JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES
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synergistically in the U.S. immigration laws and their enforcement’ (2009, 3). In this issue,
Erin Chung’s analysis of visa hierarchies in South Korea demonstrates the importance of
class status in stratifying ethnic Koreans’ access to citizenship (2020). Whereas South
Korea provides economic visas for overseas Koreans regardless of nationality, it is only
‘cosmopolitan professionals from wealthy countries’ (i.e. Japan and the United States)
who are given access to citizenship, by contrast to ‘poor, backwards colonial era labor
migrants’ from lesser developed countries (i.e. China and the former Soviet Union). Likewise, in Europe, the turn to ‘civic integration’ in the 2000s has served as a fruitful focal
point for the study of discrimination – in particular class bias – in immigration and integration policy. As many European governments have adopted civic integration policies,
access to entry, permanent residence, and citizenship has become conditional on
foreign nationals’ demonstrated willingness and capacity for integration. Policy makers
have framed civic integration as a ‘civic performance’ (Chauvin, Garcés-Mascareñas
et al. 2013) to be realised through individual self-determination and agency. Through
the acquisition of language skills, civic knowledge, financial savings, and full-time employment, immigrants can increase their human capital and demonstrate their capacity for
socioeconomic and cultural integration and, thus, their deservingness of membership.
Yet, civic integration’s purported individualistic logic of inclusion/exclusion is born out
by neither policy intent, design, nor impact. As studies of civic integration discourses,
requirements, and outcomes have shown, the ‘configurations of individual-level traits
specified in immigration policy interact with the group-level national capital, creating
nuanced and intersectional patterns of inclusion/exclusion’ (Elrick and Winter 2018, 23).
Studies of European family immigration policies in particular (Groenendijk 2011; Wray
2011; Staver 2015; Block 2016; Ellermann and Goenaga In Press) have shown that, with
the selective imposition of financial and linguistic admission conditionalities, ‘class has
become the main determinant of access to family migration’ (Kofman 2018, 43). While
some have gone as far as to argue that ‘class … “trumps” race or ethnicity’ (Staver 2015,
295), most analyses emphasise the intersection of class and race/ethnicity. In their
study of Dutch integration policy, Saskia Bonjour and Jan Willem Duyvendak examine
how classed and racialized constructions of immigrants intersect to give rise to the
policy objective to bar ‘migrants with poor [economic] prospects’ (2018, 882). Likewise,
Jennifer Elrick and Elke Winter’s (2018) analysis of the intersection of class status, ethnicity, and gender in German immigration policy conceives of immigration policy making as
a means of ‘building the middle-class national status group,’ bringing together considerations of economic utility and identity maintenance. Antje Ellermann (this issue) develops
the concept of human-capital citizenship to capture the cultural significance of economic
attributes such as education, skill, and self-sufficiency as markers of belonging (2020).
Analyzing immigration policy in Germany and Canada, her analysis demonstrates how
the upper-middle-class bias inherent in the pursuit of the ‘best and brightest’ has also
engendered class-based stratification in immigrants’ access to family unification and permanent residence more broadly. In contexts such as Germany, where class status closely
maps onto ethnic and religious group membership, immigration policy thus also functions
as a means of de facto ethnic and religious (de)selection.
It is certainly not the case that group-level discriminations arising from Europe’s civic
integration policies simply constitute unintended consequences of neutral, individual-level
traits interacting with structural inequality. In Germany, the proponents of pre-entry