Language Immigration And Naturalization

This volume focuses on the everyday legalities and practicalities of naturalization including governmental processes, the language of citizenship tests and classes, the labelling and lived experiences of immigrants/outsiders and the media’s interpretation of this process. The book brings together scholars from a wide range of specialities who accentuate language and raise issues that often remain unarticulated or masked in the media. The contributors highlight how governmental policies and practices affect native-born citizens and residents differently on the basis of legal status. Furthermore, the authors observe that many issues that are typically seen as affecting immigrants (such as language policies, nationalist identities and feelings of belonging) also impact first-generation native-born citizens who are seen as, or see themselves as, outsiders.

What is required to achieve civic integration and citizenship in nation states across the world? Should language testing be a part of it? This book addresses the urgent need to develop a fuller conceptual and theoretical basis for language testing than is currently available, to enable widespread discussion of this theme and the concomitant linguistic and cultural requirements. The policy proposals for civic integration have so far been conducted almost entirely at a national level, and with little regard for the experiences of a countries with long traditions of migration, such as the USA, Canada, the UK or Australia. At the same time, EU enlargment and the ongoing rise in the rate of migration into and across Europe suggest that these issues will continue to grow in importance. This book raises the level of discussion to take account of international developments and to promote a more coherent and soundly based debate. It will appeal to researchers and academics working in sociolinguistics and language education, as well as those working on language policy.

This report is intended as an evaluation of the initiatives taken by the federal government in the area of immigration to OLMCs since the tabling of the 2003 report. [...] What this takes into account is the attraction that English can have on immigrants in Quebec, or used to have in the past.25 The issue of the definition and counting of immigrants who's FOLS is French and their inclusion in the statistics for the francophone group prompted many questions among the Committee members. [...] Statistics Canada treats double responses as follows: half the respondents in the French- English FOLS group are indexed as francophones and the other half as anglophones, so as to respect the relative frequency of use.26 This was the procedure decided upon by Treasury Board in the 1990s: The thing is that usually what the Treasury Board does is, and the approach that was adopted in the early 1990 [...] To respond to the recriminations of the FCFA, another order in council was published in August 2010, stating that the simplified census questionnaire of May 2011 will include additional questions on language in order to comply with the provisions of the OLA relating to offer of services to the population. [...] It would be in the interest of the federal government, the provinces and territories, and the communities, within the framework of their partnerships, to harmonize their definitions and variables and to coordinate the treatment of their statistics in order to obtain comparable data on immigration to OLMCs.

Globalization is calling for new conceptualizations of belonging within culturally diverse communities. Quebec, driven by the pressures of maintaining Francophone identity and accommodating migrant groups, provides a fascinating case study of how to foster a sense of belonging.

In this impressive volume a combination of theorists - linguists, historians and lawyers - address the subject of citizenship testing for language proficiency and 'cultural' knowledge. Discussing themes of identity and cultural belonging, they draw out the implications for Australia and the wider international community.

This original study looks at language practices in a government agency responsible for granting or denying legal status to transnational migrants in Spain. Drawing on a unique corpus of naturally-occurring verbal interactions between state officials and migrant petitioners as well as ethnographic materials and interviews, it provides a fascinating insight into the relationship between language, social heterogeneity, and practices of exclusion. The book investigates how a national agency with homogenizing views of citizenship copes with the fundamental contradiction resulting from the state's commitment to the values of pluralism, justice, and equality, and its function as the regulator of access to socioeconomic resources. By focusing on information provision, the book explores how much room there is for individual agency in institutional contexts; and shows that what happens in front-line talk has very little to do with allowing immigrants access to crucial information but rather revolves around the regimentation of language and behavior, and the enactment of social control. This publication will be welcomed by students and researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics, language and immigration, institutional talk, and multilingualism.

From the perspectives of the political sciences as well as literature and language studies, this volume looks comparatively at Canadian and European constellations of cultural and linguistic diversity. By so doing, it takes Canada as exemplary for the effects of transnationalization, regionalization, and cultural and linguistic diversification on notions of citizenship and processes of identity formation.