance in Rumania, for us to have ninety per cent of the say in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Yugoslavia?” (Roberts, p. 668). This conversation was recounted in Churchill’s memoirs and concerns are naturally raised about its accuracy. Romanian historiography on international relations recounts the Percentage Agreement as a factual deed. The agreement is said to have carved the future spheres of dominance between the West and the East. About 90% of Greece was placed under British influence and indeed, after the war, Greece embraced the system of democratic capitalism. Yugoslavia, with a 50%-50% sway between the Soviets and the Brits choose the route of the third way socialism. Hungary had a similar 50%-50% split; Bulgaria was 75% under Soviet influence and 25% under British; Romania about 90% Russian and 10% British. Russian friendly governments were instated within the nations located under the Soviet influence. The Soviet regime was tacitly recognized by the US, which is why peace was maintained (i.e., pax sovietica) under its influence in the region. Due to its Orthodox religion and its pro-Russian position, the area was hardly referred to as the Balkans. It was placed within a broader Eastern European context and located as part of the USSR (Miller & Kagan, 1997; Todorova, 1997; Voinea, 2007). The Eastern Bloc became the Soviet Bloc. Romania ended up with one of the harshest dictatorial systems in the region. President Nicolae Ceaușescu wanted independence from the Soviets and carved Romania’s own path towards modernity (Kligman, 1998). Independence could hardly be pursued in a nation dependent on bigger political configurations. To pay the outstanding external debts,

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Ceaușescu adopted Law Thirteen in 1989. The Law rationalized aliments in order to capitalize on the export of agricultural products abroad (MNIR, 2015). Food was rationed and allocated on fixed monthly coupons distributed to each family member; line-ups at the stores for a bag of coffee, a bag of sugar, one liter of vegetable oil and two oranges were lasting hours; there was no freedom of expression; nor any contact with the outside world. An internal system of surveillance was set up (i.e., ‘Securitate’) in which citizens were policing each other for maintaining contact with the West. I was young at the time, but I vividly remember the hour-long lines-ups for food, the continuous starvation, the grocery- stores with empty shelfs. The austerity led to a culture of nepotism and corruption that is still felt today; from getting school transcripts to securing something to eat, people had to exchange additional goods in return: a carton of Kent cigarettes, a bottle of whiskey, a chicken or some eggs. It was only those connected with someone at the food stores that could secure an extra bag of sugar per month or an additional liter of vegetable oil. Not all Soviet countries had such harsh dictatorships. In Poland, for instance, the standard of living was much higher. I remember the Wednesday busses arriving from Poland with products to sell: soap, detergent, vegetable mix. The Poles looked far more emancipated. They had fashionable clothes, chic accessories and definitely better soaps. After the 1989 revolution, Gorbachev met with George Bush in Malta to re-draft the regional spheres of influence (Lupu, 1989). Russia was historically perceived as barbaric and uncivilized by Europe (Todorova, 1997). However, through Gorbachev’s politics of Perestroika, Russia could now enter the family of civilized Europeans (Zakharov, 2015). The US needed additional markets. The Soviet Bloc could provide access to new markets. The deal was struck in 1989. Soon after, revolutions broke out in all of the countries of the Soviet Bloc. The movement of people to the free world was restricted for years to come, yet Coca- Cola was already selling everywhere. The first section of Chapter Two mentioned the mass privatization that ensued in Romania and Bulgaria following the 1989 post-revolutionary context. Canadian and American companies now dominate the region, from mining to oil to information and communication technologies. If proposed resource extraction projects fail to materialize, these multi-national corporations are not shy from taking matters to international courts. For instance, in 2015, the US company Chevron, filled a claim at the International Arbitration Court in Paris again the Romanian National Agency for Mineral Resources

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(AgerPress News, 2018). In June 2017, the Canadian company Gabriel Resources (GBU) filed a lawsuit against the Romanian government seeking $4.4 billion in alleged losses over a stalled gold mining project in Roșia Montană (Touma, 2017). The sum claimed by GBU is three times larger than Romania’s health care budget (Bejan, 2015). These happenings are reflective of a different form of colonialism. Economic dominance can be exercised in more subtle ways. Poor nations have no ammunition to oppose global corporate interests. The same stories of resource extractions from Latin America take place in the former Soviet Bloc. From the Habsburgs, to the Ottomans, to the Soviet domination and the current Western economic colonialism, the South-East region of Eastern Europe barely had any agency in the global game of large political powers. Although part of Europe, this region was colonized by the very same Europe. The political heterogeneity existent in Europe, the different colonialisms that simultaneously co-existed with the British and the French, indicate that heterodox understandings are needed to problematize interpretations of colonialism as a universal white phenomenon, since the synonymy between colonialism and whiteness does not stand the test of historical transiency. Colonialism is the appendage of powerful nations. Yet not all white nations are powerful. Whiteness can hardly be equated with Europeanness, assuming the historical mishmash that created various waves of coloniality outside the North- American region. The history of the white peripheral nations within Europe resembles much more the trajectory of Global South nations and less that of the Western European or the Anglo-Saxon world. Seeing Europe as a homogenized, unbreakable epitome of colonialism, whereas every subject is a privileged subject due to an imagined geographical appurtenance to the continent, further cements the belief in the European singularity as the absolute benchmark for comparison. This is the logic that sustains the idea of Europeanness uniqueness, of the genius of European civilization (Chibber, 2013). This chapter started by mapping out possible explanatory accounts utilized to legitimize or challenge the exclusion of migrant populations within two different national contexts, Canada and the UK. It then discussed contingent interpretations of exclusionary situations for migrant subjects and insisted on the influence of social identities, especially the influence of whiteness, as a taxonomic trait conferring outcomes of privilege (or inclusion) for white subjects and outcomes of oppression (or exclusion) for racialized subjects. The Rubik Cube example was used as a conceptual metaphor. It intended to show that

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perspectives and referential frames change, depending on the angle from where one scrutinizes the Cube and depending on the relationality between the coloured squares of the Cube. The Rubik Cube example guides the reader to acknowledge the segmented contingency that makes up the conceptual discursive frame of the argument. Whiteness is whiteness, only if perceived from a certain angle, only if understood through a fixed label and only if applied to assumed homogenous subjects. However, if one changes the facet of the Cube, then the Cube no longer looks the same; its facets no longer follow the same rules, hence, the red, green or blue squares can be either the insiders of a facet or its outsiders. That not all people get to be white is a secondary argumentative inference. The main conceptual implication is that whiteness, as a marker of classification, is not stable, nor fixed nor ontologically homogenous. The second section of this chapter demonstrated that the categorical marker of whiteness is improperly used to denote an ontological identitarian essence for those possessing white skin; it interrogated the explanatory value of the taxonomy of whiteness in transnational analyses of migration; and insisted on the importance of historicizing geopolitical realities in drafting such analyses. Identities are the product of history (Alcoff, 2015). There is no universal history, nor should it ever be implied that a singular history should matter more in transcontinental analyses of inclusion and exclusion. The third section of this chapter showed how current understandings of what is encompassed within ontological whiteness circulate on a false presumption of epistemological equivalence that synonymizes nonsynonymous terms: colonialism, Europeanness and whiteness. Not all Europe represents colonizing nations. The expansion over North-America was preponderantly British. Understandings of what whiteness ontologically represents were produced through a North-American epistemic story which falsely synonymized whiteness with European background and with colonialism to denote an assumed reflexive, symmetric and transitive essence of sameness. The next chapter proposes a dialectical matrix of analysis to interpret the logic creating identitarian taxonomies that later get appended to outcomes of inclusion and exclusion for migrant populations. Identitarian taxonomies have been generally interpreted, especially in social work, through the theory of intersectionality. Intersectional analyses obsess over who should include and exclude from oppressive categorical counts rather than

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insisting on the logic that produces oppression in the first place. Categorical identities get stacked in pyramidal ways with one of them pinned as the main determinant in outcomes of inclusion and exclusion. However, primacy of determinacy is contextual. It varies according to societies, according to different groups in society, and according to site-specific differentiating processes of inclusion and exclusion. The next chapter shows the incongruences within the theory of intersectionality and proposes a dialectical matrix to interpret the development of the inclusionary and exclusionary logic positioning subjects described through intersectional matrices of analysis. In other words, it insists on the logic spinning the Rubik’s Cube rather than on describing the major coloured squares divided within the facets of the Cube.

3. Matrices of inclusion and exclusion

“One of the great reminders to me, as proud as a I am of being Canadian, as proud as I am of Canada, is I didn’t get to choose this place. I was born here, and I can almost take it for granted. Anytime I meet people who got to make the deliberate choice, or whose parents chose Canada, I’m jealous. Because I think being able to choose it rather than being Canadian by default is an amazing statement of attachment to Canada” Justin Trudeau, 2017

Chapter Three demonstrated that ideas of sameness and difference are not universally generalized from particular identitarian markers. Difference exists within identitarian sameness and sameness crosses identitarian differences. Outcomes of inclusion and exclusion are embedded in complex societal matrices that differentially divide subjects according to historical logics of positioning, varied interpretations of identitarian markers and wide- ranging geo-political contexts. The social work field uses the theory of intersectionality as the staple interpretative matrix to assess who is included in, and excluded out, of society, and in analyzing experiences of marginalization for the excluded subjects. In migration analyses, the theory of intersectionality is applied to identify the primary identitarian determinacy that constructs migrants as excluded. It is through an intersectional framework of analysis that

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race gets penciled in as the ultimate marker to delineate exclusion. Chapter Three showed that such reasoning erroneously conflates, on the one hand, migration with racialization, and, on the other hand, national identity with whiteness. This chapter demonstrates that an intersectional perspective brings little insight into the inclusion/exclusion logic that creates the exclusionary mechanisms in which certain populations get entangled. The problem with intersectionality is that it generally subtracts one categorical marker and invests it with a universal explanation to describe subjects as the universal carriers of inclusionary/exclusionary outcomes in all societal circumstances. Universality, however, resides in the logic that determines exclusion and not in the identitarian characteristics of the immigrant subject. This chapter proposes the adoption of a Hegelian dialectic as an interpretative matrix to guide analyses of inclusion and exclusion for migrant populations. The logic positioning one as an outsider and another as an insider is a universal logic, although the subject-position of the insider or the outsider might embody different identities across societies and across different historical periods. In other words, this chapter proposes a dialectical framework of analysis to assess the mechanisms of sameness and difference positioning some as same and others as different and to evaluate the composition of the Rubik’s Cube impartially from the meanings attached to the colours contained within the Cube. The universal is taken to represent the national, personified through the ideas of Canadianness and respectively Britishness and the particular to represent the idea of Immigrantness. The inclusionary-exclusionary axe of national-foreignness, of Canadianness/ Britishness and Immigrantness, is based on a dialectic, dividing and classifying social dynamic between what belonging to these categorical terms means. This is not to diminish that many nationals, including many Canadian or British born, are excluded on several societal dimensions, nor to extrapolate that Immigrantness overarches above all sites of exclusion. Immigrant exclusion is theorized as resulting from a sameness-difference dialectic, without stating that immigrants are the only ones socially excluded. Migration is a process of movement in-between nations. A nation-state, abstractly speaking, is the frontier that produces migrant subjects as same and different, as included or excluded. The national stands as a principle of differentiation, as a boundary policing the allocation of inclusionary/exclusionary societal outcomes. As shown in Chapter Two, some migrants are

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welcomed inside the nation while others are unwelcomed. The inclusionary/exclusionary logic positioning migrant populations as included or excluded is a logic that bestows differentiation, in relation to how the national envisions itself as a comparative benchmark and in relation to how the national benchmark delineates, in return, those compared against it. Processes of inclusion veer off from a national standpoint, since it is the foreigner -the stranger- who needs to fit within the taken for granted cultural spaces belonging to the native population (Alba & Foner, 2015). The idea of the national, as universality, does not equally belong to all those located within the territorial nation-state. It belongs less to immigrants in comparison to those already-part of the nation.

4.1 The limits of intersectionality

Within the social work field, intersectionality developed into the archetypal theory to interpret issues of oppression, exclusion and marginalization. In theory, intersectionality aims to transcend dichotomous thinking, by exploring group interactions resultant from a plurality of particular group identities (Lewis & Gutiérrez, 2003; Thiara, 2003). Intersectionality was first applied in critical black feminist studies. Kim Crenshaw (1991) coined the word by exploring the intersection of gender and race to discuss experiences of women of colour. Crenshaw drew attention to the fact that feminist theory speaks to the experiences of middle class heterosexual women and leaves out references to black women (Crenshaw, 1991). Intersectionality presumes that the interrelation of group identities solidifies forms of oppression for the subjects positioned at intersectional crossroads (Brah & Phoenix, 2013; Yuval-Davis, 2006). Intersectionality can then provide a picture of the degrees of oppression affecting particular subjects. Such reasoning makes perfect sense in theory. However, in practice, scaling the various forms of oppression remains a conceptual challenge for the intersectional thinking, which ends up cementing socially produced axes of differentiation. The term ‘intersectionality’ originated from Latin and was later imported from the French language into the English lexicon in the fourteen-century: from ‘intersectus’, the past participle of ‘intersecare’ where ‘inter’ meant ‘between’ and ‘secare’ meant ‘to cut’. Dividing implies

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partitioning or separating something into parts. Separating means that a differentiation needs to be made between portions deemed same and portions deemed different. To distinguish what was separated, outcomes of sameness and difference resulting from the parting need to be labeled and classified. In other words, same and different partitions need to be clearly delimited prior to exploring their subsequent intersection. The problem with intersectionality is that it constructs its intersections on classified segmented identities and not on identitarian fluidity. In theory, intersectionality is independent of classification, since, abstractly speaking, multiple identities can exist ad infinitum. In practice, however, intersectionality typically distinguishes between finite classified groups. That dimensions may be infinitely theorized does not imply that inter-dimensional scaling is infinitely practiced. In other words: a) intersectionality presumes infinity; however, since b) intersectionality applies classification, it transforms the infinite dimensions into finite measurements, which c) hierarchically positions classified segments, and d) envisions this hierarchical positioning as universally contoured. Take the intersection of two roads as an example. The point of intersection becomes the common junction for both roads. Certain conditions need to be satisfied for two roads to intersect; they need to be perpendicular, geometrically speaking, meaning they need to cut at a right angle of 90 degrees, or at an acute-angle less than 90 degrees or at an obtuse angle higher than 90 degrees and they need to be long enough to allow for these bisections. If two roads run parallel, or if one of them is shorter than the other, the roads will never intersect. For instance, Avenue Road and Bathurst Street in Toronto can never intersect since they run in parallel. Avenue Road runs perpendicularly with Bloor Street, meaning that, for as long as Avenue Road stretches far enough to reach Bloor, Avenue will intersect at some point with Bloor Street. In equating an identitarian dimension to a geometrical line, an infinite number of identities is implied to co-exist across its continuum. The LGBTQIA acronym, which refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, and asexual or allied persons, is such an example. The acronym started from LB and it extended to encompass congruent identities on the line. If the line is endless, then, in theory, identitarian additions can be appended eternally. Nevertheless, problems arise when trying to explain intersecting processes of identity formation on particular identitarian lines. To formulate an explanation, lines need to be managed, abstracted, nominally segmented and made finite. Interminable paths, roads,

