2470 A. ELLERMANN The vanishing of ‘permanent permanence’ is also at the heart of The New Politics of Immigration and the End of Settler Societies, where Dauvergne makes the claim that, even in settler colonial states, immigration politics has come to be defined by the ‘loss of settlement.’ At a time when states ‘no longer need people, but rather widgets’ (2016, 176) settlement and nation-building have ceased to serve as core immigration values and the idea of permanent status has become eroded. As economic considerations have moved to the centre of immigration policy making, post-settler states now ‘embrace … the idea that temporary workers are preferred economic actors.’ While admissions policies are clearly stacked against the settlement of low-skilled workers and asylum seekers, even highskilled workers are increasingly recruited on a trial basis and hence face greater barrier to settlement. This temporary and precarious nature of immigration marks ‘[t]he firm end of the settler society era’ (2016, 184), and the beginning of a ‘meaner’ and marketdriven age of immigration. The spread of legal precarity and temporariness has been facilitated by the proliferation of new immigration categories. The rapidly growing literature on superdiversity has captured new forms of diversity that are historically unprecedented in their scale, speed, and complexity (Vertovec 2007). As the frequency and complexity of policy change has increased over time (Meissner 2018), the regulation of immigration itself has come to serve as a driver of diversity through the diversification of status tracks (Beine et al. 2013). As Anna Boucher shows in this issue, even tracks such as high-skilled immigration that are commonly referred to in unitary terms, upon further disaggregation reveal a startling variety of definitions of skill and attached conditionalities (2020). Status differentiation functions to ‘channel migrants by defining conditionalities of entry and delineating categories of migrants’ (Meissner 2018, 293). In doing so, status multiplication not only diversifies immigration tracks but also produces ‘a multiplicity of relationally configured social and economic dynamics’ (Meissner 2018, 291). In other words, status diversification engenders new immigrant hierarchies that stratify on the basis of differing ‘parameters of presence’ (Meissner 2018). This Special Issue builds on these debates by examining the intersection of status differentiation, legal precarity, and immigrant hierarchies. For many decades, status differentiation operated in a largely vertical manner based on distinctions between undocumented, temporary, permanent, and citizen residents. More recently, however, status multiplication has engendered horizontal stratification. Erin Chung’s study of South Korean visa categories (2020) shows how the proliferation of visa categories in response to labour shortages has introduced new hierarchies within the category of temporary foreign workers by distinguishing between the ‘temporarily temporary’ (Rajkumar et al. 2012) who are able to transition to permanent residence and the ‘permanently temporary’ who are not (Chung 2020). In a similar vein, Ellermann (this issue) argues that the shift from social citizenship to human-capital citizenship has resulted in the stratification of the core rights of economic immigrants in Canada and Germany – most importantly, their access to residence and family unification – on the basis of occupational skill, independent of actual labour market demand (2020). Matthew Gibney (in this issue) shifts our attention to the stratification of permanent residence and citizenship. While citizenship has long been regarded as an inviolable and ‘permanently permanent’ status, Gibney shows how the fight against terrorism has resulted in status diversification even among citizens (2020). In states with the provision of denationalisation, the stripping of citizenship has