The Language of Citizenship: Canada’s Language Proficiency Requirements for Citizenship

The history of Canada is one of immigration and settlement and therefore Canada continues to maintain one of the world’s highest formal immigration rates. However, immigration to Canada is a program that is built on white settler colonialism that dispossessed the Indigenous peoples of the land that is now known as Canada and for decades the Canadian state has also had explicitly racist and gendered exclusionary immigration policies. Although Canada has moved away from immigration policies that are explicitly exclusionary on the basis of race since the 1970s, as many scholars have shown (Abu-Laban, 1998; Preston, Kim, Hudyma, Mandell, Luxton & Hemphill, 2013), the state has instituted other covert and proxy forms of maintaining gendered and racial preferences for immigration.

In this exploratory paper, I want to argue that official language proficiency in either English or French (the two official languages of Canada) is used by the Canadian state as one of these proxy technologies for constituting and maintaining hierarchies of gender and racial preferences in immigration policy. This builds on earlier work I have done on immigrant language training programs for newcomers to Canada (Haque, 2014; Haque, 2014; Haque & Valeo, 2017). For my data, I draw on observational and interview data from several adult citizenship immigration classes offered to newcomers to Canada in Toronto; Canada’s largest immigrant receiving city. These are preparatory language classes that serve a dual purpose in that the course content is meant to prepare the learners for the Canadian citizenship test and passing the course means obtaining the Canadian Language Benchmark 4 level which is a requirement for the Canadian citizenship application. The struggles and barriers that newcomers encounter in these seemingly race neutral citizenship requirements in fact reveal the continued gendered and racial preferences of Canadian immigration policy.