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turning left, right, going straight at times or bifurcating on other routes, can only be explained if portioned, labeled and categorized. To discuss incidences on Avenue Road, for example, what potholes need to be fixed, how parking should be designed, what are the rush traffic hours, how many accidents happen, segments of the road need to be classified: North, South, East, West; downtown; uptown, etc. Similarly, if social identities were to exist on an infinite continuum they would be unmanageable. Intersectionality uses group classification (e.g., race) to group people into segmented classes (e.g., racialized, white) that later intersect with other segments (e.g., gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender; or poor, working-poor, middle- class, rich, etc.) that are part of other group classifications (e.g., sexuality, class, etc.). The only way to analyze social identity formation is in segmented ways. Classification, as the systematic placement of people into categories, is a computational act; categories make sense if they are related to something else externally that establishes them as categories, and this categorical apportionment ensues between two poles of categorical formation that assign ontological descriptions to the classified subjects. Presuming that the Rubik’s Cube would have its squares arranged by size rather than colour, then the similarly sized squares would be grouped together and categorized according to their dimension, from small, to medium and large for example, whereas the classification would enlarge between the small and respectively large poles, with the small dimension indicating the squares are not large and the large dimension indicating the squares are not small. The act of classification, of categorization, transforms infinite lines into finite lines. Finite lines contain a start point and an end point. The linear LGBTQ acronym, for instance, takes the male and female gender identities, as the two comparative points -as the start and respectively the end of the line. All possible identities on the gender spectrum (i.e., transgender, gender queer, etc.) are located between two binary-framed, male/female gender poles which influence, in turn, what the other identities on the axe would look like. The segments on the continuum have meaning for as long as the continuum stretches between these two dialectically positioned identitarian poles. In other words, the identitarian option is available for the segments that differ from the finite referential points. This logic applies nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio information in measuring group identities. Just as the roads are labeled into streets, avenues, highways and so on, and ordinal, interval and ratio labels are appended to describe the difference between streets and highways, and to attribute

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values to such differences, such as streets being more quiet, highways being more busy, etc., hence to measure such differences, identities are nominally labelled into classes, such as race, gender, class, and differentiated on ordinal, interval and ratio measurements that establish what are the pertinent principles of differentiation in delineating societal outcomes of inclusion and exclusion. For as long as labeling, classification and evaluation are used to describe segmented identitarian appurtenance and the intersection of these appurtenances, intersectionality engages with finite identitarian lines. Categories that are about to intersect have as the benchmark the stronger point resulting from within the struggle between dialectical referential poles. Struggle is invoked because, as with any dialectical relation delineating the inside from the outside, a particular position, either the inside or the outside, would be universalized as the referential point and positioned as the norm. In the gender- identity dialectical relation, which is framed in-between the male-female identitarian poles, the male identity is positioned as the norm, through negating the female identity. All other identities exist in between these poles, where the marker of male gender is taken as the comparative norm. Segments exist as segments for as long as they exist on a continuum shaped by a dialectical relationality. It is the in relation to that determines the ontological assigned variation of these segments. Processes of analyzing the intersection, counting the subjects located at the intersection, describing multiple crisscrossing points of (group) belonging, disregard that intersecting segments are located within a correspondent relation for every categorically defined identitarian line (i.e., on race, gender) and that the dialectical poles of the relation are the ones to map the inclusionary/exclusionary logic determining the inclusionary/exclusionary effects for the subjects contained within the segmented parts. Group dimensions do intersect in framing one’s identity. However, each dimension has its own in relation to that ultimately determine the ontological manifestation of the other identities on the continuum. Multiple combinations of coloured squares are contained within the Rubik’s Cube. The colour of the squares stays unchanged, however, the meanings attached to the coloured squares vary once the squares change facets. The red squares are deemed different within a facet that aims for blue homogeneity yet they would be deemed same within a facet that constructs red homogeneity. It is the meaning of the red colour, as same or different, that changes. The referential point for solving the Rubik’s Cube is not the colour of the squares

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nor the intersection of these colours within the Cube’s facets but rather the logic that describes homogeneity when the Cube’s facets are singularly coloured and heterogeneity when the Cube’s facets are multifariously coloured. Intersectionality misplaces the categorically defined group identities as the referential points, and, in describing the role of coloured appurtenance in the equation solving the Cube, the intersectionality matrix universalizes divisions between essentialized group classifications. It posits that a universal meaning of sameness exits within groups and a universal meaning of differences exists between groups. It suggests that the red cubes would be deemed different for being red in all circumstances. Exploring how categorical essentialisms intersects, disregards that the squares’ meaning is different not because of some essential traits possessed by the squares but because their comparison with other coloured rectangles within the Cube, on a line where meanings are dialectically negotiated between a pole representing a homogenous version of the Cube and a pole representing a heterogeneous composition. Concerned with categorizing being, with categorizing the coloured essences within the red squares, intersectionality ontologically divides identity, presuming an essentialized sameness that gets manifested on particular domains, on isms (i.e., race, gender, etc.), where those belonging to an identitarian category are seen to share all positive and negative attributes intrinsic to such belonging. This reasoning takes as a given group based categorical differences as determining the distribution of societal advantages and disadvantages yet overlooking that sameness contains an inherent difference within it, and that symbolic hierarchical relationships are comprised in every constructed category that builds up the intersectionality web. Intersectional matrices are especially used in analyses of white privilege. Although social divisions, resulting from race, gender, class, comprise interrelated axes of societal differentiation (Brah & Phoenix, 2013; Yuval-Davis, 2006), whiteness, as a social identity, gets extracted to eclipse other dimensions of differentiation in oppression-specific analyses. Chapter Three showed that an ontological essence of whiteness does not exist and that there is no universal classification of identities, nor a universal identitarian marker that cuts across all other identitarian markers. In order to classify subjects, objects, colours or other things, group classifications do need to presume a certain ontological essence. Intersectionality cannot escape an assumed essentialism contained in such classifications. Societal axes of distributing advantages, however, continually change with the field (the social space), with

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the physical (geographical) space, and with the cultural (symbolic) space. In theory, intersectionality contends that each division came into existence within historical contexts (Brah & Phoenix, 2013), which is why social, political and economic processes weighing on the intersectionality matrix need to be investigated (Yuval-Davis, 2006). In reality, these intersecting dimensions are projected (from the hegemonic field of North-American knowledge production) to universally represent the same thing. Race is universally understood to represent skin colour, the same way that poverty is understood as the inability to participate in consumption patterns (i.e., the ability to purchase goods and services) or the inability to engage in cannibalistic capitalist activities (i.e., the real estate market). What it means to be racialized, poor, etc. or to belong to categorical segments that later intersect, has been defined from the framework of how life is supposed to look like within the American, liberal-capitalist society. Such thinking for instance, completely ignores the national privilege that members of American, Western societies have over people from other parts of the world. The racism of Western nations is paradoxically dis-considered by the intersectionality framework, which gets solely applied to issues that affect those already within the nation, those located within the territorial parameters defined by these states, and solely concerned with issues pertaining to these states. The above-mentioned is not meant to imply that intersectionality is an inoperable theory. In clinical encounters and group work, intersectionality can empower both, social workers and clients, through instilling awareness of the interactive situatedness of identities (DeLois, 2003). One-on-one work, for example, can explore how intersecting social axes form one’s subjectivity. Similarly, group work can explore how multiple memberships are at play in terms of group composition (Carr, 2004; Lewis & Gutiérrez, 2003). However, it is much more difficult, to conduct policy work from an intersectional standpoint. If identitarian membership is in perpetual fluctuation, the intersectionality matrix is never the same, hence policy ends up being formulated on group classifications, according to measurements and indicators associated with essentialized group appurtenances. Each society has its overarching systems of distributing advantages and disadvantages; people are constructed within them and are shaped by them. Privilege or non-privilege on one axis does not translate into de facto privilege across the other axes. The weak point within intersectionality theory is that it focuses solely on the outcomes of privilege and oppression and not on the processes

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and the logic that created the differentially distributed outcomes. Intersectionality stresses differences in the consequences of power relations, without dismantling the differential logic that sustains unequal power relations. This analysis is akin to saying that the poor are poor (or having the disadvantage of being poor) and the rich are rich (or having the advantage of being rich), without thoroughly exploring or addressing what made and continues to make the poor, poor and the rich, rich. Intersectionality is not a theory of domination but a theory about the matrix-effects of domination. Social work is in need of a theory that examines the logic that positions outsiders and insiders, independent from assigning ontological identitarian attributes to subjects embodying privileged and oppressed positions.

4.2 The universal-particular dialectic

The universal- particular dialectic offers a helpful interpretative matrix in analyses of inclusion and exclusion for migrant populations. This section conceptualizes sameness and difference on a dialectical relation that equates Immigrantness with difference and sameness with a national ideal. Historians, philosophers and political theorists have always been preoccupied with the relation between sameness and difference, between fragments and unities, between particularity and universality, between the part and the whole. The next pages engage with the work of Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek and G.W.F. Hegel, to demonstrate the applicability of the universal-particular dialectic as an interpretative matrix in analyses of inclusion and exclusion. The dialectic of sameness-difference is overlaid on a whole-part dynamic, where the whole equates sameness and the part equates what differs from sameness. The ‘whole’ is generally taken as the universal, the complete notion of something, be it life, god, being (identity generally refers to being for example) and the particular, as the sliver which, on the one hand, is part of the whole, and on the other hand, it lacks the significance possessed by the whole. The aforementioned authors (Laclau, Butler, Žižek), engaged with the whole-part, universal-particular dialectic and similarly conceptualized their arguments by drawing from Hegel. They differed, however, in interpreting the principle(s) of differentiation (and the

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manifestation of such principle(s) of differentiation) separating the whole and the part. The discussion that follows insists on how each of these authors interpreted the notions of universality and particularity and on what they reasoned to represent the field containing the universal-particular relationship. Further interpretations are drawn to explore how the universal-particular dialectic constructs principles of differentiation between nationals and respectively immigrant subjects. Ernesto Laclau (Butler, Žižek, Laclau, 2012; Laclau, 1996) understands the universal as the direct reconciliation of society with its own essence -the completeness, the whole already operating everywhere and for everyone. Universality denotes an entire amount of an already established something. In turn, the particular denotes a specific part of that something, the sliver, the one element of many other elements within the whole. Universality surpasses particularity since universality is made up of a multitude of particulars, themselves engaged in their own dialectical relationships with their corresponding universals. The particular, however, is in a perpetual transcendental state towards universality, in terms of aiming to achieve a post-transcendental plateau where its own particularity gets established as universality. In other words, the particular defines itself by its relation with the universality. The fragment is juxtaposed to the idea of unity through a desire of either to integrate within unity or to destroy unity, depending on circumstances. The fragment’s identity is defined in relation to the whole. For Laclau, the universalist-particularistic relationship follows a unidirectional logic and limited to a given field (Laclau, 1996); the universal negates the particular for not being whole yet it accepts it for as long as it transcends towards itself. Put differently, the universal tolerates the particular, for as long as the particular becomes less particular and more universal, hence for as long as particularity alters its fragmented essence to transcend towards universality. There are two logics at play according to Laclau (1996): the logic of difference, which addresses the positioning of particularities; and the logic of equivalence, which addresses the creation of solidarity links between claims framed in behalf of particularized identities. The logic of difference, since it is based on competing particular demands, traps the particular’s trajectory into its own particularity. It is in virtue of particularities that group struggles maintain themselves. If they surpass particularity, they cease to exist. The politics of difference, most often performed with regard to valued principles presumed to be shared by a

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particular collective, need the concept of particularity but also the ideal of universality, which the particular collective hopes to alter in order to get recognition for its group particularity. The recognition efforts condition the content of particularisms, since the only way for the particular to gain recognition within the universal is by altering its particularity. Particularity is the key but also the lock, which is why Laclau (1996) calls the universal-particular relation a non-resolvable paradox: the universal and the particular reject each other yet they also need each other (Butler, Laclau, Žižek, 2012). Within Laclau’s logic of difference, pure particularisms, embodied through ism-ly framed struggles, are self-defeating due to their inability to obtain self-determination and to place themselves away from the appeal to transcend towards universality (Butler, Laclau, Žižek, 2012). The more particular a claim, the easier it is to be co-opted by the system, and this constitutes for Laclau (1996), the danger of pure particularisms. Take the example of the 2015 Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 3902 doctoral strike at the University of Toronto. Union members focused primarily on increasing the rates of the funding packages and opted out of politicizing issues of systemic inequality, whereas administrators’ salaries reach hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while many graduate students survive on wages below the low-income cut-off (Marmol, Hande & Bejan, 2017). The strike demands were the archetypal requests that could be accommodated by the system. Their trajectory was framed from within a system premise. The administration attended to the particular demand of minimally raising funding packages without having to systemically change the unequal structure yielding the low subsidies in the first place. Or take the example of racial struggles. Media outlets, academic institutions, school boards, film networks, engage in white privilege conversations yet little gets changed, materially, at the level of racial profiling or racialized poverty. The number of incarcerated black people and of black people living in poverty is on the rise in both, Canada and the US. Generally, people from ethnic or racial communities are by largely affected by poverty in comparison with the majority populations (Williams, 2005). The white privilege rhetoric was soon co-opted by the system. Engaging with the rhetoric of white privilege, white fragility and the quintessence of white identity, sells. Netflix just launched the second season of ‘Dear white people’ and sure thing Netflix will cash-in money from the series. Similarly, the First White Privilege conference at Ryerson University had the general admission fees set at 725 dollars. For

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faculty staff and students these were respectively 525 dollars for faculty and 200 dollars for students. The state does little to alter the distribution of inclusionary and exclusionary outcomes on identitarian lines, yet particular identitarian demands certainly found a market. Within the logic of equivalence, Laclau (1996) analyzes the universal-particular relationship in conjunction with possible emancipatory ways of changing the system, on the presumption that a ‘chain of equivalences’ would contour in-between particular demands to create a new hegemonic universality a fortiori. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines equivalence as: ‘the relation holding between two statements if they are either both true and both false, so that to affirm one and to deny the other would result in a contradiction’. The emancipatory hegemonic universality would result from an interaction between a multitude of particular struggles, themselves engaged within their own logic of difference (i.e., their own particular-universal struggles). There are two universals at play within the logic of equivalence. The first universal corresponds to the particular; the second universal is the ideal about to come, in behalf of which, particulars co-join in a common universal struggle. Take the example of Black Lives Matter, Parkdale tenants strike, and mining injustice struggles, etc. Laclau’s idea is that all these struggles have the potential to consolidate, through creating a chain of equivalences, and this chain of solidarity between multitudes, would surpass the current universal, creating, in return, a new emancipatory universality. If these struggles are simply referenced in dyads (i.e., tenants versus landlords), their demands are annihilated by the current universal. The rhetoric of diversity, for example, which simply juxtaposes white-racialized claims, had already been assimilated by the capitalism system. This is why most corporate institutions are supportive of diversity efforts and multiculturalism. For Laclau, universality is an empty concept waited to be filled by common goals, hence universality can be interpreted as the Derridian about to come (i.e., l’avenir). Derrida differentiated between an emancipatory future (l’avenir) and the expected, predicted future (avenir). Although a semantically difficult distinction to trace in English, where future simply means future, the time that will come after the present, in French, there is a distinction between avenir and l’avenir. Avenir refers to the future (i.e., the prescriptive, anticipated future, expectedly resulting from the current present). L’avenir in turn, refers to the future about to come, which is unexpected, or as Derrida described it, which is not anticipated or

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predicted by the present (Derrida, 2005). For Laclau, the gratification of particular demands needs the establishment of correspondences between a plurality of social revendications, and these formations depend on the construction of a global social imaginary in behalf of which something better will come (e.g., a change of the system, a more democratic society). Let us apply the logic of equivalences to the aftermath of the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally. The rally took place in August 2017, in Virginia, US and ended with a person being killed in a vehicular attack. The alt-right groups represented, for the most part, marginalized members within the American society. Economics have long been connected with the rise of the political far-right (take the example of Greece’s Golden Dawn ascension as coupled with the state-imposed austerity measures), whereas marginalized nationals employ an otherizing logic to shift the blame for their exclusion onto the outsiders. In a short clip edited by Vice Media (2017) a hipster reporter carries out a conversation with a white neo-Nazi lower class family (class is easily visible on the body, as it relates to the choice of clothes, mannerisms, vocabulary, ways of talking, and overall, ways of being), who state their support for another genocide against Jewish people, so that their children could ‘have a chance in the world’. Many believers in the idea and the ideal of white supremacy are part of the subordinate, lower, and uneducated classes of American society. They have no chance of escaping their status-based condition, no chance for better education, no real chance to upward mobility. When one is systemically disenfranchised and condemned to a life on the margins, one of the ways of reorienting oneself is by claiming symbolic appurtenance to a categorical division correlated with privilege: whiteness in this case: ‘I might be poor but at least I am white’, so goes the rhetoric. Poor American whites, however, have much more in common with poor African Americans than with rich American whites, since both groups are oppressed by the wealthy elites. If these two groups could find a common ground, based on their shared peripheral, subaltern position within American society, they could potentially create solidarity links to overthrow the system that enslaves them both. However, in virtue of the national myth of the American dream, each group wants access to the privileges available only to the white and wealthy elite. The lower-class whites in the US fail to consider solidarity efforts with racialized groups, since what they really want is to become part of the white elites.

