Commodifying the Governance of Migration: A Canada-Germany Comparison

Canada’s and Germany’s migration regimes are increasingly shaped by a similar logic of approaching this policy field: Over the last two decades there have been important changes in both countries’ migration and integration policies that aim at streamlining the management of migration according to neoliberal market principles and limiting the entitlements that newcomers can receive. This paper analyses changes in key areas of policy formation in the field of migration and integration in both countries. At the core of the empirical study is a frame analysis of recent elite discourse and parliamentary debates in both national contexts. Based on this analysis the hypothesis will be developed that, as much as Canada and Germany still have different policies in place to recruit and integrate migrants, there an increasingly articulate tendency in both countries to adhere to a particular market-driven rationale when it comes to recent policy developments.