Article

Policy Futures in Education

Capitalism, immigration, 2016, Vol. 14(7) 1005–1019
! Author(s) 2016

language and literacy: Mapping Reprints and permissions:

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a politicized reading of DOI: 10.1177/1478210316663393

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a policy assemblage
Diana Masny
University of Ottawa, Canada; Queensland University of Technology,
Australia

Monica Waterhouse
Langues, linguistique et traduction, Université Laval, Quebec, Canada

Abstract
Immigration for Australia and Canada is critical to sustain economic growth. Each country’s
immigration policy stems from its vision of a nation that includes the role of language and
literacy and a program of economic outcomes. While the authors acknowledge that economic
integration through employment dominates immigration policies in Canada and Australia, the goal
of this article is to critically examine and map how language and literacies in an immigration policy
are positioned in relation to economic outcomes in neo-liberal times. Questions flowing from the
article’s objective are: what does immigration produce, and what is its effect on how language and
literacies are legitimated? The questions explore how capitalism decodes immigration, language
and literacy, and in turn how immigration, language and literacies reterritorialize/reconfigure
in the context of human and economic capital. These questions are taken up in an assemblage that
includes Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on capitalism and deploys multiple literacies theory to read
capitalism, immigration, language and literacy in the context of immigration policies prevailing in
Australia and Canada. These two countries offer an interesting entry point for rhizomatic analysis
since Canada’s government has, in recent years, been actively investigating Australia’s policies and their
effectiveness in the successful integration of newcomers. Mapping a politicized reading of the
immigration–language–literacy policy assemblage and questioning how this assemblage reconfigures
is important as global migration intensifies around the world.

Keywords
Assemblage, capitalism, immigration, language, literacies, rhizome

Corresponding author:
Diana Masny, University of Ottawa, Educaton 145 J.J.Lussier Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada.
Email: dmasny@uottawa.ca
1006 Policy Futures in Education 14(7)

In a country where immigration is a priority, criteria for entry are linked to policy based on a
country’s vision as a nation and to economic outcomes. Additionally, important criteria are
language and literacy. This article highlights immigration policies in Australia and Canada
which are dominated by economic integration through employment. Engaging in a
politicized reading of the immigration–language–literacy policy assemblage and
questioning how this assemblage works is important as global migration intensifies
around the world. These two countries in particular offer an interesting entry point to
analysis since Canada’s government has, in recent years, been actively investigating
Australia’s policies and their effectiveness in promoting the successful integration of
newcomers. As language and literacy education scholars working in Canada, where one in
five Canadians are foreign-born (Statistics Canada, 2013), we have become increasingly
concerned about the politics of immigration policies and programs in the current neoliberal
moment defined by capitalism. This article examines how capitalism functions in relation to
immigration, language and literacy policies. Some of the questions explored are how
capitalism decodes immigration and language and literacy abilities, and how immigration
reterritorializes in the context of human and economic capital. In the current era of
neoliberalism, what does immigration produce and what is its effect on how language and
literacy abilities are legitimated? These questions are taken up in an assemblage that includes
Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on capitalism and deploys multiple literacies theory to read
capitalism and immigration in the context of the immigration policies prevailing in Australia
and Canada.
In addition, a rhizomatic mode of analysis that calls for problematization and questioning
underpins a reading of policy assemblage. A rhizome has no tree-like vertical roots. It has
roots/shoots that spring from the middle and grow horizontally. It has neither beginning nor
end. Moreover, there are no points or positions in a rhizome. There are only lines (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987). In social systems, such as policy, these rhizomatically intersecting lines
form complex arrangements which operate in particular ways and which continually shift
their configurations to function in new ways. This article proposes to map the functioning of
an assemblage consisting of language and literacy policies in relation to immigration, state
and capitalism. The concept of assemblage stems from the English translation from the
French agencement (arrangement) or the processes of arranging, organizing and fitting
together (Livesey, 2010). The concept of assemblage developed by Deleuze and Guattari
(1987) can be used broadly to think about all kinds of structures, including social,
economic and policy structures, but in a way that accounts for their dynamic, continually
shifting relations or de/reterritorializations. Deleuze (1993) proposed that a society and its
collective assemblages are defined by lines, and in particular lines of flight (or points of
deterritorialization). Lines of flight are unpredictable in that the trajectory that a line of
flight will take is unknown in advance. Moreover, how a line will turn suggests three types
of rhizomatic lines within all assemblages: (1) molar lines: rigid, segmenting, overcoding; (2)
molecular lines: supple, fluxing, decoding in a relative deterritorialization that reterritorializes
and (3) lines of flight: nomadic, creating something novel. ‘‘What we call by different names –
schizoanalysis, micropolitics, pragmatics, diagrammatism, rhizomatics, cartography – has no
other object than the study of these lines’’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2007: 125).
The article is organized according to rhizomatic entries that may resist linear logic, yet
create intensities that the reader ‘‘plugs into’’ and thereby opens potentially new and
productive ways of thinking about immigration policies.1 A conceptual framework for
analysis is a concept of reading emerging out of multiple literacies theory, in which
Masny and Waterhouse 1007