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Laclau’s chain of (solidary) equivalencies can only be constituted if there is a common enemy to fight and this enemy can easily be taken as the existing capitalist economic system. However, Laclau moved away from Marxist economic analyses towards theorizing a multitude of identitarian positions. Indeed, he places particular struggles on equivalent levels, by arguing that the notion of class is no different than any post-modernist struggle for recognition, hence by taking capitalism as the main universal, the representation of class gets universalized (Poenaru, 2012). Notwithstanding its openness and the possibility of multiple interpretations, Laclau’s proposed ‘chain of equivalences’ is somewhat utopian. Group politics, framed around recognition efforts, are rarely able to formulate commonalities beyond group appurtenance. For instance, the Women’s March in Washington was criticized for cultural appropriation (it was initially named after the 1997 Million Woman March for Black Women) and for not attending to intersectional issues of class and race nor to issues of nationality, citizenship or belonging (Bejan, 2017); the Black Lives Matter movement was often criticized for not properly representing black youth but rather for fighting towards access into the same materialistic opportunities for consumption as the white middle class (Sewell, 2016); or the pro-immigration organization No One is Illegal was condemned for promulgating systemic anti-black racism (Zeleke, Mugabo, Rwigema, & Mire, 2015). Any particular struggle will be, more or less, accused of wrongly doing something, of not doing enough of something, or of missing out on something. How can particular struggles comprise universal goals, since they end up particularized within a logic of difference instead of being universalized into a logic of equivalence? The inter-identitarian chain of equivalences can hardly be established if particular struggles are unable to formulate broader goals due to their particular self-assigned importance. It is in behalf of each particular struggle seeing itself as the main one (i.e., in the aforementioned examples, either race, class or gender is seen as the most important division sustaining the struggle), that the creation of commonly based alliances gets diverted into issues of cultural separatism, which, in turn, inhibit political participation (Kingwell, 2000). Judith Butler brings the universal-particular discussion within the realm of performativity. The essentialized categories of sex, gender, sexuality, which have been societally naturalized, are just cultural constructs; they have meaning because society performs what these categories socially mean and transmits such meanings from within the

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language structure. For Butler, identity is never complete, since identification is irreducible just to identity. Identification is also what identity is not; it contains an inherent negativity constituted within the heart of (the positive) identity (Butler, Laclau & Žižek, 2012). Butler’s (Butler, Laclau, Žižek, 2012) idea of universality is empty and ready to be filled with particular claims, such as ethnic or gender prerogatives formulated in the language of universal rights; hence it constitutes itself through exclusions, through negating what it does not accept within itself. Butler argues that universality is just a mechanism for inclusion/exclusion. While universality accepts the re-inclusion of what was excluded from it initially, this acceptance can only be achieved via a process of cultural translation (i.e., the particular needs to be less particular to be included within the universal), whereas cultural norms (Butler cites Bourdieu to argue that social norms are embodied differently in the psyche and produce different forms of suffering) activate the subject’s imaginary attachment (the fantasmic) in relation to the social ideals that confer inclusion. The similarity between Butler and Laclau rests within the negation existent in identity. Particular political entities are defined through the absence of universality; they are incomplete and can only become complete, as the result of losing this dislocation (Butler, Laclau, Žižek, 2012). Butler states that there are concurrent notions of universality (similarly to Laclau’s reference of multitudes) yet the articulation of universality changes with time and on behalf of its revendications. It can be similarly added that universality changes across geo-political spaces. Butler, however, leaves unanswered the question of how the cultural translation changes/modifies particularisms; will these particularisms cater to the universal or will the universal in itself somehow change, hence to what extent the particulars have the ability to change the entire field of the game and the rules of the particular-universal game? Similar to Laclau, Butler writes about the co-optation of particularisms within the current universal system. She uses the LGBTQ movement as an example. Inclusion in certain institutions, for instance, in the marriage institution, the army, and accepting the rights conferred by this inclusion (i.e., the right to adoption, medical insurance, inheritance), also extends the legitimacy of the institution. It is not that universality changed per se; it is the particular which altered some of its particularity to fit within universality. Universality is hegemonic not because it represents a desirable form, but because it guides the trajectory of particularities, because it instils within the particular the desire to surpass itself towards the

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universal. Butler explicitly uses the double Hegelian negation to state that, while the particular gets negated because its incompleteness, the second negation happens via inclusion: once mainstreamed, once situated within the universal, the particular can be further excluded (culturally) as somewhat still deviating from the normative imaginary, hence the subject becomes tolerated in her deviance. This reasoning can be universalized so as to be applied to the destiny of any particular identitarian politics. For Žižek, universality is the form coloured by a particular content, the dialectical correspondent of the particular, comparatively shaped in relation to the particular, and the terrain where the dialectical game gets played out. The exclusion of particularity is what produces an otherwise empty universality. It is only through exclusion that universality fills itself. Žižek argues that the main universality, the terrain onto which the particular-universal identitarian dynamics unfold, is the capitalist system. Capitalism is identified as both, the condition and the terrain of the hegemonic battle. In agreement with Butler and Laclau, Žižek states that there is always something particular excluded from the universal. However, he criticized Laclau’s ‘postmodern’ contingent politics along with Butler’s notion of contingent identity, for engaging in a capitalist currency. It is not that people were stupid essentialists before and they just found out that gender is performative, argues Žižek; rather, the transition from essentialism to the awareness of contingency resides within the transformation of capitalism, which now accommodates such forms of contingency. For Žižek, Laclau’s idea of multiple subjectivities is somewhat apolitical. It presupposes a tacit, naturalized frame of economic relations that withholds the emergence of political subjectivities. The multitudes are just changes within the interior of the same economical regime. What Žižek fails to identify, however, is the role played by the ‘national’ in sustaining the current economic relations, supported by the wealthy, Global North nations and by transnational corporations, hosted for the most part within these very same wealthy nation-states. Žižek argues that no particular culture is a priori particular; rather it is produced as particular by not being universal, hence it is constituted through the negation out of the universal. There is ‘no particular’ without cultural translation but there is a universal without translation. Žižek’s argument in taking the economic system as the main structure could be simplistic, just as Butler’s idea that culture is the main structure is similarly simplistic.

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Despite possible universal-particular dialectical relations, the art of the dialectic analysis, writes Žižek, is the ability to choose the exceptional case which grounds the formation of universality and the negation of particularity. According to Žižek (1989) the dialectical approach locates the “phenomenon-to-be-analyzed in the totality to which it belongs” (p. x); it is the “notional determination forming the core of the thing. The problem is not that of how to grasp the multiplicity of determinations, but rather of how to abstract from them the notional determination” (p. xi). For instance, Žižek uses the example of money to demonstrate that its currency depends on how people think about money, thinking that constitutes the notional determination of ‘money’. If people would not value money, they would not use this piece of metal or paper as currency, and money would not constitute what is known as money. The relation between the universal and specific cultural elements is supra-determined historically, hence universality means different things in different cultures. This is why Žižek argues that each particularity contains its own universality. There is no a priori determined universality; it is the context that determines what fills the universality. In a Union strike, for example, the employers constitute the universality and the employees, the particularity. In the case of A2 exclusion in the UK, the British born comprise the universality while the Romanian and Bulgarian migrants embody the particularity. This is not to say that Romanians, for example, are universalized as particularities in all socio-political contexts. Romanians for instance, embody the universal in Romania, in relation to those of Roma ethnicity, who embody the particular. More so, Roma identity does not embody the particular in all socio-political contexts. For instance, in Romania, the Roma of Hungarian ethnicity, from around the regions of Covasna and Harghita, constitute themselves better in relation to the Roma of Romanian nationality. Histories of positioning are complicated within societies that have subsequent ethnic particularities embedded in the initial national particularities. Chapter Three detailed some aspects of the oppression of Romanians under the Habsburg Empire. This does not mean, similarly, that the universal-particular dialectic between Hungarians and Romanians follows a pre-determined universal-particular line where the Hungarians always represent the hegemonic universality and the Romanians always represent the particularity. For instance, the Hungarian minority residing in Romania becomes the particular within a context that takes Romania as the nation-state. Many Hungarians face cultural discrimination in Romania. Their discrimination, however, results

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from a majoritarian-minoritarian dialectical relation that juxtaposes the Romanian nationals to the minoritized ethnic Hungarians, and not from an ontological ethnic appurtenance possessed by these subjects. Žižek argues that inclusionary claims should not be made on behalf of attributive identity features but on behalf of democratic representation. For instance, the inclusion of women should not be advocated on the premise that women are better, more compassionate, etc. but rather on the premise of democratic egalitarianism, as they represent half of the population. Universality gets formed through exclusionary processes that negate the (multitude of) particularisms. For Laclau, these multitudes are equally manifested in the recognition politics; for Butler, they are culturally performed within discourse, while for Žižek they are secondary to the main struggle against the universality of capitalism. The field of the game, for Laclau, is the political terrain, which is why he envisions possible solidarity links between a multitude of particularities that may create a new hegemony. Discourse is the field of the game for Butler, as she envisions the relations of power as culturally performed. For Žižek, the field of the game is constituted by the economic system. All three authors regard the particular as being negated by the universal. They differ, however, in terms of how they define possibilities of change, of the particular changing the current hegemonic universal. The common interpretation in their works, that exclusionary processes (from a certain version of universality) are responsible for the production of universality as universality, in its empty and formal aspect, are drawn from Hegel. It is Hegel who first identified the particular as a negation out of the universal, that coined the dialectical logic and created an epistemological separation from the enlightenment idea that the universal is a priori constituted. The Hegelian dialectic is constructed on the concept of ‘Aufhebung’, which implies that, through a process of negation, the non-negated that negates retains its form and subsequently re-positions itself at a higher level. The usual English translation for this re- positioning at a higher level is ‘sublation’ or ‘supersession’ but neither of these terms capture the third meaning of ‘Aufhebung’. Through negating what is not part of oneself, the one that negates affirms a qualitative conceptualization of itself (Hegel & Rauch, 1988). Once the universal (i.e., Allgemein) negates the particular, the universal cements itself not simply as being but as being-for-itself (i.e., Besonder).

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The universal-particular Hegelian dialectic erases the question of a primary existence. Both elements, the universal and the particular, derive their existence through a relation of dependency on each other. The Hegelian universal (Hegel, 2010) implies ‘an other to a first” (§107). The ‘first’ constitute itself as the first through a relational positioning vis-à-vis an other. Hegel writes that at the beginning there is being and nothing else. The beginning, is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something needs to proceed” (§110), and this being in the beginning “removed itself from non-being” (§111). Hegel writes: “the analysis of the beginning would thus yield the notion of the unity of being and nothing […] the unity of differentiatedness and non-differentiatedness or the identity and non-identity” (112). Through differentiating itself from non-being, being establishes who belongs, who is identified to belong and how the belonging identity constructs the non-identity of those not belonging with what belonging constitutes. Being-for-itself contains both, sameness and difference, quality and inferiority, which is why, to maintain itself, being has to remove anything that could possibly contaminate it, and through this removal, through negating what is not part of itself, being constructs itself as pure being. Hegel (2010) writes that two things are not perfectly alike; they are composed of inner and outer, they are at once alike and unalike. Through negating the different ‘unlike’, likeness solidifies itself as being-for-itself. The apogee of being-for-itself (in Hegelian terms) is quality. To use a concrete empirical example, the Brexit vote was a vote of negation, of excluding the negative from the positive delimited by the territorial boundaries of what constitutes Britain as a nation. Britain not just negated the other but qualitatively positioned its being as superior to others, as Stephen Green (2017) shows on its recent book on Brexit: as one of the greatest empires, Britain deserves a special place on the world map; Britons were never slaves, they were born to rule; Britain has the best universities in the world; Britain offers the richest cultural offerings (Green, 2017) and so on and so forth. The act of expulsing what is not part of Britishness makes even a Europhile such as Stephen Green, inclined to position Britain as a qualitatively delineated being-for-itself: “…yes, we did stand alone against the evil of the Third Reich in May 1940. Yes, we did bring a halt to Napoleon’s vaulting ambition at Waterloo. Yes, it was Britons who led the campaign for abolition of the slave trade, and it was the Royal Navy that enforced it on the high seas. Yes, we have had a continuously adjusting constitution ever since the signing of the Magna Carta, which has given us the mother of parliaments and

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enough flexibility- at least since the English Civil War- to avoid the brittleness of French, German, Italian or Spanish political history. Yes, our common law, evolving over centuries and upheld by an independent judiciary is -in the words of W.S. Gilbert- the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent. Yes, we are the heirs of Shakespeare and our language has become the lingua franca of the planet. And yes, we are the heirs of a culture which values pragmatism more than doctrine” (Green, 2017, pp. 29-30). The value of being-for-itself, as universality, is mediated by the particular. The particular, however is not universally particularized, since the negative can contain, in return, a positive aspect that could further negate subsequent intrinsic negatives. The positive- negative, insider-outsider, same-different, universal-particular dialectical logic resides within every manifestation of ontological being. Such dialectic within dialectics can operate infinitely. Skilled migrants in Canada, for instance, are excluded from the labour market (negated) in comparison to Canadian workers (they are the negation from within the national) yet in comparison with (by negating) temporary foreign workers or undocumented people, skilled migrants get established as the positive. In other words, skilled migrants are the better, desired type of migrants because other type of migrants are undesired. Their desirability has nothing to do with their identitarian attributes. It is through negating the underserving component out of the abstract figure of the migrant, that idea of skilled migration positions herself as better, as deserving, through positively marking skilled migrants. Similarly, while A2 nationals are excluded (negated) from Britishness (the dialectic unfolds between national and foreignness), as European migrants, A2 nationals are somewhat contained within Britishness in comparison to non-EU migrants, for instance Syrians, Iranians, etc. Nationals from peripheral Europe become the positive through a dialectic that positions EU and non-EU citizens. Despite the EU2 being negated from the national universality of Britishness, in relation to non-EU migrants, A2 nationals get established as qualitatively better; their being-in-themselves becomes the positive. The relevancy of A2 nationals as EU migrants gets established through the non-European appurtenance of other migrants, which are negated from the subjectivity of what abstractly constitutes a ‘European migrant’. The positive-negative, sameness-difference dialectic exists within every difference contained in the initial difference. The negative, abstractly speaking, can constitute itself as the positive in another equation, space, time, and this dialectical positioning could repeatedly

