Friday, April 15, 2016
Assembly G (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
The dual discrediting of multiculturalism and overt ethno-nationalism has sparked a heated debate about a fading versus revitalized impact of national identity on immigration and citizenship policies. Surprisingly, within these debates, the way national identities are conceptualized is decidedly void of economic content. To put it with Van Hear (2014): ‘the class baby was drowned in the identity bathwater’ when it comes to the theorization of nation building in relation to immigration and citizenship policies. Taking up Van Hear’s call, in this paper, we argue that national identities are deeply informed by notions of class and status. Middle class ideals are mapped – by means of immigration policy -- onto potential new members of the nation. At the theoretical level, we use Max Weber’s concept of ‘status group’ to remind us that economic and cultural/political processes of inclusion/exclusion operate in tandem. This is also the case in processes of social closure pertaining to the nation-state. We then use Bourdieu’s interrelated concepts of field, capital and habitus to examine how social closure is executed through immigration policy, and how the latter creates and structures a global field of international migration. To exemplify our argument, we examine two particular pieces of European Union immigration policy, namely the 2003 Family Reunification Directive and the 2009 ‘Blue Card’ Directive for the admission of highly skilled workers. For both directives, we study their implementation in one EU member state, namely Germany.