reading is intensive and immanent. Literacies consist of words, gestures and sounds; that is,
human, animal and vegetal ways of relating in the world: ways of becoming with the world.
They are texts, broadly speaking (for example, mating rituals, music, visual arts, physics,
mathematics, digital remixes). The contribution of reading intensively and immanently is
proposed as a novel way to examine policies on language and literacies. Literacy, understood
as engaging with printed material, is undone. Reading in the conventional manner is
hierarchically decentered in a rhizomatic mode of analysis (Masny, 2013).
From the outset, we propose to map the functioning of an assemblage consisting of
language and literacy policies in relation to immigration, state and capitalism. This article
offers four rhizomatic entries consisting of differential elements in an assemblage. The first
rhizomatic entry is multiple: a Deleuze–Guattarian perspective on axiomatics and capitalism,
reading capitalism as a decoding machine through the lens of multiple literacies theory,
reading human capital and immigration. The next two rhizomatic entries are devoted to
language and literacy respectively. The next entry, an intermezzo (not a conclusion),
emphasizes the opportunities rhizomatic analysis and multiple literacies theory afford when
considering the rhizomatic trajectories of the lines – molar, molecular, lines of flight, shooting
through the immigration–language–literacy policy assemblages of Canada and Australia.

Axiomatics and capitalism

This entry focuses on the relationship between capitalism and axiomatics. What are
axiomatics? How do axioms function? What do they produce? A response begins with
coding practices in society. Societies function according to social rules established by
the state to code or regulate concretely the flows of desire seen as positive and productive
along a qualified continuum. Overcoding, that is merging existing codes into a high-order
regulative structure, is also practiced to limit movement. A relevant example is how the fine-
tuning of international adoption legislation effects the overcoding of existing policy
structures such that, in practice, the eligibility to adopt children becomes increasingly
constrained (Government of Canada, 2016). Movements, both figurative and literal in this
case, become limited as the regulation of transnational migration intensifies.
In contrast, axiomatics and capitalism are not subjected to such structured movements.
Capitalism is a decoding social machine that creates unrestricted flows of money and labor,
for example. While a society, in order to function, is structured and coded, an axiom does
not operate with a code. An axiom is more abstract. An axiom may be added and subtracted.
It is a decoding machine that will do anything not to limit its movements. As a machine, an
axiom is meaningless. It takes on meaning once a model is realized and applied to material
situations (Toscano, 2010). While coding and overcoding practices are established in context,
decoding decontextualizes these practices that apply to any situation and becomes quantified
and commodified through a process of axiomatics. Related to our earlier example, one sees
how this decoding can operate when private agencies crop up to assist ‘‘clients’’ interested in
adopting internationally in negotiating the existing legal structures, but these agencies do so
for a substantial fee. An axiom operates on decoded flows: capitalism. Capitalism is its
offspring, its result (Buchanan, 2008).
Capitalism, a decoding machine, is limitless because capitalism can constantly empty
coded flows introducing novelty and innovation into society (Buchanan, 2008). This does
not say that society is codeless. The function of the state is that of ‘‘organizing conjunctions
of decoded flows in the service of capital accumulation and the axiom of money’’ (Deleuze
1008 Policy Futures in Education 14(7)

and Guattari, 1987: 451). In other words, the state cannot operate without axiomatics.
The state can only regulate them. Returning to our adoption example we note how the
state has organized decoded flows, that is, flows of people and capital created by the
private adoption agencies. Across Canada provincial governments regulate these agencies,
and in Ontario the Ministry of Children and Youth Services (2016) actually sanctions these
agencies through licensing.
Similarly, through a process of axiomatics and its offspring (capitalism), literacy, as we shall
see later, is a quantified commodity. For the moment, instances with the internet provide
additional examples regarding the axiomatics of capitalism. There has been an exponential
surge of data tracking on the internet. One example is doing a survey once you have used a
particular service. Another is the footpath you have created using different websites that then
appear shortly after as ads on your screen. A globalized axiom is at work governing the
interactions. Whatever exchanges occur happen regardless of the people, positions or
geographic entity involved. It is irrelevant. The axiomatic is at work codeless (decoded).