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unfold in relation to everything considered being. For instance, Canadians oftentimes define their cultural identity by differentiating themselves from the Americans (Courchene, 1996). Through negating Americanness, Canadianness, as being, positions itself as better, as being- for itself. Nation-states are similarly engaged in their own dialectical forms. Think, for example, about the wealthy nations of the Global North as embodying a universality while the poorer Global South states embody the particularity (although both regions have their own dialectical ethnocentric constructions). The universals, for Hegel, maintain their universality because they are shared. Sharing something implies that strangers come to an agreement that the something is valued enough to be shared within a space delimited by various parameters (cultural, political, ethnic, national, etc.). Societies contain varied layers where strangers can develop affinity with other strangers. Markers of affinity, however, are shared in context specific circumstances, varying from one structure of collective consciousness to another (Conklin, 2008). A courteous affinity may be shared in a coffee shop amongst strangers, whereas the space is strictly organized on functional terms; an ideological affinity would be shared amongst partisan affiliations within Parliamentary debates, for example, where the House of Common, as a space, has the role of debating political ideologies; racial appurtenance would be shared in recognition movements, such as the Black Lives Matter; while national appurtenance would be shared when cheering up teams participating in Olympic games. Bounding over shared universals reflects a communitarian ethos. If a person desires material wealth, for example, it is not enough for that person to simply make money or save money. One needs to mentally participate in the universal shared idea that money equals success. Bonding with others over this shared idea bestows not only a particularized material achievement for the individual in question, but also a universalized ideology legitimizing material success. Hegel writes about two forms of ethos that sustain shared universals. Either the individual bonds with the community she feels adjacency (i.e., family, ethnic community, etc.) and accepts by default the customs of the collectivity (e.g., the acceptance of Canadian multiculturalism without contestation); or the bonding results out of a process of active consciousness through a reflection, deliberation and evaluation of the shared universals. The first ethos lacks self-consciousness; the second possesses consciousness (Conklin, 2008). Bonding, in the second case, is chosen. Cultivating the belonging to an ethos (i.e., Dasein) is

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ethical, for Hegel, although it might be immoral. Trans-genderism constitutes an example of chosen bonding. While it might be ethical for someone to choose an identitarian belonging, this gesture might not be moral; as shown in Chapter Three, Racheal Dolezal was publicly accused of immorality in trying to change her race. Similarly, it might be immoral to exclude immigrants yet it might not be unethical in terms of the social functioning of the nation-state. Morality for Hegel is subjective whereas ethical life is objective. Hegelian ethicality refers to a relation of social recognition over presupposed shared universals (Conklin, 2008). Ideas about shared universals exclude other ways of being to maintain their ethos. Think about the imposition of bilingualism in Canada, instead of linguistic plurality, despite the multicultural character of Canadian society; or the cutback in the power of the Scottish Parliament in the UK although the British identity encompass the English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish identities (Ali, 2015). Ideas about national identities generally signify an ethical national ethos. Ethical as defined by the recognition between strangers on the universal values shared to delineate what constitutes a nation. For instance, commonly accepted Canadian values (yet shared to different extents by individuals) include those of tolerance, human rights, multiculturalism, peace, politeness and a spirit of compromise (Courchene, 1996). Loosely defined ideas of politeness, respectability, commitment to human rights and social justice are concepts difficult to measure. However, Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey (GSS), collected data on such shared values within the country. Respondents identified human rights, respect for law, gender equality, linguistic duality, ethnic and cultural diversity, and respect for Aboriginal cultures (Sinha, 2013) as the main shared universals to symbolize what it means to be Canadian. In the UK, state attitudinal surveys are less centered on measuring national values in loosely referred ideological terms, but rather focused on what encompasses concrete national priorities. The Brits identify pragmatic shared universals: caring for the elderly, public accountability, affordable housing, employment opportunities, dependable public services, economic development, governmental effectiveness and financial stability (Barrett & & Clothier, 2012). While the Brits agree on specific symbols as reflective of British culture, such as language, sense of fair play, the national flag, sporting achievements, these are overall seen as less important in sustaining the British state than broader economic and political factors (McCrone & Bechhofer, 2012). This does not mean that Britain lacks shared universals but rather that it

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shares a different type of universals (i.e., economic and political). Shared universals of what it means to be Canadian or British get particularized in individual consciousness through space-specific and time-specific contexts. If an attitudinal survey was carried out in the 1700s during the peak of the British Empire, identified national shared universals would have been of a different kind. In 2017, when Canada celebrated 150 years of national existence, Roots, the Canadian clothing company, launched a video advertisement which specifically tapped into the currency of national universals: Canadians are nice, beyond polite, but nice in a selfless way, ‘the real’ nice that takes ‘guts’ (footage of soldiers shown in the background) and nice for opening doors when other doors are closed (footage of Canada accepting refugees). The add concluded with a rhetoric of national encouragement: “Canada’s: here to another year of being nice” (Burgess, 2017). The Roots campaign tapped into the common values attached to nationally shared universals: the discourse of Canadian niceness, of Canada as a human rights savior. The war imagery is juxtaposed with the rhetoric of national niceness, although in the last couple of decades, Canada participated in as many possible wars as can be dotted on the map: The Gulf War, the Rwandan Civil War, The Somali Civil War, the Bosnian War, the Kosovo War, the Afghanistan War, the Libyan Civil War, as well as the Iraq War. These conflicts did not represent an external threat for the Canadian state, yet Canadian military involvement is mentioned as the moral thing to do and as ethically congruent with NATO’s military direction where Canada holds membership. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of welcoming refugees was similarly co-opted as a symbol of national pride. According to international statistics, Canada received a low number of refugees compared with other Western nations. UNHCR statistics for 2016 indicate that Germany settled 722,364 refugees, Italy-122,124, Turkey -77,851, France -70,748, UK -38,380 and Canada about 23,833 (UNHCR, 2017). The national discourse of Canada as a human rights protector is merely performative. Figures show that Canada is doing the bare minimum in settling asylum seekers despite the fact that it was militarily involved in many of the conflicts that produced and continue to produce the refugees. Such rhetoric, however, solidifies the shared understanding of the Canadian national with a positive significance through inferring that human rights are national matters within Canada. A similar message was contained in a 2014 temporary exhibit, imported from the Canadian War Museum, to be displayed at the Canadian Human Rights Museum in

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Winnipeg (CHRM, 2014). The exhibit emphasized the positive role of Canada’s intervention in Afghanistan, in terms of building security, securing women’s rights, contributing to global peace as well as supporting training, development and other forms of foreign aid, hence highly positioning the Canadian national at a higher value, despite the involvement of Canadian Forces in Afghanistan. The idea of the national is multifariously shared within states. National television, national car rental, national bank, national museum, national hockey team, national language, national emergency number, national insurance, national social security numbers, are all markers of a collective appurtenance that is territorially defined and culturally understood. The national is a natural phenomenon because its members are first united via blood origin (Conklin, 2008). Hegel wrote that “in world history, we are concerned with ‘individuals’ that are nations, with wholes that are states” (Hegel & Rauch, 1988, p. 16). Once a society has a state, the state comprises the culture of a nation, taken altogether: “A community that is in the process of shaping itself into a state requires rules, laws, universal and universally binding directives” (Hegel & Rauch, 1988, p. 65). The state therefore contains “the universal spiritual life, to which the individuals who are born into it relate with trust and habitual acceptance, so that they have their essence and actuality in it” (Hegel & Rauch, 1988, p. 93). Ideas about ideals shared within a state are societally manifested through routine societal practices, cultural assumptions and community expectations (Conklin, 2008). The unwritten assumptions contained within the shared universals contour a societal, collective ethos. Yet this ethos is particularized, according to each state. There is no universal ethos since societies have their own inscribed ethos. For instance, several shared universals exist in regard to national models of immigrant identity formation. American national identity encompasses different ethnicities for as long as they are additions to American uniqueness (Alba & Foner, 2015). Canadian national identity is defined in multicultural terms. It tolerates identities for as long as they stay cemented as particularisms. “Americans are comfortable with hyphenated identities. You can be American and ‘ethnic’ at the same time…. Being Canadian and ethnic is also normal and accepted”, Alba and Foner discuss (2015, p. 200), as hyphenated identities like Italian-Canadian or Indo-Canadian are “an integral part of the richly textured fabric of the country” (Shields & Bauder, 2015, p. 19). The shared universal in these instances is one of tolerance towards the other, for as long as the

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other does not trouble the societal ethos. In Western Europe, for example, an ethnic homogeneity constitutes the shared national universal. The other is defined under ethno- national labels: Deutschturken (i.e., German Turks) in Germany; allochthones in Netherlands to delineate the foreigners from the autochthones native Dutch. France favours an assimilationist immigration model, where immigrants are expected to become and feel French. Britain seems closely aligned with Canada and the US, although empirical work shows that the Muslim population or those of Caribbean descent do not feel they belong to Britain (Alba & Foner, 2015; Ali & Heath, 2013). Explanations for the sustenance of hyphenated identities in North America are framed on the historical make-up of the American and Canadian societies, as settler, immigration-orientated cultures. Diversity is understood as a shared ideal that is cultivated through history, through embedding immigration in the formation of the nation state, and through strengthening the jus soli citizenship regimes that grant nationality at birth. In most Western societies, the standard practice, at least until recently, was to grant citizenship on jus sanguinis principles, meaning that citizenship could only be inherited (by blood) (Alba & Foner, 2015). A transition to jus soli followed within the last years. France gives jus soli automatic citizenship at birth for the third generation; Germany for the second generation, if at least one parent lived in Germany for a minimum of eight years, and if the applicant renounces their former citizenship when acquiring German nationality; Britain grants conditional jus soli at birth, if one parent possesses citizenship or permanent residence; Netherlands grants conditional citizenship at eighteen years of age for those with Dutch residency since birth. Territorial birth, as these examples showed, becomes the utmost criterion in granting citizenship, the primary principle on the basis of which belonging to the nation gets demarcated. It delineates, on the one hand, the boundaries for the manifestation of shared universals, and on the other hand, it constructs a sameness-difference dialectic between those de facto embedded within the parameters containing the shared national universals and those negated outside of its spheres. In the examples above, citizenship-granting correlates with a temporally framed level of attachment to the land. The longer the attachment, the longer the investment within the national. Territory, as a spatial category, bestows the determinant condition for citizenship, producing regimes of accessing rights and differentiating between communities of shared values. Once territorial homogeneity gets overlaid on boundaries of similarity and dissimilarity, the

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concern becomes about creating differentiation (Rigo, 2010): “the condition of foreignness is projected within a political space or national territory to create an inadmissible alterity” (Balibar, 2015, p. 69). Belonging to the national, by birth, amounts to already being included in the nation (already contained within universality), yet not being included as the result of a process of inclusion. Those already born within the national ethos are de facto included within being for-itself, in terms of their right to belong. Inclusion in society might be differentially experienced by national subjects through their identitarian appurtenance, however, those within the being-for itself have a legitimized right to claim societally denied privileges within the nation. The outsiders, those born somewhere else, might gain national rights yet these are unguaranteed. Take the example of Bill C-24. Introduced under Stephen Harper’s government, Bill C-24 aimed to revoke citizenship from dual Canadian citizens convicted of terrorism, treason or espionage. Many parts of the Bill were revoked under Bill C-6 adopted by Justin Trudeau’s liberal government (Zilio, 2017). Bill C-24, however, is demonstrative of the distinction made by the state between those belonging to sameness and those belonging to difference. The immigrant, as the newcomer to the nation is constructed as different from those deemed the same within the nation. All three Executive Orders put forward by Donald Trump (i.e., the Muslim bans) were ideologically well-thought-out on national lines. The intention was to purify national sameness and to negate the difference that could hypothetically change the character of the American nation. The bans prevented citizens of predominantly Muslim countries, such as those of Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Iraq, from entering the US for about 90 days (i.e., the number of days formerly allowed under the Visa Waiver Program). The order did not apply to the Muslim states of Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, countries with strong economic ties with the US. The ban did apply, however, to those already legally entitled to reside, study or conduct some sort of business in the US, to dual citizens and residents, hence to those already belonging, in one way or another, to the nation, to the community of value whose borders shape the American state. The Muslim ban was an effort to re-engineer the game of granting rights on stringent cultural values of national belonging. Trump’s Muslim ban was about protecting jus sanguinis Americanness. To protect ‘our country’ from terror and to ‘keep it safe’ (The Independent, 2017) could ad litteram outline the state’s right to delineate who is part of

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America and who should be part of America (Bejan, 2017). The Brexit vote was similarly reflective of a national effort to exclude the outsiders from the idea of Britain as a community of value, and to impose Britain as nationally defined in relation to everything else. Universals are shared within the territorial parameters delineating sameness, through negating the difference, and superiorly positioning, through this negation, the subjects with territorial appurtenance within the nation-state in relation to those outside the nation. The existence of the state per se does not endow the national subject with the attribute of consciousness. The investment within the shared universals gets created without a proper reflection (Conklin, 2008). It is only when the subject gets self-invested in the logic of the state, that the subject becomes self-conscious of her appurtenance. The state mediates this appurtenance by providing benefits to its members: citizenship, passports, access to employment, rights, etc., hence creating the conditions of a shared territorial bounding and circulating shared national values by appending them to centralized institutions. Individual bonding with the state subsequently sustains the state. Universals, according to Hegel, are shared when an individual comes to an agreement (a shared understanding) with a stranger, when the individual recognizes the stranger through shared universals (i.e., laws, institutions, assumptions). Once these shared universals are posited inside the individual consciousness they get particularized into one’s thinking and, through the process of recognition, the individual feels at home (Dasein) with this universal unity (Conklin, 2008). Binding rules bind not because their legality per se but because their legitimacy originates from their particularization into singular consciousness (Conklin, 2008). Customs are universal. Yet the bonding is particularized through every person’s particularity (Conklin, 2008). When individuals reach adulthood, and leave their family for the civil society, a person’s objective becomes about promoting her own individualized, particularized welfare (Conklin, 2008). Following her self-interest, the individual fulfills a social function within the state. For instance, by furthering the shared universal of private property the individual also satisfies her self-interest of owning property, and this is how, in Hegelian terminology, the societal universals get linked with the subconscious. In arguing for British companies and British jobs, as it was the case with the Brexit campaign, individuals not only pursue their self- interest (i.e., employment) but also further the national universal that has as a social function the primacy of employment for those belonging to the nation-state. Belonging is not solely

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equated with a physical existence inside spatial boundaries but also with a mental appurtenance manifested by subjects’ participation in a commonly shared significance (Van Wolleghem, 2014). For Hegel, all structures of consciousness are socially and historically conditioned (Conklin, 2008), which is why universals are determined by temporal and spatial contexts. Attachment to one country, to a nation, is also a way for the strangers, for the members in society to relate to one another (Ali & Heath, 2013). For instance, empirical evidence shows that people born outside Britain, including EU migrants, have much lower levels of attachment to Britain than those born within the nation, and out of those born abroad, those from within the Commonwealth show a deeper sense of belonging (Ali & Heath, 2013). Such evidence suggests that the leveled appurtenance to Britain is indicative of a recognition mechanism in relation to the shared universal of the national. The subjective attachment to the shared ideals manifests in the performativity of unwritten laws, rules and regulations, which have as an effect, the objectification of these shared ideals. Practices of sharing universals in society do construct the universals as principles of differentiation. Pierre Bourdieu (1984), showed, in Distinction, that the preference to visit a museum is socio-economically conditioned. Even if museums would have free registration, this will not automatically translate into higher rates of attendance. Not everyone would have the cultivated disposition to appreciate exhibited work. Similar with the taste in music. To enjoy classical music and to have the disposition to enjoy classical music, one has to formerly cultivate such taste. If someone listened their entire life to Britney Spears, they will not have the disposition towards jazz or classical tunes. The cultivation of taste requires time (e.g, listening to classical music or learning to play a musical instrument) and financial ability (e.g., purchasing tickets to the opera, symphony, etc.). One would not be able to distinguish between Tchaikovsky and Chopin if one did not invest in practices of knowing how the music of these two composers sounds. The ordinary act of liking certain type of music is indicative of one’s position on the social scale, in Bourdieusian thinking. Similarly, participation in practices that denote national membership, such as the games of hockey in Canada, or rugby or cricket in the UK, would be conditioned on a certain national familiarity bestowed to those residing in the nation. Those born in a society participate, through time, in practices that produce subjects as national subjects, and that cultivate in subjects a taste towards certain cultural practices that maintain, in turn, national values. There

