Skills to Build the Nation: Immigrant Labour Market and Canadian Nationalism
Soma Chatterjee
Year of Publication: 2026
Drawing attention to the simultaneous recruitment of skilled immigrants (as crucial for national prosperity), their devaluation (for lack of commensurate skills), and subsequent policy and programmatic affirmation of local Canadian experience as marker of integration/employability – triple dynamics that unfolded between the liberalization in 1962 and the last major immigration policy overhaul in 2016 – this book highlights the skilled labour market as a generative site for post-liberalization Canadian nation building. In the process, the author moves from the entrenched practices of studying the immigrant and how they measure up to the nation to studying the nation immigrants enter and how the labour market becomes an index for it.