Reading capitalism
Multiple literacies theory’s relevance lies in proposing other ways of conceptualizing literacies
and reading that provide opportunities to think differently about them through such concepts
as capitalism, the assemblage and becoming. Multiple literacies theory refers to reading the
relationality of heterogeneous elements (expression and intermingling of bodies human and
non-human) that de- and reterritorialize in an assemblage. In this context, how does reading
capitalism through the lens of multiple literacies theory function? What does it produce?
In multiple literacies theory (Masny, 2014a), literacies engage visual, oral, written, tactile,
olfactory and multimodal digital modes. They produce different vegetal and animal
mutations, speakers, writers, artists and digital avatars. Literacies actualize according to a
particular context in time and in space in which they operate. Literacies are nomadic (not
wed to a context) and are taken up in unpredictable ways. Multiple literacies theory refers to
reading as a process in reading the world and self that creates potentialities for transforming
life. Reading self refers to reading the relationality of the differential elements through the
flows of affect that the assemblage produces.
In addition, multiple literacies theory is both theory and practice. From a theoretical
perspective, it focuses on problems and questions that enable the creation of concepts.
From a practical perspective, Deleuze likens a theory to a toolbox: ‘‘it has to be used, it
has to work’’ (Deleuze, 2004: 208). The toolbox is practical, for it consists in creating non-
pre-given concepts. Concepts are not definitions. They provide new directions for thinking.
Accordingly, multiple literacies theory is interested in praxis, the ability to do, to practice
when asking questions about how literacies function and what they produce.2 Questions and
concepts create ‘‘possibilities for thinking beyond what is already known or assumed’’
(Colebrook, 2002: 19).
In asking how reading works and what it does or what it produces (Deleuze, 1990),
multiple literacies theory has conceptually created reading to be intensive and immanent.
To read intensively is to read disruptively. Reading the relationality of the elements in an
assemblage disrupts and reading becomes intensive. In the case of reading capitalism,
reading intensively consists in reading capitalism in a way that decodes and disrupts
coding and overcoding practice. To read immanently refers to the virtual thought of what
Masny and Waterhouse 1009

might happen in reading the world and self (Masny, 2014b; Masny and Waterhouse, 2011).
Reading capitalism immanently refers to an actual–virtual interaction. Actual–virtual
describes Deleuze’s ontological insistence on the potential of difference (virtual) to disrupt
and transform reality as it is lived (actual). Take, for example, an immigration assemblage.
A problem tied to the economy of the country arises: the state claims that there are
insufficient skilled workers. Reading that element as part of the assemblage disrupts the
relationality of the elements in the assemblage (reading intensively expression and content
or bodies, workers for instance). Meanwhile, a reading immanently suggests that in the
virtual, immigration is asignifying. The virtual thought of immigration then actualizes
through an actual trajectory (untimely, and not pre-given) of different coding practice(s)
relating immigration to labor. A new immigration–labor signifying nexus forms in the
actual, but that same nexus may once again be decoded and unravel in the virtual. For
example, a temporary foreign worker program was created in Canada with overcoding rules
(what companies could do, whom small businesses could bring in, etc.) to hire foreign workers
temporarily because there were no Canadian citizens or permanent residents available. Through
the capitalist decoding machine, the program began to unravel: qualified persons from abroad
took positions held by Canadians and received a lesser salary. Other businesses brought in
foreign workers, paid the minimum wage and were not necessarily enumerated in a timely
manner. The program was halted until a different quantified formula could be developed.
Another instance of reading immanently happened and capitalism deterritorialized.
The trajectory to actualization is unknown and untimely.

