Capitalism, immigration, language and literacy: Mapping a politicized reading of a policy assemblage

Abstract

Immigration for Australia and Canada is critical to sustain economic growth. Each country's immigration policy stems from its vision of a nation that includes the role of language and literacy and a program of economic outcomes. While the authors acknowledge that economic integration through employment dominates immigration policies in Canada and Australia, the goal of this article is to critically examine and map how language and literacies in an immigration policy are positioned in relation to economic outcomes in neo-liberal times. Questions flowing from the article's objective are: what does immigration produce, and what is its effect on how language and literacies are legitimated? The questions explore how capitalism decodes immigration, language and literacy, and in turn how immigration, language and literacies reterritorialize/reconfigure in the context of human and economic capital. These questions are taken up in an assemblage that includes Deleuze and Guattari's writings on capitalism and deploys multiple literacies theory to read capitalism, immigration, language and literacy in the context of immigration policies prevailing in Australia and Canada. These two countries offer an interesting entry point for rhizomatic analysis since Canada's government has, in recent years, been actively investigating Australia's policies and their effectiveness in the successful integration of newcomers. Mapping a politicized reading of the immigration-language-literacy policy assemblage and questioning how this assemblage reconfigures is important as global migration intensifies around the world.

A transdisciplinary exploration: Reading peace education and teaching English to speakers of other languages through multiple literacies theory

“…Secondly, we acknowledge that the field of TESOL is not unproblematic and that it is criticised for contributing to the spread of a globalised hegemony closely associated with neo-liberal capitalism (see, e.g. Masny & Waterhouse 2016). We also work from the premise that English language teaching and learning are not neutral or value-free practices (Pennycook 2006;Phillipson 2009).…”