Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
capital have become the privileged criteria for the valuing of immigrants
while ethnic and racial status have been disqualified. The causes of this
transition are complex but include the more expansive social liberalism
of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the neo-liberalism accompanying
economic recession and the fiscal crisis of the state in the 1980s that has
privileged the self-sufficient economic migrant in selection. The effects
have been dramatic, exemplified by the re-positioning of Chinatown
from historic pariah to a neighbourhood in the 1960s that suddenly had
an entitlement and a voice heard by government.
It was the ideology of neo-liberalism rather than the welfare state that
opened up the prospect of the Pacific Rim, and the prospecting that fol-
lowed in the brazenly economistic Team Canada expeditions. The Pacific
Rim as a putative region was shaped in the North American imagination as
a business opportunity and little else. The chilling conditions in the facto-
ries and workers' barracks of the free trade and special economic zones of
Asia Pacific evoked the unequal relations of a plural society where Furnivall's
'test of cheapness' harshly defined the meaning of life. The value-added
nodes of this network were connected by the movement of container ships,
the buzz through airport hubs, and the near instantaneous transmission of
electronic capital and cyber-commands. National and international busi-
ness associations were assembled as facilitators, with APEC as chief cheer-
leader and symbolic overseer. The business immigration programmes in
Canada, Australia and elsewhere that took flight from around 1980 were
launched by this prospecting imagination. The business immigrant was the
embodiment of successful Pacific Rim enterprise - an entry prize indeed -
enabling the successful recruiter to enlist both capital and the capitalist. In
this flattening out of perspective, citizenship, a defining quality of the liberal
state, also became marketable, quantified in precise dollar terms as a com-
modity to be bought and sold.
The heroic animator of the Pacific Rim network was
homo economicus
,
and as a mythology developed of the superior trading skills of the cosmo-
politan Chinese businessman (Hamilton 1999), so business acumen
became essentialized and embodied in an ethnic identity. Not surprisingly
then, the senior immigration officer at the Canadian High Commission in
Hong Kong was effusive in his assessment of the new recruits: 'They are
one of our best immigrant groups. They are used to standing on their own
feet. They bring education, language skills, a good attitude and enough
finances. They hit the ground running' (Mickleburgh 1996). Here it seemed
was the late twentieth century embodiment of what Engels, in awe of the
single-minded obsession of the Manchester mill merchants he observed in
the 1840s, once described as a walking - now perhaps a flying - political
economy.