Reading human capital

The economy constitutes a worldwide axiomatic (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 453).
The concept of human capital occupies a significant position for the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which defines it ‘‘as the knowledge,
skills, competencies and attributes embodied in individuals that facilitate the creation of
personal, social and economic well-being’’ (Keeley, 2007: 29). Reading is deployed through
the lens of multiple literacies theory. It consists of reading, for example, sounds and gestures,
human and non-human. This conceptualization of reading is proposed in order to engage
with the differential elements in an assemblage. Human capital as well-being has
been disrupted, and reading intensively the relationship of elements in the assemblage
coincides with reading immanently. Reading immanently considers how the concept of
human capital as well-being has been disrupted. What might human capital produce in
becoming?
Human capital might have undergone transformation through the decoding machine of
capitalism. In reading immanently, human capital deterritorializes and becomes asignifying.
It is virtual. The process of decoding calls for creation of a different coding, for example,
capitalism decodes labor and labor reterritorializes as (the axiom of) money (i.e. human
capital). Has capitalism also decoded the human? To quote Colebrook (2006: 127): ‘‘In its
final form ‘man’ becomes a laboring being whose force is no longer invested in a coded
flow . . . but is decoded and deterritorialized through money and labor.’’ We ask whether
humans might be quantified in terms of money. Another question is whether Canada’s
immigration policy, for instance, is invested in the coded human. Through capitalism, has
the individual been decoded and axiomatized as money, that is, in terms of human capital?
1010 Policy Futures in Education 14(7)

Gu and Wong (2010) (while not dealing with immigrants/newcomers) provide a reference
used by the Canadian government for human capital stock. Canada adopted the term
human stock in their immigration policy. Human capital stock refers to:

. . . the expected future lifetime income of all individuals while human capital investment is
estimated as changes in human capital stock due to the addition of new members of the
working age population arising from the rearing and education of children and the effect of
immigration on human capital. (5)

Reading immanently calls for a virtual–actual interaction. This interaction is repeated,

but each time it is different, for the assemblage is different each time. Accordingly, once
more, reading human capital can be deterritorialized. Regarding understandings of how
human capital circulates in Australian government policy on education, for instance,
Sellar and Zipin (2013) reformulate human capital through Deleuzean affect theory as
relational. This relational perspective frames human capital in terms of multiplicities and
changes in capacity to affect and be affected. Such a conceptualization of human capital has
the effect of shifting the locus of capital from the individual to the collective. Human capital
is no longer simply individual human skills, resources and knowledge, but entails a rather
more complex view of human capital as a productive set of relations operating within an
assemblage. As such, the whole of affective human capital is greater than the sum of its parts,
a key characteristic of complex global systems.

Immigration
Through multiple literacies theory, immigration is intensive. It is disrupted by the decoding
machine of capitalism and transformations are effected through human capital, such that
human bodies are decoded through capital. Although both countries share mandates
to facilitate the ‘‘integration’’ (Canada’s word choice) and ‘‘social inclusion’’ (Australia)
of immigrants, what dominates their policy and programming is economic integration
through employment. Everything is about product/capital and producing flows
of product/capital. For example, in Australia, the New South Wales Department of
Education and Training’s (2011) Annual Report 2010 describes in detailed financial
statements the millions of dollars in revenue generated by contracted Adult Migrant
English Program (AMEP) services, estimated at AUD$40.6 million. Moreover, the report
indicates that AUD$1.8 billion was poured into technical and further education (TAFE)
programming, which includes migrant language training programs as well as other college
level, workplace readiness programs. Similarly, in 2006, the newly elected Conservative
government in Canada tripled funding to immigrant settlement services, including its
flagship language training program, Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada
(LINC). The Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney,
commented in a news conference on November 28, 2010:

Overall the federal government used to spend, before we came into office, under [CAD]$200
million annually on settlement and language services for new Canadians. Now we spend well
over [CAD]$600 million a year.
It remains to be seen how the policies of Canada’s newly elected liberal government, which
ran on a pro-immigration platform, will address immigrant language training. What can be
said at present is that their immigration platform emphasizes family reunification, yet at the
Masny and Waterhouse 1011

