Becoming Multicultural: Immigration and the Politics of Membership in Canada and Germany . By

Do not judge this book by its cover! While the cover depicts a fairly bland image of a circle made up of red and colored dots, the book’s content is empirically rich and astonishingly insightful. These characteristics enable Becoming Multicultural to make a significant contribution to the literature on immigration and citizenship. The book adds, in particular, to a growing body of migration-related literature that compares Canada and Germany. It uses the two countries as case studies to explore what Triadafilopoulos calls the migration-membership dilemma. This dilemma is created by the contradiction between state practices of admitting migrants to fill labor shortages or pursue political aims and the lack of commitment to include these migrants into the national community. Despite Canada’s and Germany’s different histories, understandings of national belonging, and attitudes toward migration, Triadafilopoulos uncovers similarities in the manner in which immigration and citizenship have unfolded in both countries and seeks to “explain why two countries so determined to limit cultural diversity through the application of restrictive immigration and citizenship policies during the first half of the twentieth century found themselves transformed into highly diverse, multicultural societies by its end” (p. 158). The book contains six chapters. In the Introduction (Chapter 1), Triadafilopoulos develops a theoretical framework of analysis that draws on a political-science perspective. According to this framework, policy trends can be explained by the interaction of the overlapping dimensions of normative contexts, national traditions, and political practices. While an emerging “global human rights culture” (p. 8) after the Second World War framed the immigration and citizenship policies in both Canada and Germany, these policies were also influenced by the legacies of different traditions related to being a classical immigration country (i.e. Canada) and an ethnic nation (i.e. Germany), as well as by different political institutional systems and historical contingencies. In addition to these normative, historical, and political contexts, both Canadian and German immigration and citizenship policies were affected by practices of policy stretching, policy unraveling, and policy shifting. The subsequent substantive chapters apply this theoretical framework to an empirical context. Chapter 2 examines Canadian and German policies and politics from the turn of the century through the inter-war period. Chapter 3 explores the consequences of the transformation of the global normative context in the wake of the Second World War and the horrors of Nazi ideology and the Holocaust. Chapters 4 and 5 then investigate separately for Canada and Germany the more recent transformations of immigration and citizenship policies and the convergence by both countries toward multiculturalism. A short conclusion (Chapter 6) summarizes the main argument and speculates about the future of the ongoing process of immigration and integration in light of emerging tensions around religion. The strength of the book is its empirical rigor and attention to historical detail. It is probably the best source of factual information comparing Canada’s and Germany’s immigration and citizenship policies and practices over the last century currently available. Although the empirical parts of the book are extremely well researched, a section or appendix explaining