Immigration Policy and Canadian Nation-Building Research Paper by Quality Writers

This essay critically examines the issue of immigration and Canadian nation-building within a sociological perspective. A particular focus of the paper is on the contradiction between the ideal of immigration, as reflected in the changes to immigration policy in the 1960s and the introduction of official multiculturalism in the 1970s, and the realities of immigration in regard to its being embedded in the social class and power distribution structures of Canada. In this context, the paper argues that in our capitalist society immigration policy has primarily served the interests of capital in the form of labor force reproduction. This being said, it is then argued that the existence of a multicultural and multiracial society represents a clear challenge to the existing power distribution in Canadian society; a challenge that has been met by policies such as official multiculturalism which are instruments by which the capitalist state seeks to control and channel dissent and thereby ensure the perpetuation of the Canadian status quo.