same time continues to recognize the economic importance of immigration, stating that it
‘‘has always been an important part of Canada’s economic growth’’ (Liberal Party of Canada,
2016a: 1). The Liberal costing plan describes new investments in, for example, job training and
immigration, but in the latter case makes no mention of language training or other integration
services. Instead, the plan foregrounds fund allocation to immediately respond to the Syrian
refugee crisis and to reduce processing times for immigration applications over four years
(Liberal Party of Canada, 2016b).
As Colebrook (2006) writes: ‘‘Capitalism appears to be an event that turns the flows
of individual lives, our own desires and meanings, into a single global present: time is
money. Everything we do is quantified’’ (34). Further to Colebrook’s point, not only does
time undergo transformation into money, human bodies themselves appear to be decoded in
capitalism. No longer citizens, no longer father/mother/son/daughter, perhaps no longer
workers even, human bodies are coded and decoded in the universalizing axiomatic of
capitalism.
In the Canadian context, Hawthorne (2007) notes that Canada’s nation-building ‘‘is
informed by a human capital model of immigrant selection’’ (124). Hawthorne’s study of
labor market outcomes for migrant professionals in Canada and Australia was co-funded by
Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada,
and Statistics Canada. This report has become a touchstone for government decision makers
in Canada and it serves to reinscribe the primacy of human capital models of immigration,
focusing on the economic value and integration of newcomers. More recently, Hawthorne
(2014) reaffirms that in both Australia and Canada, immigration over the last decade has
been aimed at nation-building and economic growth, aims realized in a policy emphasis on
skills for the labor market.
It is important to keep in mind that Canada and Australia constitute two societies (two
assemblages), each shaped by its own lines (molar, molecular and lines of flight), and each
with their own social machines, political machines, etc. Yet both are operating in the context
of the decoding regime of capitalism. As such, capitalism has particular effects on
and interactions with each unique assemblage (the nation-state, its immigrants and
citizens, its machines, etc.), effects which are produced by the interactions of the lines that
traverse it. There is the molar (rigid, segmenting, overcoding forces of territorialization such
as macropolitical government policies specific to each country). There is the molecular. It is
supple, fluxes, migrant, engaging in deterritorialization of the diverse ways policies are
actualized/enacted in the micropolitics of practice which differs between countries and
even within each country. From our analysis of immigration policies in both countries, it
appears that overall the Australian assemblage has been historically constituted by far more
elaborate machines than Canada both in terms of a highly differentiated complex system of
policies for various categories and sub-categories of migrant visas as well as in terms of the
array of post-settlement support programming offered.

Mapping and transforming language in a state–capitalism–immigration

assemblage
Language is shot through and transformed by lines traversing the state–capitalism–
immigration assemblage. In a rhizomatic analysis, how might these lines be mapped
(Waterhouse, 2011)? Two ways are suggested. In the first, language is coded in various
ways (e.g. as official, as heritage/community language) and then overcoded within the
1012 Policy Futures in Education 14(7)

molar lines of a legislative policy apparatus which inscribes the binary logic of official
language(s) or heritage/community languages.3 Reading language intensively through the
lens of multiple literacies theory asks what kind of overcoding language undergoes when
named as official and credited points on an immigration application. Similarly, having a
‘‘credentialed community language’’ in Australia can then count towards migrant selection
points. Reading intensively activates reading immanently, in which language ruptures and
the virtual thought of what might happen follows. It then actualizes as an official language.
In the Canadian context, a question arises regarding how capitalism decodes official languages
through the flows of capital. Does the concept of official languages in the context of
globalization, markets and flows of capital matter little? Canada espouses official bilingualism
and multiculturalism, and therefore diversity. The state codes diversity through the Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Government of Canada, 1982). State bilingualism and
multiculturalism continues decoding through capitalism, a decoding machine of monetary
value: money is codeless – it is integral to an axiom. Capitalism, the decoding machine, has
traces of money and functions to decode bilingualism. Bilingualism is no longer a molar, coded
national value and instead becomes a marketable individual attribute whose worth lies in terms
of increasing human capital. In this context, we are interested in how diversity might function
and what it might it produce when capitalism decodes state diversity. Capitalism, according to
Lorraine (2011):

. . . reduc[es] all cultural difference to a set of variables that can be inserted into a globalizing
axiomatic that welcomes difference without being affected by it. Whereas in societies rooted in a
foundational culture, beliefs and practices were rooted in a way of life that was taken for granted
and provided the backdrop for the vicissitudes of life, capitalism tends to replace such belief
systems with the ongoing change needed to produce and market commodities. (44)

