Worrier Nation: Quebec's Value Codes for Immigrants

Abstract

This article analyses the political and policy discourses of Quebec's integration toolkit for immigrants. With a focus on value codes for immigrants, I argue first, that recent debate on accommodation of immigrants and religious minorities resuscitates the dominant historical narrative of Quebec's fragility as a conquered settler colonial nation but where the major threat is defined as the cultural otherness of racialized immigrants and religious minorities. Second, such value codes instantiate a form of governmental strategy that combines neo-liberal and communitarian rationalities and insist on cultural assimilation as the price of entry into Quebec citizenship. Finally, the paper examines how Quebec's current national imaginary of the ‘worrier nation’ maps spatially onto the urban-rural divide.