Immigration Policy and Strategic Discrimination: The Skill-Selective Turn

• In Event: (Un)Deserving Migrants: Race and International Migration

Abstract

Policies that control immigrant entry are, by their very definition, discriminatory instruments. Because this power is central to the nation-building project and because states would have to accept an extraordinarily high cost for complete closure, the vast majority of states must settle for a fractional strategy, deciding who and how many get through the door. What strategies have societies settled upon in the past then, and how have those strategies shifted over time? Building upon existing historical and theoretical work on immigration policy, this paper seeks to explain the recent emergence of policies that target highly skilled migrants in countries all over the world, a trend referred to in the paper as the skill-selective turn. It draws upon archival sources and legislative records to explore the evolution of immigration selection systems in settler states, showing how once-ubiquitous ethnically selective policies diffused across states and eventually gave way to economic and familial strategies of selection. Based on this historical-political analysis, this paper argues that admissions policies favoring high-skilled migrants are actually more akin to ethnic selection strategies than economic ones. The analysis demonstrates that the concept of skill has become tied up with class in the same way that class has long been tied up with race. Because of how widespread skill-selective immigration policies have become, the implications of this are extensive. While skilled migrants are not the first immigrant group to be deemed desirable in juxtaposition with a racially or culturally undesirable other, they are the most recent incarnation of this xenophobic tendency.

Author

• Vivienne Born, Texas Woman's University