Lorraine’s comments on how capitalism effectively exploits difference, such as Canada’s and
Australia’s cultural and linguistic diversity, for the axiomatic end of production leads to a
second way of mapping language and the state–capitalism–immigration assemblage.
Studies show that labor market ‘‘outcomes [are] profoundly influenced by migrants’
English or French language ability’’ (Hawthorne, 2014: 6). From the perspective of
multiple literacies theory, reading intensively, these findings produced a rupture
(deterritorialization). The policy in place became undone. Reading immanently (virtual–
actual interaction) gave rise to the virtual thought of what might happen and then be
actualized, with the Canadian government implementing more stringent third party
language proficiency testing prior to entry into Canada. Similarly, in Australia, for some
time now language testing has been in place to ensure English language proficiency and since
2007, in response to employer demands, a higher proficiency level is required (Hawthorne,
2014). In fact, Hawthorne (2014: 9) reports that in both Australia and Canada, ‘‘employers
demonstrate a strong preference for skilled migrants characterized by advanced English
ability [or French in the case of Quebec, Canada] and training in OECD countries.’’ It is
clear that the demands of employers, key elements of the capitalism decoding machine,
produce flows of capital by driving the policy process. In schizoanalytic terms, capitalism
introduces a line of flight that interrupts (reading intensively) the relatively fixed molar lines
of governmental immigration policy on language requirements, and then transforms and
appropriates them in the service of increasing flows of money and human capital. A case in
point is a report produced for Statistics Canada, Literacy in the labor market: Cognitive
Skills and Immigrant Earnings (Bonikowska et al., 2008), in which capitalism can be seen to
Masny and Waterhouse 1013

decode the value of language proficiency in and of itself and instead links its value to how
language proficiency is able to transfer professional skills into ‘‘usable skills,’’ that is, useful
in the production and flows of capital.

In our framework, fluency in the host country language can enter either as a skill in its own right
or as an input to the generation of other skills. In the latter case, employers care only about the
usable amounts of each skill that a worker possesses. Thus, an engineer who is well trained but
cannot communicate with his or her employer or fellow employees would be counted as having
zero usable engineering skills. Language ability in French or English then enters as an input into
the production of usable skills, with greater language ability leading to higher usable skills for
any given level of other inputs . . . Previous research indicates that reading fluency is a more
important determinant of employment, but speaking fluency is a more important determinant
of earnings. (Bonikowska et al., 2008: 14)

In other words, the points an immigrant has in language proficiency are in large part due to
his ability to use language in the context of engineering or other professional employment.
Is the decoding machine of capitalism wiping away the value of language proficiency in
various facets of daily life in favor of privileging ‘‘useable skills’’ for the workplace? Has
language proficiency been quantified and commodified according to a job market?

Mapping and transforming literacy in a state–capitalism–immigration

assemblage
Closely related to questions of language proficiency as a determinant of immigration points
is the issue of literacy skills. In a rhizomatic analysis, how might lines in a literacy–state–
capitalism–immigration assemblage be mapped? Literacy-for-immigration constitutes a
molar line in that literacy refers to engagement with printed material. According
to Deleuze (1995), state power rests ‘‘on the exercise of binary machines which run
through us and the abstract machine that overcodes us’’ (141). Relevant to our mapping
of the immigration policy and literacy assemblage are binary categories such as official/
unofficial language, literate/illiterate, and citizen/noncitizen, which draw rigid molar lines
through government immigration policy and delimit the status of an individual. From the
perspective of multiple literacies theory, literacy in Australia is a ‘‘foundational skill’’
(Commonwealth of Australia, 2012), along with numeracy, and is viewed in the
conventional sense of being able to read and write. This received view of literacy is also
apparent in the AMEP curriculum (Yates et al., 2010). The importance of literacy from the
government’s policy perspective is firmly rooted in economic competition concerns, and thus
reading (at least for adults and students of workforce age) is about being able to get a job,
and moreover the highest paying job possible. Significantly, there is scant mention in any of
the government documentation reviewed for this analysis of the importance of reading,
writing or digital modes of communication in other realms of social life. Multiple
literacies theory foregrounds literacies not as products, but as processes that go on in
immanently unpredictable ways and that take on particular value according to the diverse
social contexts of home, school and community in which they actualize. One notable
exception is Yates et al.’s (2010) research report on AMEP. It makes recommendations
related to first language maintenance in families and the social inclusion of newcomers,
where ‘‘social inclusion’’ is also part of the Government’s official mandate for migrants,
but it is an outcome which seems to be overcoded in terms of economic concerns like
1014 Policy Futures in Education 14(7)

