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Managing the National Status Group: Immigration Policy in Germany

Document Cited in Related
Published date01 August 2018
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12400
AuthorJennifer Elrick,Elke Winter
Date01 August 2018
Managing the National Status Group:
Immigration Policy in Germany
Jennifer Elrick* and Elke Winter**
ABSTRACT
This article challenges the established convention in immigration policy scholarship of treating
economic utility and identity maintenance as logically distinct concerns. Drawing on work by
Weber, Wallerstein and Bourdieu, we argue that concerns about economic utility and identity
maintenance interact in the immigration policies of Western liberal democratic states, leading
to policies designed to build and maintain middle-class national status groups. Using the
example of contemporary immigration policy in Germany, we illustrate how this impulse to
build the middle-class status group affects immigrant inclusion/exclusion in nuanced ways at
both the group and individual levels, along class/status, ethnic and gender lines. We conclude
by considering the policy implications of growing and shaping populations according to mid-
dle-class ideals, particularly for the statistical monitoring of immigrant populations for integra-
tion benchmarking purposes.
INTRODUCTION
A key assumption underlying theoretical accounts of immigration policy in Western liberal-demo-
cratic states is that it is shaped by, and ref‌lects, two logically distinct concerns. The f‌irst concern is
economic utility, i.e. how immigration policy can be used to pursue general economic strategies.
One contemporary result of this concern has been the emergence of immigrant admissions policies
for highly skilled workers across OECD countries, the ostensible goal of which is to grow knowl-
edge economies. The second concern is with what Zolberg (2006: 74) has termed “identity mainte-
nance”, i.e. the perceived need to manage the putative effects of racially, ethnically, religiously
and/or linguistically different immigrants on the “way of life”,“cohesiveness”and “identity”of the
receiving state (Zolberg, 1999: 84). This latter concern has long been a driving force behind explic-
itly and implicitly exclusionary measures, of which contemporary family reunif‌ication policies, par-
ticularly in European countries, are considered a prime example.
In this article, we challenge the established convention in immigration policy scholarship of treating
economic utility and identity maintenance as logically distinct concerns. Drawing on an innovative
combination of work by Weber, Wallerstein, and Bourdieu, we show that economic concerns and the
policies for highly-skilled immigrants that derive from them are not just about utility, but also about
building and maintaining a middle-class national identity. Conversely, concerns about identity mainte-
nance, and the restrictive family reunif‌ication policies that derive from them, create particular eco-
nomic subjects in immigration policy that are compatible with middle-class identity building and
maintenance, and which serve economic utility. We furthermore argue that, within the middle-class
* McGill University, Montreal, Canada
** University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
doi: 10.1111/imig.12400
©2017 The Authors
International Migration ©2017 IOM
International Migration Vol. 56 (4) 2018
ISSN 0020-7985Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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