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is a certain way of being a national subject which denotes a taste, an inclination, a disposition to position as part of the national, to embody a national habitus. It is common knowledge that attending a national hockey game is what Canadians do, similarly to celebrating Canada Day at the cottage, skiing in the winter, shopping for clothes at the ‘real Canadian store’ Roots, purchasing household items at the Hudson Bay Company, buying jewelry from Bricks or attending Upper Canada College. These markers of distinction differentiate not only on class (i.e., attending private colleges) but also in terms of symbolic appurtenance (i.e., shopping at Roots). Roots Canada, for instance, always emphasized the importance of Canadian national heritage to the ‘brand’s DNA’ (Roots Corporation, 2017). By providing the wardrobe for nationalist manifestations (i.e., the Olympic games) (Millard, Riegel, & Wright, 2002), the company capitalizes on the currency of national symbols and the investment of national subjects in these symbols. The activities mentioned above carry a symbolistic that shows honour and pride in what is seen to be Canadianness. Markers of dress codes (brands, stores), markers of frequented places (cottages, etc.) do not solely possess an ideological function, through maintaining the idea of the national, but also a social function, differentiating the newcomers from those embodying being-for-itself inside the nation. Buying a fashion outfit, buying an experience (i.e., attending hockey game) also implies buying into a way of thinking that classifies what it means to consume certain products and experiences, and construes such consumption patterns on imagined national lines. Naturally, there is a plurality of cultural currencies that denote investment in the national, including nationally bestowed commercial symbols. In referring to the Canadian National day celebrations in London, a British newspaper was reporting that the popular landmark of Trafalgar Square, will be getting a “red-and-white makeover, with classic Canadian treats up for grabs, from Tim Hortons double-doubles to sweet maple syrup snacks” (Independent, 2017). Maple syrup and Tim Hortons become commercial markers circulated to denote national appurtenance. Let us further discuss the manifestation of national belonging within cultural institutions. The military is a good example. In case of a global war, it is the appurtenance to the nation-state that determines for whom the soldiers will fight. It is in virtue of being national subjects that people will be drafted into the national army. The Canadian Armed Forces, for example, is strongly attached to the idea of the national. This is why it merely

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recruits Canadian citizens. In fact, soldiers of immigrant background represent 5% of the Canadian military force (Park, 2008). It is no coincidence that the national liaison ties a formal institution, such as the army, with the cultural institution of hockey. Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (MLSE), the professional sport company that owns the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team strongly supports the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). MLSE oftentimes holds Appreciation CAF nights, dedicates games and contributes ticket donations to CAF members and invites CAF members to attend the games. There is even a hashtag on social media that tags related photos with CAF representatives - #TMLForcesNight. The MLSE foundation regularly donates to the Soldier On Fund, which supports injured CAF members and raises revenue for the Fund by auctioning player-worn camouflaged sweaters and players-autographed memorabilia (Toronto Maple Leafs, 2016). It is the principle of the national that becomes the basis to sustain the shared universals of what matters within a nation: hockey and the military. Bourdieu (1984) wrote that the universe of sporting activities is a space of ready- made relations reflective of larger societal connections, which have been instituted through shared values, rules, traditions and symbols with specific social, cultural and historical significance. One can easily think of the hyped up Olympic events, the World Cup or the European Soccer Cup FIFA. Many nations, in fact, regard membership in the United Nations (UN) just as important as FIFA membership (Watson, 2017). In Canada, hockey is promoted at the level of a national culture and portrayed within the Citizenship Guide as the national winter sport (Watson, 2017). Anyone who ever attended a hockey game can interpret its associated symbolism as a show-off of national pride; from people standing up during the anthem to the memorialization of Canadian soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hockey provides a manifestation of the socio-cultural universal of Canadian identity, which is why there is a strong state support for hockey games. In 1999, after three Canadian sports teams relocated to the US, both federal and provincial governments agreed to provide financial support for Ottawa Senators to avoid an anticipated relocation to the US (Watson, 2017). The subsidy plan was retracted due to public outcry (Watson, 2017), however, that it was even entertained to begin with, shows the weight of national sports in defining national identity. The federal government has insufficient funds to endow a universal program for child care but plenty enough to fund private hockey franchises.

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Attendance at a hockey game imparts an entertainment and a social function. At the primary level, there is a rudimentary distinction between the hokey spectator and the disinterested individual. At the secondary level a subtler distinction gets established between the connoisseur of the game, the one familiarized with the game and with the performative behaviours at the game, and the one from outside who needs to learn the etiquette of attending a hockey game. Think also about the process of purchasing tickets. Season holders automatically renew their Maple Leafs tickets on a yearly basis. These have been passed down generationally, hence only those who acquired them earlier have the privilege to renew them. Years-long waitlists are in place for purchasing such packages. The ability to purchase season tickets does not just create a primary distinction between season holders and the general population (many Canadians cannot afford hockey tickets or even if they can afford them, tickets are often unavailable) but also a symbolic distinction differentiating between subjects attending the game. A person regularly participating in such sporting events, embodies the performative mannerism of what it means to participate in the game; how to react when the national anthem plays, when to catcall a move on the field, how to move between rowed seats, what to do during the breaks, etc., mannerisms that a person who got the tickets on Craigslist will not be accustomed with. Embodied habitus makes one feel as the legitimate recipient of a cultural product and this denotes a certain familiarity, naturalness with recurrent practices. While for some, sporadically attending a hockey game might be an event, a special night out, for the ticket holders, it is something they do regularly, twice a week, during the winter months. The symbolic pedigree that gets created through attending a hockey game (hockey was used as an example, there can be other cultural practices to distinguish the national), through consuming an entertainment good that symbolizes the national, produces, amongst plural types of differentiation, also a differentiation on national lines. The disposition to attend a hockey game, to have a taste for hockey, similarly reflects the transmission and accumulation of national capital. Not all Canadians enjoy attending a hockey game, however, the disposition to enjoy hockey has been historically and habitually shaped through national appurtenance, through the transmission of national taste across generations, as reflected by the Canadian educational system (children taking part in community mini hockey leagues) and the popular entertaining culture which assigns a leisurely value to hockey as a sport. Someone habitually accustomed with a social practice

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has the tendency to like it and even if she does not like it, she has the ability to contribute to its happenings to a certain extent, to know the rules of the game, etc., things that strangers need to gain familiarity with, and even when familiar with such performativity, they might not appreciate it in the same way that someone with a historically shaped habitus would. Participating in the hockey experience, for example, buys one a glimpse of the national life, of what it means to live in Canada, to be Canadian, to be part of Canadian cultural practices and to perform Canadian social practices. Mastery of English can be a similar example. Language denotes belonging to the nation, and those born in Canada, who have always used English, have the ability to exercise the language with an unconscious mastery and familiarity. The dialectic between natives and immigrants to the nation (Codini & D’Odorico, 2014) materializes through processes that symbolically translate the national universals to culturally delineate the difference of the other, of the foreigner which deviates from national sameness. Canadianness gets manifested in subtle ways, through the requirement of Canadian experience, mannerism, enjoyment of hockey, having a Canadian flag on the lawn, standing up to the national anthem at sporting events, similarly to how Britishness manifests through the public support for the monarchic events, British music, etc. The national becomes naturalized, embedded into the everyday, and catalogued as authentic. Newcomers to the nation, would have a limited ability to withhold the cultural capital that makes one belong to the nation. Even if they engage in cultural consumption, they lack the internalized schemes to correctly appropriate them, since they lack the internalized forms of building national capital. For example, in any immigrant community there are differences between those who immigrated as children and those who migrated as adults. The adult migrants cannot dispose of their ethnic imprint of appurtenance. Those that migrated as children, besides speaking their language of origin and sharing a common lexicon, are Canadians inside-out, from mannerisms, ways of thinking, and the investment in national values. People sharing a certain universalized taste are able to recognize each other as being more or less the same; those able to cross classified boundaries of difference might get acceptance within sameness if they manage to transverse their difference and are able to show investment in universally shared national cultural practices. The newcomers become accepted once they consciously share and circulate the national markers of distinction.

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It is on behalf of the national pedigree that the Ontario website settlement.org drafted a web page detailing what constitutes Canadian etiquette at work: one should ask where to sit in an interview, to send a thank you email after an interview, hold open the doors for others, etc. One of the original newcomer orientation books, from 1991, contained remarks that Canadians do not urinate in public (Courchene, 1996), as a shared protocol of what it means to be Canadian. Aside from prejudiced assumptions that newcomers to Canada are rude, uncivilized and unaware of how to use a urinal, such statements emphasize the national trait of behavioural practices, bestowing with normality those that are accustomed with these practices and creating a symbolic differentiation between those that might differently act. The national subjects acquire the basis of a national performing from when they are born, from within the family, school system, work system, etc. hence they become accustomed with the ordinary choices of what is being considered respectful, polite, of where is best to sit during an interview and which particular chair to pick. Social practices work in the recognition process; the stranger recognizes the others and the others recognize the stranger. When Canada’s Defence Minister, Harjit Singh Sajjan was caught discarding cherry pits in a parking lot, last summer, his gesture was publicly interpreted as a lack of Canadian manners: “The sight of anyone eating and tossing cherry pits from a parked car is not a pleasant sight! But it is a normal sight in India” wrote the South Asian Link Newspaper (2017) from Surrey, British Columbia. Although Harjit Singh Sajjan is a Canadian citizen and has been living in Canada since he was five years old, it is his non-Canadian cultural appurtenance that gets blamed for his cherry pits habit. Were he born in Canada, such claims could not be as easily made. These remarks were broadcasted by an immigrant media outlet, which shows the investment of Immigrantness in national values. Similarly, when a Punjabi hockey broadcast was launched in Canada (HNIC Punjabi), the public reaction was one of amusement. In fact, a LOL tag was circulated on Twitter in regard to the topic (Szto, 2016). Again, it is not the identitarian (i.e., Punjabi) attributes that gave birth to the LOL rhetoric but rather the imagination of the Canadian national. Broadcasting hockey with an accent is not what hockey is all about. Universality, be it national or of another sort, is content but also form. Content because it is that what divides particularity from universality and form, because universal-

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particular dynamics play out within a certain arrangement of universality (e.g., the nation- state in this case). On the one hand, the universal constitutes the counterpart of the particular, the ideal (of Canadianness or Britishness) in relation to which the particular (Immigrantness) defines itself, hence the pole in relation to which the particular either struggles to disrupt or to assimilate. That immigrants seem more likely than non-immigrants to appreciate national symbols as important to the Canadian identity (Sinha, 2013), constitutes an example of particularisms’ assimilation within the national universality. The removal by the Ontario Human Rights Commission of the “Canadian experience” requirement in employment applications is an example of particular demands disrupting certain shared assumptions within the universal, that of Canadian experience being authoritatively valued. The Hegelian dialectic embodies the universal through particularisms (Conklin, 2008). Both notions are constituted in relation to one another, via an associative valuation and not through an essentialized juxtaposition of what immigrants and/or born nationals constitute on identitarian basis. The national self-identifies through its refection in particularisms. It contains the imaginary of its self-value, and by gazing at Immigrantness, by negating Immigrantness, the national cements its identity as universal. Immigrantness, as the particular, needs the universal benchmark of the national to transcend from its particularized position. Excluded from national belonging through negation, immigrants have their difference inferiorized and contoured away from the idea of sameness contained within the nation-state. The ideal imaginaries of Canadianness (tolerant, multicultural), of Britishness (equal, fair-play), are required by both, the universal and the particular. First by the universal, which surpasses to a superior position and second, by the particular, which needs the national in its own ascension towards universality. Take as example the mission statement written by the Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). It explicitly states that immigration is about the enhancement of values and the promotion of rights and responsibilities of Canadian citizenship (Citizenship and Immigration, 2016). Presumed here are the enhanced (i.e., better) traits of Canadian values. It is subsequently implied that immigrants, since they lack these values, need to adopt them in order to strengthen Canada’s national regime. It is the constant comparison with and the valuation with Canadianness that evaluates Immigrantness. For instance, the Canadian Citizenship Study Guide (CIC, 2011),

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does not only outline legal rights and responsibilities that come attached to citizenship (i.e., voting, jury duty) but it additionally includes a section on Becoming Canadian. Since Canada is not the place for violence and hateful prejudices, the Study Guide implies that migrants should dispose of their backward practices and embrace democratic principles (CIC, 2011). The immigrant is objectified through a judgement of cumulative prejudices by the one doing the valuation (i.e., by the one already located within and belonging to the national), and in the perceived deficiency of the other (in the lack), a (distinguished) perspective of sameness (as distinguished Canadians, British) gets constructed: “In the perceived deficiency of the others, each perceives - without knowing it- the falsity of her own subjective position; the deficiency of the other is simply an objectification of the distortion of our point of view” (Žižek, 1989, p. 67). By the very fact of being an immigrant, of being less, of lacking, the immigrant does not deceive the national expectation that the Immigrant is lacking. The Canadianness- Immigrantness dialectic is not just an abstract contention. It gets similarity operationalized in taxonomic terms. For instance, Citizenship and Immigration Canada commissioned Nevitte Research Inc. to conduct a World Values Survey in order to assess how different are immigrant morals compared to those born in Canada. Respondents were categorized in relation to their national attachment: Canadian born; earlier immigrants (more than ten years in the country); and recent immigrants (less than ten years in the country). In measuring how much one becomes part of being-for-itself, this study surveys, in fact, assimilation. Immigrant values are compared with Canadian customs, which, from the get-go are envisioned as superior. Asked if new citizens should adopt the customs of Canada, 60.3% of Canadian born versus 32.9% of recent immigrants stated so (CIC, 2016). Studies in UK similarly assess native/foreigner taxonomies; however, the degrees of assimilation are not as stringently measured. For instance, the 2007-2008 Citizenship Survey assessed national values as differentiated by those born in the UK and those born outside its borders (Department for Communities and Local Government. Race, Cohesion and Faith Research Unit, National Centre for Social Research, 2008). On the other hand, the universal constitutes the terrain where a multitude of universal-particular dialectics get played. Identitarian struggles (i.e., racial, LGBTQ) unfold within the context of the nation-state, as the hegemonic, universal terrain. The universal topography of the nation state withholds the dialectical game between the universal which de

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facto belongs (the national subjects) and the particular which is being negated from belonging (the newcomers). The nation-state is the whole that holds within it, the struggle between the part and the whole. The universal-particular logic is a contextually dependent logic. There are many universals within many fields of the game, each corresponding to their own particulars. Identities are produced within fields where multiple differential relations are played. Analyses of universal-particular struggles need to assess the whole web of such dialectics and to locate the universal within the field, within a certain structure of relationally defined structures. The fields where the dialectical relationships unfold need to be named, identified and defined, in other words they need to be particularized. The notions of Canadianness and Britishness do not solely represent the universal of the national in relation to which newcomers are compared against, but also the universal as the physical space that withholds the very same national-Immigrantness dialectic (alongside many raced, gendered, classed identitarian dialectics contained within the nation-state). Critics might argue that the idea of the national has little relevancy in analyses of inclusion and exclusion, that ideas of native appurtenance to Canada, to Britain, are unfit for interpretations of privilege and oppression, since many racialized and poor Canadians and Brits are similarly excluded from the nation. As mentioned in other parts of the dissertation, while subjects who are nationals might be culturally or economically excluded in one way or another, they cannot be deprived of their right to claim inclusion, to claim belonging based on jus soli citizenship appurtenance. A recent speech by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is demonstrative of the idea of national sameness as defined through territorial belong on blood lines. “One of the great reminders to me, as proud as a I am of being Canadian, as proud as I am of Canada, is I didn’t get to choose this place. I was born here, and I can almost take it for granted. Anytime I meet people who got to make the deliberate choice, or whose parents chose Canada, I’m jealous. Because I think being able to choose it rather than being Canadian by default is an amazing statement of attachment to Canada” (O’Doherty, 2017). Being born on Canadian soil makes one a default Canadian, part within national sameness, and differentiated from those not belonging to sameness or from those aspiring to sameness. The 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms similarly differentiates between the rights of citizens and non-citizens, as it guarantees voting and mobility rights merely for the citizens (Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982). Permanent residents need to spend a specified