employability and international competitiveness. Yates et al. (2010) also conclude that in
AMEP ‘‘a greater focus on authentic literacy tasks would be useful’’ (59), echoing Currie and
Cray’s (2004) finding that in Canada’s LINC program ‘‘both [students] and their teachers
viewed writing in LINC classes as a vehicle for the development of linguistic accuracy rather
than a socially situated practice’’ (111).
In Canada, the positioning of literacy skills with respect to immigration occurs in very
specific ways tied to jobs and employment. Bonikowska et al. (2008), in a report that was
produced for Statistics Canada, ask whether the cognitive skills, including literacy, of
immigrants differ from those of Canadian-born persons, and whether skill differences
between those who are Canadian-born and immigrants depend on where human capital/
education was acquired. An analysis was conducted on the results of Canadian-born persons
and immigrants who participated in the International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey
(IALSS). IALSS, also known as Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey, measures literacy,
numeracy and problem-solving skills, and according to Bonikowska et al. (2008) the scores
obtained measure cognitive skill. They found that Canadian-born persons scored higher on
literacy skills than immigrants. These low-score findings may be attributed to the fact that a
number of immigrants were unable to complete the test and to skill differences where human
capital was acquired. Immigrants who received their education prior to their arrival in
Canada have lower results on skills measured than immigrants who received their
education in Canada.

Regardless of these differences in skill levels and acquisition, however, we clearly reject the
hypothesis that immigrants receive lower returns to cognitive skills than the Canadian born.
Indeed, an important group of immigrants benefit more than do native-born Canadians from
higher skill levels. . . . Within our analytical framework, the implication is that education
acquired abroad produces cognitive skills such as literacy, numeracy and problem solving
skills but does not produce other skills that are valued in the Canadian labor market.
(Bonikowska et al., 2008: 9)

Reports prepared for Statistics Canada are quantitative, and this report’s data analysis
suggests that literacy skills may be out of sync with those valued in the Canadian labor
market. However, qualitative data and other analyses would be helpful to shed light on
whether the measures on the IALSS tested language and literacy skills desired in the
Canadian labor market.

Intermezzo
Though Canada looked to Australia for insights into how to reform its immigration legislation
and policies with respect to language/literacy requirements, we never know in advance how
becomings will unfold. Regardless of how Canada might follow in the immigration and
language policy footsteps of Australia, on a molecular level, it will produce a different
becoming due to the operation of difference and the de/reterritorializing effects of
capitalism as a decoding regime. What will a society produce? How will a particular social
assemblage find ‘‘its gradation and its boundaries drawn’’ (Deleuze, 1993: 233)? We wonder
what molar and molecular lines run through it, how it will be ‘‘defined first by its points of
deterritorialization, its fluxes of deterritorialization’’ (Deleuze, 1993: 233). The entire
assemblage is far more complex than the molar lines alone. It includes the simultaneous
operation of more supple, fluxing molecular lines, which relate to the molar lines yet create
Masny and Waterhouse 1015

possibilities for deterritorialization. In other words, it is both the macro and micropolitical
forces at work in each country that shape how it transforms in response to the decoding effects
of capitalism. For example, despite the apparent uses of language proficiency tests for
immigration (and citizenship) at the molar level in Australia, McNamara (2009) points out
that, at the molecular level, ‘‘social policy, for example labor shortage, or social competition
over control of access to opportunities for work, plays the determining role in the use of
language tests for assessment’’ (230). McNamara gives the example of labor shortage in the
health profession. Health professionals wishing to immigrate were eligible to enter without
taking the language proficiency test.
In Canada, it would appear that the results of a language proficiency test will be
interpreted according to what and where the employment needs are. Recall that
Bonikowska et al. (2008) concluded that assessment of language and literacy is tied
specifically to performance in the Canadian labor market (cf. example of language and
engineering). In addition, in Canada, molar lines function to produce an apparent
shortage of workers, to which immigrants are often touted as the solution. However,
McQuillan (2013), following molecular lines of education and training, argues that the
issue is not one of labor shortage but rather of a mismatch between the education,
training and skills Canadians have and the needs of the labor market. Thus, he offers a
molecular rationale for why the government should not increase current immigration rates, a
molar policy decision. It is not clear if current government policy moves are based on
McQuillan’s argument; however, his recommendations do align with the Canadian
government’s strategic selection of skilled workers to target the needs of under-supplied
sectors of the labor market, which was initially proposed as the two-step Expression of
Interest (EOI) system, following similar programming in Australia and New Zealand. The
system would align immigration candidates’ human capital attributes (including language
proficiency) with labor needs identified at provincial, territorial and federal levels
(Government of Canada, 2013). The policy came into practice in January 2015 under the
name Express Entry (Government of Canada, 2015).
In sum, in reading intensively, capitalism decodes immigration and immigration policy.
What emerges is contingent on reading immanently that which actualizes in an assemblage
(e.g. language, literacy, policy, politics, markets) and therefore opens new and different
potentialities for immigration. Is there a potential to free capitalism from the axiomatic of
production? Of labor? We ask how the flows of reterritorialization might differ. Perhaps
there might be an immanent reading of capitalism from a different axiom. How that axiom
might function is another question. What capitalism would it produce? Through the lens of
multiple literacies theory, reading disrupts and includes more than the printed material and
more than its connection to market economy. Meanwhile, governments and the OECD
produce reports that aim to predict, using an algorithm, labor shortages in the possible
future and thus prevent unintended outcomes. Are institutions functioning in a binary
system? In the context of globalization, immigration is not a question of operation within
a binary machine: match/mismatch, literate/illiterate. How might an open system engage
with unpredictability? An open system has the potential for the virtual thought of what
might happen without shutting out other literacies in assessing immigrants, for example. It is
the virtual thought of what might become when forces of unpredictability are at work in the
assemblage in relation to immigration.
Following Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) schizoanalytic approach in this article, we have
studied the rhizomatic trajectories of the lines – molar, molecular, lines of flight, shooting
1016 Policy Futures in Education 14(7)

