The Crescent Moon through Maple Trees: How Racializing Settlement Structures Reinforce Nonbelonging, and Perceptions of ‘Canadianness’ for Pakistani Newcomers

In this dissertation, I develop nonbelonging as a sociologically relevant concept and heuristic by examining what it means to be “Canadian” for newcomers. Drawing on life-history interviews with newcomer Pakistani immigrants and first-generation settlement counselors, I show how nonbelonging is subtly reinforced during early settlement. First, I use Foucault’s concept of governmentality to analyze how the settlement service sector legitimizes nonbelonging at an institutional level. I demonstrate how institutional practices and social interactions reinforce nonbelonging, even in seemingly inclusive social institutions. Next, I apply Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital to examine how newcomers experience nonbelonging through the loss or devaluation of professional and educational credentials, linguistic fluency, and social status. These accounts reveal how structural and embodied forms of nonbelonging intersect. Finally, I use a postcolonial framework to show how whiteness continues to define authentic Canadianness. I analyze how Canada’s image as an “authentically” white nation reinforces racialized exclusion and structures perceptions of belonging (Mackey 1999; Thobani 2007), and how these perceptions coexist with nonbelonging. By centering the voices of Pakistani newcomers, this dissertation provides the first comprehensive study of how nonbelonging operates and is reinforced in latent ways for racialized immigrants in Canada. I argue that nonbelonging is not an unintended consequence of immigration but an active, structured, and ongoing condition that functions alongside racialized belonging. Across three studies, I demonstrate that institutions which appear inclusive, such as settlement service centers, often communicate messages of nonbelonging. Settlement counselors, who are themselves first-generation immigrants, draw on their own experiences of exclusion, normalizing these barriers for newcomers. For Pakistani immigrants, this process becomes embodied in the loss of symbolic capital and felt through contradictions between pre-migration expectations and post-migration realities. These interactions reflect and reproduce broader structures of whiteness that continue to define Canada’s national ethos. Ultimately, this dissertation shows how Canada’s immigration system simultaneously welcomes and excludes, producing a complex and contradictory experience for racialized newcomers like those from Pakistan. It makes visible the hidden processes of nonbelonging, challenging assumptions of inclusivity and calling for deeper sociological engagement with the intersections of race, migration, and belonging.

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