This paper examines the absence of religious myths and metaphors in policy, politics and public parlance regarding French immigrants in Canada’s two most populous provinces: Québec and Ontario. Even while consequential in number, these migrants are largely ignored, including in scholarly literature. Unlike prevalent research that examines overtly religious/Christian metaphors in its framing of migration (cf Bramadat 2022; Ramji and Marshall 2022) or that charts concern with Muslims (Razack 2008; Norton 2012; Amiraux 2016) and a religiously conservative racialized uneducated Muslim man, in particular (Razack 2008; Shryock 2010; Yurdakul and Korteweg 2020), we examine the overt invisibilization of nonreligious white French immigrants to Montreal and Toronto. We show how Canadian federal and provincial discourses idealize these elite, mobile, economically driven cosmopolitan expatriates as desirable due to their shared history and their “cultural” sameness in relation to whiteness, nonreligion and French language abilities.
To do so, we draw on three sets of data: First, we frame our findings by bringing together two bodies of scholarly literature on (1) the power and banality of the nonreligious in Western contexts (Le Renard 2019; Oliphant 2021; Blankholm 2022) and (2) on the privilege of whiteness in postcolonial contexts (Ahmed 2007; Beaman 2019; Maghbouleh 2017; Lépinard 2020). Second, we draw on our fieldwork and interviews conducted in 2022-2023 with 87 first-generation white- and 17 racialized- first-generation French immigrants in Montreal and Toronto. Our participants’ migration narratives evocatively capture significant trends in experiences of racialization and religious in/visibility in Montréal and Toronto, and can be correlated with quantitative data that show how approximately 58% of French people identify as nonreligious, and 89.5% of French in Canada are white (Statistics Canada 2021). Third, we draw briefly on critical discourse analyses of Canadian and Québécois immigration policies and France-Canada bilateral agreements, to show that the ease experienced by our participants related to whiteness and nonreligion are not accidental. Elite educated nonreligious and white French immigrants are implicitly sought after in recent policies and bilateral agreements, particularly between France and Quebec. These mechanisms work to further entrench these migrants’ normativity and invisibility.
Their desirability has a long colonial history. French immigration to Québec follows a centuries-old trajectory, beginning with the advent of “New France” in the 17th Century, when many Catholics sought a safe haven from France. More than four hundred years later, since 2008, the French are the most significant immigration group to that province (Statistics Canada 2021; Trespeuch, Pavot and Robinot 2021). Since 2008, the French have been the largest migratory group in Québec, and the ninth largest in Canada. Of course, we recognize that the contours of French life are slightly different in Québec, where visible religiosity is met with greater suspicion, and in Ontario, which tends to be characterized as maximalist and multicultural.
Our analyses of policy and bilateral agreements make evident that, despite factors of race and nonreligion common to most of this immigration wave, their invisibilization in public discourse on immigration is no accident. The paper turns briefly to the framing of this migration in post-2016 federal and provincial immigration policy (namely through economic class immigration, work/study permits and student visas) as well as bilateral agreements with France as overtly framing a desirable French immigrant who is “culturally compatible” (read: in relation to race, nonreligion and language fluency).
We conclude by putting theoretical work on whiteness and nonreligion in France and Canada (Ahmed 2007; Beaman 2019; Lépinard 2020) in conversation with literature on migration. While scholars have argued that whiteness and nonreligion allow access to a series of structural privileges, the contribution of this paper is that it considers the intersection of these two concepts to better capture the texture of nonreligious immigration, especially related to the privilege of being invisible.
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In contrast to literature on religion and migration that has often recently emphasized Muslims (with metaphors of “tides” or prevailing “Muslim questions”), this paper takes up a contrasting case to theorize the ease experienced by nonreligious white migrants. Specifically, we consider post-2016 white French nonreligious immigrants, the most important immigrant group to Québec and among the most important to Ontario, Canada. Methodologically, we draw upon: (1) literature addressing the privilege and banality of the nonreligious (Le Renard 2019; Oliphant 2021) and intersecting whiteness (Ahmed 2007; Beaman 2019; Lépinard 2020); (2) fieldwork and interviews with French immigrants in Montreal and Toronto; and (3) critical discourse analyses of immigration policies and bilateral agreements. We consider how intersections of whiteness and nonreligion individualize and mainstream them, while prevailing narratives of cosmopolitanism, economic need, shared culture, and the perceived absence of religiosity invisibilize them.