In their new book, Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Ethel Tungohan and Christina Gabriel use the “containing diversity” concept to encapsulate and explore crucial shifts in contemporary immigration, multiculturalism and citizenship. The volume offers a clear, comprehensive and critical explanation of the nature and effects of Canada's immigration priorities and citizenship policies from 2001 to 2021, and it does so within a comparative frame of reference. While the book primarily covers the period from 9/11 to the COVID-19 global pandemic, it also provides a revealing historical overview that lays a foundation for the main analysis and includes some very recent policy developments, such as Canada's issuance of emergency visas in response to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Containing Diversity's eight chapters are logically organized into three sections. The first two chapters, constituting part 1, contextualize by identifying major international immigration trends and outlining Canada's immigration policies over time. Part 2 provides a systematic account and assessment of today's predominant immigration pathways and preferences in four chapters that examine, respectively, the halting responses to refugees, the priorization of “skilled” immigrants, the use and abuse of temporary workers, and the marginalization of family migrants. In part 3, the last two chapters of the book, we find reflections on weighty normative questions around membership, belonging and the future of immigration and citizenship.
The authors’ main argument is straightforward in that it underscores the racialized and exclusionary politics that epitomize containing diversity. However, the dynamics of containing diversity are more complicated and contested, encompassing “racialization and control of specific groups, alongside contradictory impulses exhibited between closure to threatening outsiders and openness to valued workers and citizens” (2). What is more, racialization “intersects with religion, gender, country of origin, class, and citizenship status in manifold ways in both discourse and individual experiences” (2). The authors’ analyses are thus also more complex, as they bring together feminist intersectionality, feminist political economy and feminist care politics.
The volume provides an invaluable follow up to Abu-Laban and Gabriel's discipline-defining 2002 book, Selling Diversity: Immigration, Multiculturalism, Employment Equity, and Globalization, and includes several new dimensions. Tungohan is added as a co-author, and the theoretical scope is expanded through the inclusion of more extensive, intersectional, ethical and normative concerns. The grounded, up-to-date details in Containing Diversity not only lay out a plethora of politics and policies and illustrate the daunting structural constraints at play, but the authors also strive to foreground im/migrants’ agency. Even in the most extreme exclusionary conditions, Containing Diversity includes scenarios of migrant mobilization and solidarity building.
Containing Diversity has multiple strengths, from its empirical depth to its theoretical breadth and normative ambitions. As a result, it will be an incredibly beneficial resource for scholars, students, practitioners and policy makers. It is especially useful in providing a holistic examination of policy changes, from major historical movements, to smaller, more recent immigration pilots and pivots, globally, nationally and subnationally. The volume is relevant to multiple subfields of political science (for example, Canadian politics, comparative politics, political theory, international relations) and beyond, and it is a must-read text in many other disciplines, including law, sociology, gender and women studies, race and ethnic studies, social justice and community studies, and so on.
Partly due to the substantial ground covered by the authors, there are some areas that invite more careful consideration. For example, a few historical examples of working across difference—that is, the building of alliances across ethnic and racialized communities, or between Indigenous peoples and settlers, especially racialized im/migrants—might have illustrated greater historical reflexivity and relationality. This could remedy accounts that reinforce separateness and/or fixity of such categories and identities, and it would support Containing Diversity's ultimate call to support co-resistance between, for example, migrants and Indigenous peoples.
Last but not least, the logic of containing diversity is explained by the prevalence and proliferation of neoliberalism and securitization/criminalization. Yet the period under most scrutiny covers multiple Liberal governments (Chrétien, 1993–2003; Martin, 2003–2006; and Trudeau, 2015–present), along with a tumultuous period of Conservative governance with Stephen Harper's three terms in office (2006–2015). The authors do acknowledge a shift, at least in discourses and stated policy objectives, after Harper and under Justin Trudeau, but in the end they point to more continuity than change. While I am very sympathetic to this assessment, I still question the constancy of neoliberalism over a long, four-decade time span.
More attentiveness to the ways in which conditions are changing would be beneficial, particularly given that long-standing leftist critiques of neoliberalism are now joined by the right's assault on neoliberalism. The latter has fostered not merely a return to protectionism but to ethno-nationalist, xenophobic and far-right (including alt-right) extremism, as evidenced during the Trump presidency and elsewhere. Canada is not immune to these forces. This raises some larger questions: Are we seeing fundamental changes and challenges to the neoliberal order? As a result, are there other, or new, -isms at play that explain containing diversity? If so, this will necessitate that Containing Diversity's authors and other progressive academics and activists (among whom I count myself) refresh their analyses and recharge their political strategies accordingly.