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amount of time in the country, which conditions their citizenship on the territorial liaison with the land. Integration programs for immigrants, such as those mentioned within the Second Chapter, are transcendental projects veering the particular towards the universal and aiming to transform Immigrantness into Canadianness. They presume that the excluded particular (i.e., the immigrant) in need of inclusion (as an outcome) will become universal once included (i.e., Canadian): more Canadian and less of an immigrant. This legitimatizes a division between those born within belonging and those having to transcend towards it. To be accepted within universality, the particular needs to sacrifice some of its particularity, which results in universality cementing its hegemony. Similar to accessing rights within oppressive institutions (i.e., marriage, army) (Butler, Laclau, Žižek, 2012), immigrants can access certain benefits (i.e., participating in the market, having au par earnings with their Canadian counterparts) only by becoming more with the national sameness and renouncing their difference. For instance, by having Canadian experience, by knowing the mannerisms within the workplace, one becomes employable, gets a wage, and participates in Canadian economy and Canadian society. The same way as the access to marriage for queer people strengthens marital status as the necessary condition for allocating certain societal rights and benefits (i.e., spouses financial benefits, etc.), similarly, the inclusion of immigrants within Canadianness strengthens the concept of the national, the ideal of the nation-state, and of what it means to be Canadian (i.e., the ability to participate, amongst other things, in patterns of economic consumption). In aiming to move the particular towards the universal, inclusion implies an uprooting of the subject from a marginalized excluded identity into an included and therefore non-marginalized one. Exclusion is the a priori condition underpinning inclusion: the excluded identity is acknowledged as excluded, as non-included, hence in need of inclusion. Acknowledging the excluded identity as the a priori condition in need of emancipatory inclusion, re-reinforces it as non-emancipated (therefore in need of emancipation) and by extension, weighs it as other, as inferior, and further re-excludes it (Laclau, 1996). In trying to include, inclusion further excludes. Trying to make the immigrant identity less of an immigrant, re-emphasizes Immigrantness. The national, in return, needs the non-identity of Immigrantness to relationally define itself as Canadianness, as Britishness. It is via negation that the national preserves itself as pure being and transforms

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itself qualitatively into being-for-itself (Hegel, 2010). Inclusion and integration are promised for the subjects capable to succeed the process of cultural translation, which transforms Immigrantness into a version less of itself, less different and more same with the national. This is why skilled workers in Canada, since they have the potential of becoming part of what being-for-itself represents, are desired as included. The state, however, protects itself from those perceived as unable to ever share its universals, for instance, in the British context, from the A2 migrants, whose values are seen as incongruent with the national British ones. Fragments that could contaminate the national are expulsed, as shown by the Brexit vote. The national does not come into being through an abstract pre-determinateness, but through a juxtaposition with the non-national that gets negated to qualitatively re-affirm the national. It is Immigrantness that determines the national as being-for-itself. The a priori point that establishes the ideas and ideal of Canadianness or respectively Britishness, is constituted by the creation of the nation-state. The 1640 revolution paved the way towards a unified English state (Chibber, 2013). The territorial nation of Canada was formed 150 years ago, with the birth of the confederation, when Canada gained independence from Great Britain (Shields & Bauder, 2015). The idea of Canadianness came into existence historically, after British and French colonialism, through the settlement of these lands, hence through negating Indigeneity. Canada did not exist prior to the formation of the confederation. It was merely a land of mass marked by British colonization. The national ethos produced through the formation of the Canadian nation-state, might be an ethical one, in Hegelian terms, yet it might not be moral, since it included the negation of Indigeneity as part of the nation-state formation. The national as an idea gets formed through a recognition process of the ideals (of what being Canadian constitutes) shared within the nation state, as the starting point in developing a common shared knowledge of what being is. The nation-state constitutes the frame from where the national subjects observe themselves while also observing Immigrant values. Being-for-itself is observed from the parameters of being. The construction, imagination and representation of a nation-state is what constructs the national as a principle of differentiation. Empty being would be nothing without the particularity that establishes being in an evaluative from, as the universal being-for-itself, which negates what could devalue being. The modus operandi of the sameness-difference dialectic is the imaginary. It

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is because Britain is invested in an imaginary of cultural, economic, and symbolic superiority that it cannot be polluted by outsider, inferior nations. It is because Canada abides to a symbolic imagery that Canada expects the outsiders to adopt national values. Although the universal-particular dialectic tends to always manifest, through the universal excluding the particular, the identitarian attributes of the subjects enmeshed in the dialectic logic change throughout space and time. There is no universal universality within the multitude of universal-particular relations, hence the dialectical analysis is not about assessing the development of a particular content within universality but rather about interrogating the process through which universality fills itself.

4.2.1 The (multicultural) national as the terrain withholding the universal-particular dialectic

The national, as the universal manifested and performed within the (territorial) nation-state, becomes the primacy determinant of belonging. Secondary belonging determinacies naturally unfold; if someone is whiter, wealthier and perceived more culturally similar with the nationals, that someone will be included into the nation. Yet it is the juxtaposition of categorical markers of identity to the idea of the national (as the primary standard) that make one subject worthy of inclusion. The national is the entity from which shared universals emanate as well as the multitude of the universals that correspond to (identitarian) particular struggles. For instance, processes of whiteness and racialization, patterns of inequality and class, are explored within the parameters of the nation state, in order to delineate who are the subjects discriminated on race and respectively on class. Recognition efforts are the appendage of those with legitimized belonging within the nation, those already with rights to have rights, as mentioned earlier, those already endowed with citizenship. The nation-state uses the criterion of the national as a principle of division, delineating a primary level of belonging, prior to any other axes of societal differentiations. Ideas about “who we think we are” as nationals and “with whom we feel connected” (Sharma, 2015, p. 214) might matter more than categorically ascribed markers of group differentiations.

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The national character determines how people and societies make their appearance within history (Hegel & Rauch, 1988) and there are, indeed, many forms that the national can take. Remember that universality is empty and awaits to be filled. Even if the national is filled by the idea of multiculturalism, this does not make it less of a universality nor it diminishes its national traits. Multiculturalism, in fact, can be an essential element in nation- building. Officially defined as a “fundamental characteristic of the Canadian heritage and identity” (p. 8), with many religions, diversity of gay and lesbian communities, as well as the existence of many ethnic immigrant groups and many languages (CIC, 2011), Canadian multiculturalism has become the shared universal to support the national. While Canada might be a diverse ethnic nation (in terms of cultures, languages, etc.) it is still a nation, with a universal set of shared values; those from other ethnicities, as the tolerated other, are expected to bond with these shared universals in order to show a strong investment in the nation-state. Multicultural struggles are encouraged in their recognition efforts within the particular-universal dynamics for as long as they do not disrupt the hegemonic universalism of Canadianness. Opinions, differences are accepted if they conform to the national. The cultures are many (i.e., multi) yet they are integrated within the main, universal, national culture. The official Canadian rhetoric that settlers and immigrants, particularly those that came 200 years ago, of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish origins, laid the foundation of the country and built its diversity and richness (CIC, 2011), does reflect that multiculturalism is intertwined with the Canadian national identity. Particularisms seem to have been referenced from the inception of the Canadian state, as building the shared universal of Canada as a multicultural, tolerant, nation. In fact, multiculturalism was credited to sustain the idea of Canadian nationalism and to lead to a “stronger sense of belonging and pride in Canada” (Shields & Bauder, 2015, p. 19). Paradoxically, Canadian nationalism defines itself through a negation, through a lack of investment within the mainstream forms of nationalism (Millard, Riegel, & Wright, 2002) in order to position Canada as a better nation because of its diversity. Although historically, access to the Canadian nation was differentially applied to various groups of migrants, as shown in Chapter Three, by now, the idea of multiculturalism ascended to an instrument of nation building; the state actively promotes an official policy of multiculturalism to enhance Canadian national identity.

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Multiculturalism becomes a ‘good’ form of nationalism (Dzenovska, 2013). The national universal of Canadianness claims its universality as comprised of differential multitudes. It captures a rhetoric of difference to keep itself as sameness, as universality; the Canadian universal is not homogenous but heterogeneous and the absence of ouvert ‘national’ homogeneity maintains its national character. It is in behalf of heterogeneity filling the national universal, that adherence to a set of shared universal values is required in attributing belonging. Multiculturalism bestows the illusion of an alternative to assimilation, however, those constituted within the differential ‘multi’ are negated once again, inside the nation, either culturally, racially, symbolically or economically, through a process that excludes them by merely tolerating their presence as different from national sameness. The dialectical processes of assimilation and accommodation are of particular importance, yet such an exploration would go beyond the purpose of this dissertation. Naturally, the host society also changes after immigration. The fact that it changes, however, constitutes a secondary effect, since the state-supported Canadian rhetoric promotes a tacit assimilation where migrants are expected to fulfill their primary role, which is that of helping the nation evolve. If the national evolution happens through changing the host society, that is fine, but their primary role is still that of keeping the nation and reproducing the nation. That the national identity of Canadianness contains cultural diversity is not a case of the multicultural supervening the national, but rather a case of the multicultural being conflated, adopted within the national, and mainstreamed to become part of the national. The universal continues to be represented by Canadianness despite its heterogeneous content. This is why immigrants share similar values with the national subjects (Hyman, Meinhard & Shields, 2011). For instance, most Canadian born but similarly most immigrants, both groups in large proportions (over 90%) stated that respect for the law should be a citizenship-conferring requirement. Similarly, in the UK, 57% of UK born citizens and 56% of immigrants shared that respect for law is the most important value for living in Britain. The fact that there is no difference in these answers between citizens and non-citizens, shows an investment in the idea of the national from both types of subjects, the nationals and the multicultural ones. The multicultural is mediated through shared universals, and these shared universals, express the kernel of national identities, materialized in a strong investment to British and Canadian

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values. Partaking in sharing national universals bestows the symbolical appurtenance of belonging to the nation. Acceptance of differences via multiculturalism might create the illusion that Canadianness is not the universal, since differences exist within universality. However, these are not differences that alter being, away from its envisioning as being-for-itself, hence the incorporation of differences strengthens the superiority of the Canadian national imaginary (e.g., Canadian customs, values, etc.). Multiculturalism works particularly because it maintains the superiority of the national and it does not alter the national appurtenance to the shared universals. Multiculturalism and nationalism are not mutually exclusive. The multicultural is the new national. Hegel writes that a nation arises with determinate principles, materialized within forms of the government, within institutions, legal laws, value systems, which is why the individuals living within the territory of the nation are committed to the interests of the nation (Hegel & Rauch, 1988). The nation has its own spirituality, cemented by historically shared common memories, through which the nation becomes self-conscious in relation to its being (Conklin, 2008). Prior to the stage of the state formation, when the nation was primarily created on ethnic lines, individuals had an unconscious appurtenance as members of the nation. However, once the national becomes a social unity, once the masses develop awareness on shared universals, they become members in the nation (Conklin, 2008), regardless of their ‘multi’ identitarian appurtenance. The main aim of the nation is to be a state and to preserve itself as such. When the national unity is recognized externally, as sovereign (by other states), the nation gives content to the state (Conklin, 2008). This is why issues of international recognition over Palestine as a state, or issues about moving the US embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, are of such political concern. Even is the state was formed immorally, by taking over a nation, by colonialism for example, a state still embodies a certain ethos, on the basis of its formation, regardless of how it was formed (Anderson, 1991). Once a state was formed, once it became sovereign, the people within its territories are more or less bounded with and invested in the idea of what constitutes national appurtenance. For instance, Jewish and Palestinian people lived fine together and they did not view each other as ‘Jews’ versus ‘Palestinians’ until the formation of Israel as a nation- state, which was constituted, in fact, through negating the Palestinian identity. The fact that

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Canada is multicultural does not take away from the fact that Canada is a national state. Hegel wrote about the domaine réservé of the state, meaning that its territorial business is a matter concerning solely the state, and that no other organization or no other state can interfere in its business, hence it is the state that decides to whom it should confer nationality, who to accept, and when it can go to war (Conklin, 2008). Hegel believed that when different (i.e., ethnic) nations, constitute a single state, there is a weakness within the state (e.g., Britishness as encompassing the Scottish, Welsh and Irish identities) which can be overcome by strengthening the civic character of the nation (Conklin, 2008). Multiculturalism ‘works’ precisely because it is incorporated within the civic idea of Canada as a tolerant nation, hence it is a feature of Canadian nationalism to have a multicultural ethnic state. British identity is also tied on civic lines. While ethnic groups tend to show strong belonging on identitarian, ethnic basis, it appears that these identities, the ethnic and the national, do not necessarily collide. Research showed, for example, that many analogously identify as being British and Indian or as being British and Scottish (Ali & Heath, 2013). This is not to infer, however, that the Scottish and the Indians have a similar experience of inclusion or of partaking in the manifestation of Britishness. Nations are organized around the symbolic shared values of what a nation constitutes and not around descriptive identitarian markers that characterize the subject within a state. And while the space of the national is different (territorially based) the logic of manifestation of the national (as principle of differentiation) is always the same, in terms of deciding who is in and who is out, who belongs and who does not belong. The overarching argument of this chapter theorized the dialectical logic that positions immigrants in juxtaposition to those already belonging to the nation. Any exclusionary logic, on any identitarian axe, manifests on a universal-particular dialectic. There is the universal, that negates the particular, and via this negation, the universal maintains and superiorly positions itself in a qualitative manner. Yet, this is not to imply that there is a same universal that cuts across all exclusionary fields. Societies encompass several universals (whiteness, class, perceived cultural difference) all with their own particularities (racialization, economic marginalization, as in low employment rates, unemployment, etc., and cultural markers of non-belonging etc.), located within various fields (the national field, the cultural field, the economic field, etc.) and maneuvered by their own positioning logic that shapes how the dialectic of the universal-particular unfolds. Although the universal-particular logic has a

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universal mechanism of manifestation (i.e., the excluded gets negated so the included can superiorly position as included), the universal changes throughout time and space. The excluded and the included do not embody the same (groups of) subjects across space or across time. Take as example the enlargement of the category of whiteness within North America, whereas initially this was reserved for Anglo-Saxons, mostly protestant subjects, yet nowadays it includes Jewish people, Irish Catholics, Southern Europeans, etc. Categories are logically presumed to be the same. That the taxonomy of whiteness changed means it is neither a universal classification nor that its essence is physically (i.e., biologically) defined. There are billion axes of differentiation, and within every differentiated identity, an auxiliary dialectic contours to exclude, in return, the negative out of its own positive identity. Relationality is hierarchical and hierarchies cannot just be undone by appending additional axes of oppression to understandings of privilege and oppression, nor by assuming that identitarian classifications differentiate through a presumed ontological essence contained within their own being as identities. What is important in conceptual analyses is to pin down the exceptional case matching the angles from which the dialectic is observed and the geo- political space in which the dialectical relation unfolds, be that a society, a community, or a micro setting. Processes of exclusion manifest through universal-particular dialectical logics, however, the dialectics in themselves gets particularized within specific fields, constructing, in turn, different type of subjects, hence different identitarian particularities. The excluded do not embody the same identitarian subjectivity across geo-political spaces (e.g., different type of migrants in Canada and respectively in the UK), yet the logic positioning the fragment as excluded and the whole as superiorly included, stays the same. This section introduced the reader to a heterodox way of interpreting outcomes of oppression and privilege, of inclusion and exclusion within the nation-state as a particular context. It argued that subjects might find themselves enmeshed in inclusionary/exclusionary situations which are context specific and vary across geo-political spaces, yet subpoenaed to a universal logic that includes some and excludes others, logic that universally plays out on a universal-particular dialectic, with the universal negating the particular to maintain itself as included, to superiorly position its already-included traits and to inferiorly conjecture the excluded. There is a multitude of dialectics played out on multiple universal terrains and the researcher, or the social worker, needs to primarily gauge the space, in order to identify the

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dialectical logics at play within particular situations. The universal-particular dialectic can be a useful interpretive framework within social work, a framework that would detract the attention away from myopic identitarian explanations that identify outcomes of exclusion in physical traits possessed by subjects. Bestowing ontological essence onto fixed identitarian markers, which are presumed to stay the same across universal circumstances, cannot fully explain the outcomes of exclusion, since a perspective of ontological attribution disregards that exclusion is not about the excluded but about the included.

