Human-capital citizenship and the changing logic of immigrant admissions

As notions of human capital and personal autonomy have become integral to constructions of social membership, we have witnessed the incursion of market mechanisms into many areas of social life. Immigration policy has been no exception to this trend. By tracing policy developments in Canada and Germany, this article examines the extent to which human-capital citizenship has come to shape immigration policy across policy regimes. Examining economic and family immigrant admissions, the article tests two sets of propositions. First, that human-capital citizenship has come to transform economic immigration policies in ways that have stratified core rights - that is, residence and family unification rights - by skill level, rather than economic contribution. As a second proposition, the article contends that economic considerations are being increasingly applied to immigrants who arrive through non-economic streams. As the desirability of immigrants has come to correspond to their rank in the labour market hierarchy, the accompanying process of market invasion has led to an increasing blurring of longstanding normative and policy distinctions between economic and non-economic immigration.