Becoming A Canadian Citizen

"Becoming a Citizen is a terrific book. Important, innovative, well argued, theoretically significant, and empirically grounded. It will be the definitive work in the field for years to come."—Frank D. Bean, Co-Director, Center for Research on Immigration, Population and Public Policy "This book is in three ways innovative. First, it avoids the domestic navel-gazing of U.S .immigration studies, through an obvious yet ingenious comparison with Canada. Second, it shows that official multiculturalism and common citizenship may very well go together, revealing Canada, and not the United States, as leader in successful immigrant integration. Thirdly, the book provides a compelling picture of how the state matters in making immigrants citizens. An outstanding contribution to the migration and citizenship literature!"—Christian Joppke, American University of Paris

Over the past 15 years, the citizenship debate in political and social theory has undergone an extraordinary renaissance. To date, much of the writing on citizenship, within and beyond Canada, has been oriented toward the development of theory, or has concentrated on contemporary issues and examples. This collection of essays adopts a different approach by contextualizing and historicizing the citizenship debate, through studies of various aspects of the rise of social citizenship in Canada. Focusing on the formative years from the late 19th through mid-20th century, contributors examine how emerging discourse and practices in diverse areas of Canadian social life created a widely engaged, but often deeply contested, vision of the new Canadian citizen. The original essays examine key developments in the fields of welfare, justice, health, childhood, family, immigration, education, labour, media, popular culture and recreation, highlighting the contradictory nature of Canadian citizenship. The implications of these projects for the daily lives of Canadians, their identities, and the forms of resistance that they mounted, are central themes. Contributing authors situate their historical accounts in both public and private domains, their analyses emphasizing the mutual permeability of state and civil(ian) life. These diverse investigations reveal that while Canadian citizenship conveys crucial images of identity, security, and participatory democracy within the ongoing project of nation building, it is also interlaced with the projects of a hierarchical social structure and exclusionary political order. This collection explores the origins and evolution of Canadian citizenship in historical context. It also introduces the more general dilemmas and debates in social history and political theory that inevitably inform these inquiries.

Essays presented in January 1992 at a Roundtable on Citizenship sponsored by the Faculty of Law at the U. of Ottawa discuss what it means to be a Canadian and how Canadian citizenship must evolve if it is to serve a unifying ideal. The essays are organized in four broad categories: history; regions; law, constitutionalism, and economics; and individuals and groups. No index. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This guide is arranged in two parts. The first part covers immigration, including sections on immigration operations, immigrating to Canada, refugees, immigrant settlement programs, visiting Canada, foreign students, temporary foreign workers, enforcement, immigration inquiries, detention and removal, appeals, and status. The second part is a reference guide to the rights and responsibilities of Canadian citizenship and the process of becoming a Canadian citizen.