through the immigration–language–literacy policy assemblages of Canada and Australia.

By reading capitalism immanently and intensively in the context of these assemblages,
new questions emerge and concepts are created as responses to problems presented by
lived social formations in the actual, concepts such as human capital, immigration and
globalization. A de- and re-territorialization of human capital, for example, creates a
different concept and consequently may invent new ways of thinking about and
responding to the complexity of the human capital–policy assemblage as it relates to
immigration and immigrant language requirements as well. A politicized reading of policy
calls for an ontological reading of policy (Webb and Gulson, 2012). In other words, policy as
a concept in the Deleuzian sense asks what policy produces, its material effects. In terms of
multiple literacies theory, a pragmatic, and inherently political, study of policy incurs
reading policy intensively and immanently.
This article explored the various ways capitalism functions as a decoding machine driven
by the axiomatic of economic flows with regard to immigration policies in Australia and
Canada. Yet capitalism itself is a concept which is not static. It has a virtual aspect and may
transform as an effect of other axioms with which it comes into a relation. As such, it
remains to be seen what new lines of flight will open and what new social formations
(even beyond the state) may actualize. In a time of strong neoliberal politics and global
organization by institutions such as the OECD, lines of flight offer potentialities for change.
There are ways of laboring, languaging and living for what might yet become, which exist in
the virtual, beyond thought, and which will actualize through the forces of reading the world
immanently and intensively.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: This project received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada 861-2009-1001.

Notes
1. The concept of ‘‘plugging in’’ is one borrowed from Deleuze in order to signal a particular
epistemological orientation to our analysis. Rather than aiming to fix a conclusion or build a
predetermined argument, the mapping of an assemblage – in our case a particular policy
assemblage involving Australian and Canadian elements – aims to open up the productive
potential of thinking by examining diverse elements coming together and seeing how they might
function in new or different ways.
2. Praxis in Deleuzian terms refers not simply to the theory and practical application, but their
connectivity in ‘‘the action of theory’’ (Deleuze, 2004: 207).
3. In Canada, non-official languages, that is, languages other than French and English, are commonly
referred to as heritage languages. In Australia, the term community languages tends to be used to
refer to non-official languages.
Masny and Waterhouse 1017

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Diana Masny is professor Emerita at the University of Ottawa and adjunct professor at
Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests include Multiple Literacies
Theory, research analysis, minority education, early childhood, multilingualism,
immigration and citizenship. She has coauthored Mapping Multiple Literacies: An
Introduction to Deleuzian Literacy Studies (2014, Continuum), edited Cartographies of
Becoming in Education: A Deleuze-Guattari Perspective (2013, Sense) and co-edited
Deleuze and Education (2013 Edinburgh University Press).

Monica Waterhouse is an assistant professor in the Département de Langues, linguistiques et

traduction, Université Laval where she teaches courses in research methodology, critical
perspectives on culture and language education, and English Second Language pedagogy.
Her current research project works with the Deleuzian concept of affect to study the social
and curricular stakes of language teaching in newcomer language programs in the Canadian
provinces of Quebec and Ontario.