On A Roll

Check this shit out.

Peter S. Li discusses the representational frameworks that surround discourses of immigration in Canada. He walks us through the history of this country’s consistently racialized immigration policies, referencing the political and social response to “newcomers.” His perspective steps out from behind a lens that consistently places immigrants as the source of problems and changes within an otherwise acultural space. Li uses the work of Gramsci and Hall, who speak about the challenge to the predominantly white European “cultural framework” that hegemonically limits the possibility of difference in Canada. The way Canadian see immigrants as people over whom “old timers” exert the power to accept or deny is problematized, and Canada’s space is illuminated as a thoroughly racialized space. At question also is the idea of immigrants “value” to the country, which is most often evaluated on a purely economic basis. This economic scapegoating is a metanarrative of the dominant class, but there are other stories as well; often, nonwhite immigrants, especially Asians, are seen to be the bearers of organized crime, disease, communism, and illegal immigration into the US. Li refers to the research of Henry and Tator to illustrate the stereotypical basis of the “moral panic” around immigrants and immigration. The coexistent discourse of multiculturalism should contradict this ethos, but it tends, in fact, to reinforce it. Difference is tolerated as a midpoint towards “integration” and assimilation. There remains a strong ideology of “irreconcilable differences,” and this is a means to limit the discursive space given to cultures other than their own. For example, immigration policy very cautiously approaches the idea of family, in order to quietly legislate away families outside of the nuclear norm. Li addresses yet another example of the intolerance and hypocrisy of the Canadian cultural value system.