4. Conclusions

This dissertation demonstrated that processes of inclusion and exclusion produce different outcomes of privilege and oppression, for different types of subjects, racialized, high-skilled migrants in Canada and white, low-skilled migrants in the UK (Chapter Two). It disrupted the reasoning that infers that outcomes of inclusion and exclusion for migrant populations are universally framed across geo-political spaces and posited that processes determining such outcomes have their own, historically particularized logics of exclusion. It deflated the interpretations delineating the idea of whiteness as the main explanatory marker in analyses of inclusion and exclusion, demonstrating that taxonomical whiteness lacks ontological essence and that such ontological essentialism is sustained by a false relation of equivalence which synonymizes colonialism with Europeanness and whiteness (Chapter Three). It provided a critique of the theory of intersectionality and proposed the adoption of the sameness-difference dialectic as an interpretative matrix to explore inclusionary and exclusionary processes affecting migrant populations. Lastly, it veered away from understandings that universalize particular identitarian markers as principles of division, towards understandings that highlight the national as a principle of differentiation (Chapter Four). Chapter Two made use of available statistical data to map the exclusionary trajectories for both populations. Chapter Three drew from historical accounts to show the conceptual inadequacy of the synonymy we automatically append to analyses of whiteness. Chapter Four applied a theoretical perspective to sketch a novel viewpoint in transnational interpretations of inclusion and exclusion as they pertain to migrant populations.

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The arguments expressed in each chapter are interdependent. There are processes of inclusion and exclusion that create included and excluded subjects. There is knowledge of subjects being excluded since outcomes of exclusion are easily quantifiable. Resolutions to exclusion depend on the state’s desirability to accept particular subjects. Those wanted should be included (i.e., the Canadian solution) while those unwanted should be excluded (i.e., Brexit as the British resolution). That in Canada, the excluded are highly skilled, racialized migrants, while in Britain, the excluded are lower skilled, white migrants (amongst many other types of excluded subjects) infers that both societies exclude racialized, white, skilled and low-skilled people. Categorical whiteness does not work as a fixed, universal benchmark for defining inclusionary/exclusionary outcomes, whereas Romanian and Bulgarian migrants are white (in terms of skin colour taxonomies) yet culturally excluded from Britain as a community of value. Whiteness then is equally racialized; racialization cannot be conflated with immigration; and the danger of taking whiteness as fixed maintains the assumption that race consists of visible biological markers. White privilege cannot be solely explained through Eurocentric membership since Europeanness is not homogenous but differentiated and not all nationalities within Europe are treated as privileged white nations. Exclusion, then, is not consequential of migrants’ characteristics but consequential of peculiarities withheld by the national referential frames of host societies. Hence, rather then using the theory of intersectionality to discuss oppression, marginalization and exclusion, a theory that is conceptually limited through positing that categorical essentialisms intersect, this work proposes a dialectical reasoning, imported from Hegel, to be applied to multiple geopolitical contexts containing inclusionary-exclusionary processes, reasoning that does not have to rely on universalizing particular situations. Intersectionality was critiqued not because its application extends beyond the North-American epistemological field but because understandings of inclusion and exclusion are generally abstracted, through intersectional perspectives, especially in social work, on universalizing categorically particularized identitarian taxonomies. The dialectical perspective is not proposed as an absolute version of epistemological truth nor as an absolute version of true interpretivism. It is rather proposed as a heterodox perspective, one that could be additionally included amongst many others that have already secured a place within the social work knowledge production field. What the dialectic reasoning universalizes are the mechanisms sustaining the logic of exclusion. Hegel

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is not a wide read author in the field of social work. There are a handful of articles on the use of dialectics in the discipline and these pieces typically misinterpret the Hegelian perspective. First, social work scholars seem to discuss the dialectal logic without references to Hegel, often drawing on secondary literature and authors that weighed on the topic (i.e., Robert Mullaly; Ming Tsang, 2000; Simpson & Murr, 2015). Second, the Hegelian dialectic appears to be misinterpreted, if compared with how it was initially formulated in Hegel’s work. Social work scholars generally define the dialectical approach in loose terms of ‘contradictions’ and ‘oppositions’ (Ming Tsang, 2000), whose synthesis will generate new forms of knowledge to solve such contradictions and oppositions (Simpson & Murr, 2015). The Hegelian dialectic, however, is not about contradictions and oppositions but primary about relationality. It is about understanding that the meaning attached to what is termed the inside, is defined as the inside because the inside is not the outside and because the inside positions itself as the inside by negating the outside. Third, the idea that new knowledge or some sort of progressive transformation results from the dialectical exchanges reduces the Hegelian model to applications concerned with analyzing argumentative models. The simplified application of the thesis (argument)-antithesis (contra-argument)-synthesis (new knowledge) model in Hegelian thought (Ming Tsang, 2000) is mainly useful in argumentative debates and less useful in interpreting topics concerned with ontology. Forth, applying the dialectic to matters that might be contradictory yet not positioned within a dialectical relationality (e.g., intimacy/privacy in personal relationships; the individual/social divide) (Ming Tsang, 2000), falsely implies that everything oppositional is somehow engaged in a dialectical relation. The co-existence of opposites, however, does not mean that opposites are dialectically situated. A dialectical relation needs to contain determinacy (which is bestowed through the negation that superiorly positions the one negating) and not the mere existence of oppositional stances. For instance, the ideologies of socialism and capitalism are opposed to each other but they are not dialectically positioned. It is feudalism and capitalism that are situated in such relationality. Capitalism came into existence by negating feudalism, and through this negation, the market society positioned itself as a superior system versus the former societal arrangement where market relations were peripheral. Some could argue, however, that socialism came into existence by negating capitalism hence the two are dialectically connected. The angle of analysis is equally

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important. If the unit of analysis is capitalism, although socialism is opposed to capitalism, the dialectical relation is framed in-between capitalism and feudalism. If the unit of analysis is socialism, the opposition between socialism and capitalism could be equally dialectic. Mullaly and Keating (1991) provide a slightly nuanced and more complex view in adopting a dialectical approach to radical social work practice, yet again, their work engages little with what is meant by the dialectics and what are some of the material realities produced by the dialectical logic. This dissertation showed that analyzing social identity formation through a universal- particular interpretative perspective decenters the role of identitarian markers in universally explaining social identity positioning. Identitarian theories highlight unevenly distributed regimes of societal access and rights. Assuming, however, that a particular identitarian appurtenance (i.e., whiteness) is universally explanatory for the social positioning of all subjects in all socio-political circumstances might have adverse social work implications for those affected by such identitarian logic. These implications are positioned within the realm of thinking about social work. Conceptualizing ways of engaging with the ‘helping’ profession and ways in which social work identifies the subjects to be helped by the social work discipline has ramifications for research, teaching and social work praxis. After all, social work scholars and professionals practice and teach from within thinking, by starting from conceptual ideas and through applying such conceptual ideas. A first possible social work implication of homogenizing whiteness is that of subject invisibility. The presumption of a universalized ontological homogeneity as privileged, as this is the case with the social identity of whiteness, constructs the marker of whiteness as uniformly same and produces as invisible any marginality existent within the taxonomy of whiteness. For the idea of whiteness to stay intact as an ideal, it needs to negate the difference out of its sameness, meaning it needs to negate race. If whiteness was to negate part of its own difference, part of its whiteness (i.e., the degenerate whiteness) it could not position itself as same, as homogenously defined. For the idea of whiteness to stay intact, homogeneity needs to be retained at all costs, and, any heterogeneity existent within the deemed homogeneity, needs to be erased. In 2015, I worked as a Research Assistant for a University of Oxford-University of Toronto study that examined the working conditions of Romanian migrants in the construction industry in London, UK. I have conducted twenty-

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three interviews with Romanian construction workers. About half of the interviewees had some connection with Canada; either they conducted former work in Canada under the Temporary Foreign Worker program or they had their paperwork in the pipeline to enter the program. Out of those who entered Canada under the Temporary Foreign program, most of them were subcontracted for public sites (e.g., Vancouver International Airport). Many workers detailed unsafe and exploitative working conditions: job-related injuries, unpaid hours of overtime, etc. At the time, recruitment companies based in London, UK, were specifically staffing Romanian workers for Canadian companies in construction, on promises of permanent residency and future immigration opportunities for their family members. Most of them found they were under a temporary program of migration and unable to invite over their dependents upon arriving to Canada. Romanian migrants, as a subcategory of migrants, are invisible in analyses that examine the Temporary Foreign Worker program. They are white subjects, entering Canada mostly from the UK, in small numbers. The number of temporary workers with Romanian nationality, averaged, between 2012 and 2016, around 11,000 entries per year (IRCC, 2016). These numbers are low compared with those of nationals from the People Republic of China, which, in 2016, averaged 656,344 entries, India- 408,947, the Philippines-115,956 and Mexico -131,500. Since the source countries were so-called racialized nations, the Temporary Worker Program has grown to be exclusively defined as a racialized program (Goldring & Landolt, 2013; Lenard & Straehle, C. 2012). Experiences of migrants that do not originate from racialized source countries, have not been particularly researched, although, anecdotal evidence suggests that precarious working conditions intersect with immigration status for white entries as well. In 2009, on December 24th, four migrant construction workers died in Toronto, falling from a scaffold without wearing safety harnesses. The company, Metron Construction Corp, was fined in 2013 in a provincial court with 750,000 (Jones, 2013). The four victims were migrants from the former Soviet bloc, from Latvia, Uzbekistan and Ukraine (Jones, 2013). Their deaths, however, was publicly portrayed as an issue of workplace safety in the construction industry and not one where immigration status and precarious working conditions, intersect. Such interconnecting analysis is usually provided in instances where temporary foreign workers are racialized migrants. For example, in the agricultural sector, the status of migrants is deemed the main determinant for marginalization, as reflective in abusive workplace

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practices, work injuries and employers’ non-compliance with provincial labour standards (Alboim, 2009; Kim & Gross, 2009; Goldring, Bernstein & Bernhard, 2009; Goldring, Hennebry, & Preibish, 2009; Nakache & Kinoshita, 2010; Preibisch, 2010; Perilla, Wilson, Wold & Spencer, 1998; Singh, 2010). After the 2009 accident, there was no predisposition on behalf of civic groups nor on behalf of the academic community to investigate these workers’ immigration trajectory. Assuming that precarious migration is racialized and that whiteness solely delineates national appurtenance, the four construction workers were not necessarily seen as migrants but as workers within the nation. Their deaths were regarded as an issue of workplace safety and not one related to migration. During 2013-2014, I worked for a project at Lakehead University, Ontario that assessed human trafficking from the former Eastern Bloc to Canada. Between 1990s and the early 2000s, Romania was one of the top suppliers of exotic dancers to Canadian strip clubs. About 80% of the exotic dancer visas in Canada were issued by the Canadian embassy in Bucharest (Hughes, 2005). The former Eastern Bloc was identified as the second global source (after Asia) for trafficking in persons to Canada, particularly in sex trafficking of women (Oxman-Martinez et al., 2005; Perrin, 2010; RCMP, 2010), and Romania as one of the largest ‘suppliers’ of human trafficking victims for Europe and Canada (Adevarul, 2008; Jurnalul National, 2008). The Balkan countries have been a similarly notorious source, transit and destination country for human trafficking (Timoshkina, Miftari & Arhin, 2014). Again, such types of occurrences are not regularly associated with white populations but with racialized subjects. Analyzing human trafficking and sex work as phenomena solely affecting racialized women, renders invisible the experiences of migrant women who do not fit within racialized taxonomies. In 2014-2015, I worked as a Research Assistant for a University of Toronto- University of Calgary collaborative project that assessed the conditional residency measure for sponsored spouses within the family class. In 2012, the Harper government introduced a conditional immigration status for the sponsored spouses suspected of marriage fraud. Their permanent residence was conditioned on the requirement that spouses remain in a conjugal partnership with their sponsors for a two-year period (Migrant Mother Project, 2015). The Government of Canada repealed the conditional measure in April 2017 (Government of Canada, 2017). The top ten countries with the highest number of conditional residencies,

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between 2012 and 2014, included India, China, Philippines, the USA, Morocco, Algeria, Iran, Sri Lanka, Cuba and Tunisia (CIC, 2015). The number of spouses under the conditional measure matched the countries with the highest entry numbers. By default, such a calculation implies that the higher the number of sponsored spouses, the higher the number of conditional measures. The picture changed, however, when the nations with the highest conditional rates were juxtaposed to the number of entries. For instance, while the US ranked the third in entry numbers (i.e., 6,165 spouses) about 17% of sponsored spouses from the US were conditioned on their permanent residency application. Albania, by contrast, which was well down the list in terms of entries (e.g., 186 spouses) had 39% of its sponsored spouses conditioned in their permanent residency. Azerbaijan and Belarus showed similar patterns, with a 48% increase in conditional permanent residency and respectively 36%. These post- Soviet countries made it to the top ten source countries in terms of the highest number of conditional measures as juxtaposed to the entry number of sponsored spouses. The study aimed to explore the racialized effects of the conditional measure and was primarily focused on South Asian entrants. Although the proportions of conditional measures were high for spouses from Albania, Azerbaijan and Belarus, these numbers were not further explored, since they could not sustain the hypothesis of the study. Appending interpretations of inclusion and exclusion on fixed taxonomies of ontological racialization results in marking as invisible those who do not match their classified positions within the aforesaid taxonomies. These examples constitute instances where the social work discipline failed to engage with issues of oppression affecting these migrant populations. Making oppression invisible is not what social work should be about. That said, practices of epistemological erasure do not originate from a vacuum. It is important to note, in this context, that an epistemic orthodoxy, originating from the Atlanticized nations, North America and the UK, prevails within the social work knowledge production field and generally addresses issues affecting these nations or the larger populations residing within these nations. Those with experiences of oppression unfit to fit the Atlanticized classifications denoting marginalization or oppression, are deemed irrelevant by the knowledge production apparatus. Interrogating the misalignment between how whiteness is classified and how whiteness is differentially experienced, especially by subjects located at the periphery of whiteness, gets trumped in a favour of a universalism that aims to produce knowledge solely on what matters for the

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Atlantic world. Ovid is a research platform that indexes research articles from over 150 countries by the field of study. A search of social work abstracts within the Ovid database, with the keyword ‘Romanian’, yielded a result of 95 research pieces published between 1968 to March 2018. Seventy-nine of these articles were published in a Romanian academic journal- Revista de Asistenţă Socială. About seventeen articles on topics related to anything ‘Romanian’, from child welfare to marital therapy, over a period of forty years, were published by Western academic outlets, such as The Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work; Children and Youth Services Review; Child & Adolescent Social Work Journal; Journal of Marital and Family Therapy; Social Work and Globalization. Adding the term ‘migrant’ in cross-searches, Ovid yielded one result: an article from 2015, again in the Romanian journal, titled Mobility within the European Union and the access to social benefits: Challenges of social policies (Rentea, 2015). Despite the fact that Romania produces the second largest number of migrants in the world after Syria, and despite the fact that many Romanian migrants face issues of cultural and economic discrimination, as it was illustrated by their societal treatment in the UK, the discipline of social work does not focus on issues concerning this population. It has been formerly noted that perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe are not integrated within the Western knowledge production fields (Dzenovska, 2013). The Atlantic world cares little about what happens in places such as Romania or Bulgaria, or about what happens with the migrants from peripheral Europe. South-East Europe is not an influential region in any sense, nor a region devastated by military conflicts. Many social workers would not even know where to point these countries on the map let alone be concerned about what happens inside their national perimeters. Academic knowledge about Bulgaria ranks worse. The ‘Bulgarian’ keyword within the Ovid database yielded five articles and the cross-search with the term ‘migrant’ yielded no results. The lack of a social service sector during the Communist regimes can partially explain the shortage of social work research on these regions. Indeed, under the Communist system, the State was the sole provider of social services. It was only after the 1989 revolutions that social work became a stand-alone field of practice. Nineteen years have passed since the fall of the Soviet regime and social work is now a burgeoning field in the region. Social work research endeavors, however, did not follow. There is little known within the discipline about the experiences of migrant populations that originate from these areas. The colonial history

