Transnationalism,neo-liberalism,and the rise of the shadow state

This paper examines the processes through which a neo-liberal agenda is broadened and entrenched through time. The case study focuses on a federal immigration policy in Canada in the 1980s, which encouraged the rapid entry of wealthy entrepreneurs and investors from Hong Kong. One of the many impacts of the arrival of this Chinese business élite in British Columbia was the rapid growth of a key volunteer organization in Vancouver dedicated to social service provisioning for immigrants. With the donations and volunteerism of the new Chinese arrivals, this organization grew from a small, narrowly focused social service institution, to one of the largest and most extensive providers in the lower Mainland, supplying numerous goods and services formerly controlled primarily by the province and the federal government. As a result of the actions of this voluntary organization, a type of interstitial organization that some scholars have termed under the rubric, 'the shadow state', conservative politicians in the 1980s were able to roll back many welfare state programmes in British Columbia without a corresponding loss of legitimacy occurring from the immediate truncation of services. The Business Immigration Programme thus aided in the entrenchment of a neo-liberal agenda both through the increased circulation of capital and articulation with Asian networks, and also through the devolution of direct welfare-state governance. I argue that this immigration programme thus represents one good example of the multiple ways that seemingly simple policy shifts can have much broader effects, and can entrench neo-liberal policy socially,culturally and institutionally as well as economically.