A Retrospective Look at the Social Construction of ‘Skilled’ Immigrant Workers in Ontario

Abstract

In this short chapter, I discuss how immigrant workers are objectified through the governing technology of public immigration policy. In particular, I comment on how ‘skilled immigrants’ in Ontario are turned into subjects of immigration policy and research through practices of social objectification and categorization (Foucault, 1972, 1977; Rabinow, 1984). I argue that such processes operated in a ‘discursive policy web’ constructed during the decade between 1996 and 2006. By pointing to some of the policy strategies employed, I attempt to ‘make visible’ the operation of power, which works through such techniques to govern social relations (cf. Foucault, 1977). To begin, I describe the scholarship behind the idea of a discursive policy web and the textual network that emerged in the period under analysis, which was chosen because it was through its discourses that the notion of ‘skilled immigrants’ was invoked as a policy solution to the skills shortage problem in the Province (see also Goldberg, 2006, 2007).