Skills to Build the Nation

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How do discourses of “skill” and “training” shape immigrant integration, national imaginary, and skilled labour policies in Canada?

In Skills to Build the Nation, migration studies scholar Soma Chatterjee takes Canada’s Federal Skilled Worker Program as an entry point to examine how the federal policy developed through a productive contradiction: casting skilled immigrants as both essential and perpetually deficient. The federal government’s policies and programs come under critical scrutiny as the text investigates the paradoxical position of welcoming skilled immigrants while also demanding they instinctually embody an elusive, assimilatory Canadian identity.

Blending critical race theory, discourse analysis, and Marxist feminist critiques of labour, Chatterjee challenges the notion of “skill” as race-neutral and dismantles the idea that Canada’s immigration system represents a state of post-racial liberalism. By focusing on political narratives and government documents (including ministerial speeches, policy reports, and public archives), Skills to Build the Nation highlights the tensions between Canada’s global pursuit of skilled labour and its exclusionary national imaginary.

In a country with an understanding of hard work as a measure of national belonging, Chatterjee’s book is a powerful and timely intervention into the contradictions and myths of immigration, nationalism, and labour in contemporary Canada.