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of South-East Europe, the 1989 revolutions, the high numbers of migrants originating from the region, bestow at least an ethical imperative, if not an epistemic one, to include knowledge from, or about, these countries within the field. A second implication from understanding whiteness as ontologically fixed and as resulting from an equation synonymizing it with Europeanness, concerns the transformation of whiteness into a placeholder for the ideology of white supremacy. A failure to recognize that marginalization similarly exists within whiteness, construes belonging to whiteness as a symbol of prestige. Opening up the concept to include supplementary groups (e.g., Jews, Italians) and zipping it right after, perpetuates exclusion for the groups not yet allowed entry in the categorical marker; it keeps the idea of white supremacy intact, by reinforcing aspirations of desirability in relation to belonging to such an esteemed identity. The false equivalence between whiteness and Europeanness helps ground the alt-right ideology. Richard Spencer, the self-professed neo-fascist white nationalist who coined the ‘alt-right’ term and launched the altright.com website, advocates for identitarian separatism in behalf of a white, European ethnocentrism (Southern Poverty Law Centre, 2018). Spencer was born in the US, in Boston to boot. However, he equates his white identity with a European rather than an American appurtenance. The conflation between Europeanness and whiteness shapes the political discourse of white identitarianism. Spencer was banned by the right-wing governments of Poland (i.e., The Law and Justice party) and Hungary (i.e., Fidesz), which themselves abide by an ideology of ethnocentric national fixation, and is momentarily banned from entering the Schengen space. Spencer’s ideas are considered too far right even for the European far right. Identitarian claims on racialized grounds enable those engaged within the politics of difference at the other pole of the whiteness-racialization dialectic, to believe in a legitimate right to establish a white identitarian politics. The recent surge in white nationalist movements across the US, Canada and Europe is indicative of the need to start thinking about how social work engages with conceptualizing group based identitarian exclusions. A third implication resulting from the association of whiteness with Europeanness and as resulting from Eurocentrism, deflates attention from American-centrism as the new form of colonialism. The epistemological discourse on European colonialism, European whiteness and white colonialism (and the synonymy of these terms) was, for the most part,

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produced within North-America. It is a discourse that refuses to see America as detached from its European roots. After the European, primarily British, conquests, a new world, with new nation-states and new socio-political rules, emerged. This new world has nowadays little to do with European colonialism. It built, instead, its own forms of colonialism. Chapter Three showed the importance of the nation-state formation in maintaining and circulating shared universals. The American knowledge production system has cemented the taxonomy of whiteness as a universal truth, as a universal construction that can be applied to all white subjects, even to those originating from geopolitical spaces that lack historical similarities with the North-American nation states. There is a lack of explanation concerning who is counted within the term, and why the category of whiteness is referred to as European- American (Alcoff, 2015; Bucholtz, 2011) rather than American. This conflation is most likely maintained with the intention of preserving the colonial heritage that created the American lands and to detract attention away from the fact that America colonizes. The US dominates the globe militarily, politically and on ideological grounds. The BRICS countries oftentimes oppose the foreign policy positions coming from Washington, however, the international political games play out by American rules. Think about the Trump administration; not only the bombing of Syria that happened a few weeks ago but also the movement of the US embassy to Jerusalem, despite the wide-ranging protests against this decision, or the veto power that US carries at the UN Security Council, where it can reject any decision unaligned with its political interests, even if other States vote to adopt it. The US started its hegemonic trajectory in 1971, when it delinked the dollar from the gold standard to pay its creditors. Nation-states around the globe ended up withholding the US dollar as a tool for wealth. With the dollar standard substituting the gold one, Washington was in a good position to maneuver the world (Prashad, 2014). By the 1980s, credit was severely tightened, the interest rates rose to 21%, many labour unions were dissolved, and the manufacturing sector collapsed (Prashad, 2014). During Reagan’s time a new asset bubble was mounted on credit card and real estate debt. The low interest rates inflated credit and consumption while enabling large sums of money to travel the globe in search for investment, towards Brazil, India and South Africa. It was the already rich North, however, that benefitted from this capital flow. When the US raised the interest rates, this had a catastrophic effect on the Global South (Prashad, 2014). In 1973, the Global South states had

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a cumulative debt of 130 billion. This rose to 612 billion by 1982 (Prashad, 2014). Farmers in the US and Europe were replaced with factory farming and governmental subsidies for industrial agriculture gave the North advantages in the global food market. Through Free Trade agreements, such as NAFTA (1994), the North eliminated producers from Mexico, India, Ghana, and Bangladesh. Migrations followed, as impoverished rural workers from the South, especially women, joined factories to create products for the Atlantic shops (Prashad, 2014). The 2008 market crash was similarly produced by credit induced consumerism as well as financial and real estate speculation (Ali, 2015). The US and the EU bailed the falling banks and people ended up paying for a deregulated banking system and for dismantling the welfare state (Ali, 2015). Austerity measures were imposed by the IMF on Greece, Iceland, Spain, Portugal and Italy, while the German, French and British banking systems were saved from collapsing. Obama promoted a light Keynesianism, not on behalf of social good, but on fears that an anticipated collapse of the European banks will threaten the US banking system (Prashad, 2014). The hegemonic American influence, the political and ideological colonialism led by the US, are topics hardly written about within social work. For as long as discussions about colonialism are kept within the terminology of Europe, Europeanness, and Eurocentrism, there is little incentive to examine the American colonialism. Universalizing particular differences into a ‘one and only’ essentialized concept of Europe, totalized to encompass the entire geographical area that came to be known as Europe, erasing any subalternity existent within the continent, and conceptualizing the term to reflect the ‘West’, ricochets attention away from the US as an imperial colonizing power. It is much easier to talk about Eurocentrism within North American social work academic circles then having to turn our eyes onto American-centrism and to acknowledge that global power dynamics shifted from the times of European colonialism. Browsing through the course syllabi for the MSW and the PhD program(s) within the Social Work Faculty at University of Toronto, one would notice that most selected course readings are from North American journals or from authors affiliated with North American institutions. If it happens that one article is not sourced in America, this will most likely originate from its Anglo-Saxon sister countries: the UK, Canada, Australia or New Zeeland. As bell hooks (1994), one of the most influential scholars in social work, stated, the dominant mindset of scholarly inquiry continues to be that of neo-colonialism despite the

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rhetoric of post-colonialism. However, what bell hooks fails to acknowledge is that neo- colonialism is perpetuated by the one everyone refuses to name. bell hooks criticizes American dominance, however, she solely insists on conceptual Eurocentrism as the ultimate principle commodifying privilege and appropriating oppression. Her famous line of ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ does not identify the main capitalist colonizer nation. hooks (1994) writes about the war in Iraq as being white supremacist yet she does not state that it began as an American war; she writes about the first world mindset of materialism and consumerism without naming this mindset as particularly American; when she writes that, within Western, industrial societies, possessions become substitutes for status, she again fails to name America as the leading nation in developing such consumerist logic. Keeping the gaze on Eurocentrism camouflages American-centrism. One cannot converse about Eurocentrism when the North-American centrism functions as a boundary of epistemic, politic, military and ideological imperialism. The fact the Europe colonized should not take away from the fact that America imperializes. The implications outlined above indicate that an epistemological interrogation of the orthodox framework of thought used within the discipline of social work is necessary to address issues of oppression, colonialism, privilege and migration. It is important to deconstruct patterns of thinking entirely based on Anglo-centric, American thought. Social work is, after all, a cultural product developed by the Anglo-Saxon world. Ideas and principles of ‘doing’ social work are oftentimes uncritically applied to local communities across the globe, giving birth to systems of ‘helping’ that have little relevance to these very same local, geo-political spaces (Tsang & Yan, 2001; Yan & Tsang, 2008). Such ideas, for instance, were transported to Latin America in the beginning of the twentieth-century and they had quite some currency until the 60s and the 70s, when local social workers ended up re-conceptualizing what social work means in the region (Parada, 2007). Similarly, post- soviet/post-socialist ideas have not secured a place within the social work literature, nor largely within the post-colonial field of study, despite periodic texts from Yugoslavian, Balkan scholars. On the other hand, ready-made applications encompassing Anglo-American conceptualizations of race have been imported to analyze the region. Catherine Baker (2018)’s book, Race and the Yugoslav region, for example, argues that the post-socialist spaces have been engaged in race-thinking because they were exposed to transnational

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patterns of cultural production, hence they consumed certain popular products (i.e., music) whose messages were entangled within global formations of race. Such reasoning portrays, once again, the South-Eastern European space as a void that awaits to be filled with Western knowledge and Western thinking in regard to what constitutes racial identity formation. The post-colonial literature, which is the most influential stream of thought within ‘social justice’ social work (Bhuyan, Bejan & Jeypal, 2017), merely centers on the forms of coloniality produced by the West, defined as synonymous with Europeanness, and fails to conceptualize the post-soviet spaces as places of local people and local histories, rather than Western projections of such histories (Tlostanova, 2006; Milevska, 2007). The epistemological residence of otherness within post-colonial interpretations is inaccessible to the post-socialist territories, contrary to the history of colonization that affected the region (Dzenovska, 2013). South-Eastern European identities are not taken into account as colonized identities; as a result, post-socialist Europe is recruited within Europe, and within whiteness, in similar ways. Filtered down assumptions based on ontological understandings of skin colour, ill- informed thinking about a homogenized idea of Europe, and passé suppositions that East- West divides have been erased at the end of the Cold War, can materialize into unconstructive social work implications. Through the courses I taught during my PhD training, I frequently encountered such preconceived understandings, whereas students, for example, were saying, when discussing the activist group Femen (which had indeed and continues to have its ideological problems), that Ukraine is a white, Western, colonial nation. If one reasons that Ukraine is a Western nation because Ukrainians are white (i.e., based on their skin colour), thinking without any historical grounding, since Ukraine is neither Western nor colonial but rather has a history of colonization by Russia, this could play out in problematic ways in clinical social work encounters with refugees from Donetsk, Ukraine, for example. Perpetuating such ignorant thinking might translate into a lack of cultural understanding of Eastern Bloc migrants, on the part of social workers. These are migrants whose habitus might not fit within the pre-determined binary dynamic where whiteness refers to the colonizer while racialization refers to the colonized. Potential theorizations from this work could contribute to macro social work practice, by informing different understandings of anti-oppressive practice, but also to micro, clinical

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practice, in working with migrants whose personal experiences are shaped by transnational (exclusionary) processes that differ from the boxed-in categories used to classify the American world. Interrogating ready-made patterns of thinking that social workers dogmatically apply, based on the presumption that there is a singular way to conduct anti- oppressive practice, may open up the possibility of exploring a situated praxis of multiplicity and difference, that could link communities in solidarity, and that could attend to both, global and local particularities (Baldwin & Estey-Burtt, 2012; Dudziak, 2002). Such reasoning might also veer attention away from essentialist concepts of culture, which provide social workers with the false belief that cultural competencies are sufficient to make one culturally sensitive (Dupré, 2012). Social workers need to understand not only the group category that a person fits into but also the culture and pre-migration experiences of different newcomer populations (George & Tsang, 2000). A universal taxonomy of whiteness as categorically determining outcomes of inclusion and exclusion does not hold within transnational contexts. Whiteness does not universally represent sameness across the globe, in every social circumstance, and across national communities of value. Within North-America, the idea of the national was formed on the national as being ‘white’, yet the nation in itself goes beyond whiteness once the level of analysis is no longer the nation-state but the transnational space. Racialized British are still British; Racialized Canadians are still Canadians; although both will experience a different kind of Britishness or Canadianness compared with the white nationals. A failure to focus on the exclusionary boundaries produced by nation-states, draws attention away from the national as a principle of differentiation regulating who should be allowed within the nation and ultimately excluding those seen as unfit to become part of the nation. Extending the nation to comprise diversity, ignores the fact that it is the national character that generally excludes. A statement like the following: “We need to change the frames. We need to claim the entirety of British history. We need to let it be known that black is British, that brown is British, and that we are not going away” (Eddo-Lodge, 2017, p. 223), disregards that the solution of stretching the ‘British’ ethnocentrism to make it brown and black keeps intact the national character of Britishness. Carl Brigham’s study of American intelligence (see Chapter Three), analyzed the intellect scores for the ‘foreign born whites’ as juxtaposed to their years of residence in the new country. Brigham intended to show that differences in intelligence

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between the native and the foreign-born population in America, is larger for those who arrived within the first five years versus those with over twenty years of residence. In other words, migrants who were assimilated within the fabric of the national, were catalogued as smarter: “the most intelligent immigrants remain in this country while the more stupid ones go home” (Brigham, 1923, p. 96). Markings of belonging or non-belonging are not just limited to skin colour but also drawn along national lines. The Third Chapter showed that identity is more complex than categorical, particular classifications, since differences - economic, cultural, national- also exist within groups. The perpetual preoccupation with whiteness as the main principle of differentiation, instead of interpreting it as categorical marker whose classification is contextually particularized, keeps alive a binary understanding of race, where whiteness is placed either on a ‘pedestal’ (the societal mainstream position) or in the ‘gutter’ (critical race theorists) (West, 1993) yet it is continually benchmarked as the standard of comparison vis-à-vis race. Interpretations of whiteness as non-essentialized, as racialized, might open up possibilities for transcending categorical classifications, for altering the distribution of material effects associated with such classifications, for building solidarity in togetherness, and for constructing alternatives to the market-societies which simply found a way to incorporate differences into their functioning. Processes of establishing sameness and difference must not be theorized solely on racial grounds, since sameness can be similarly constructed through peripheral ontological appurtenance. This thesis has not suggested that the idea of whiteness is meaningless nor that an ideology of white privilege is nonexistent within Anglo-American societies. Instead, it argued that the meaning attributed to whiteness also results from the taxonomy grounding the term. It produces as invisible the subjects located on its periphery and becomes a placeholder for alt-right white supremacy. Questions need to be addressed regarding the utility of this taxonomy for society. Eliminating racial classifications is not tantamount to supporting a colour-blindness approach. Oftentimes, eliminativism is conflated with colour-blindness (Eddo-Lodge, 2017) or race avoidance (Alcoff, 2015). However, there is a difference, on the one hand, between pretending that something does not exist and acknowledging, on the other hand, that, something is harmful and should be perhaps erased. What is known within the social work discipline, of oppression, marginalization, and of the interpretative ways to address oppression and marginalization, has been produced by a

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North American knowledge, which, as any epistemic system of imperial production, bestows the primary right to classify, define, label and ultimately oversee the logic of classification (Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2006). Not that knowledge coming from a colonial standpoint needs to be invalidated, however, there is a need for forms of knowledge that do not originate from this standpoint. Only because the American system classifies the world in a certain way, it does not mean that everyone should accept to be classified by an American classification. Concepts constructed to understand North-American realities are invested with universal conceptualizations, as forms without substance, to explain everything and anything, any particular subaltern realities or the experiences of people originating from contexts which have not been shaped by North American understandings. Yet, differences are historically produced and their production depends on geo-political contexts. Ways of understanding differences need to be reflective of such specificities. Someone born and raised within a certain socio-political context, whose habitus is formed and modeled by ways of producing and creating difference, that differ from current ways of differentiating, should not be epistemologically disregarded and placed within a pre-determined categorical thinking, unreflective of the determining ways that have created their difference. The relationality between geo-historical locations and epistemology, and between identity and epistemology (Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2006), justifies the need to particularize the standpoints that construct de-colonizing work. Societies have many axes of exclusion. The idea is to map the dialectic in every field and historical circumstance; to identify what creates the exclusion in a particular setting, who are the subjects involved in these processes, how is their habitus defined, etc. and what are the material effects for these subjects, rather than simply apply ready-made universalized interpretations to subjects originating from particularized societies that would never fit such interpretations.

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