ABSTRACT
Writing over a decade ago, Jim Collins made the point that despite opinions to the contrary, the United States is ‘a highly class differentiated society, with large social and economic differences between the owning and managing elites and the working-class majority, and a widening gap between the incomes and education of middle class and working-class households’ (Collins 2006: 3). He goes on to argue that within this class-differentiated society, ‘immigrant populations are sharply differentiated with, for example, wealthy entrepreneurs, middle class professionals, and low-wage service workers found among most groups,’ leading him to conclude that ‘class is a significant structural feature in the contemporary United States, and it is a significant “category of difference” in immigrant communities’ (Collins 2006: 3). In effect, what Collins is saying is that those who study immigration, and in particularly those applied linguists who study the interrelationship between migration, identity and language (MIL), need to adopt class as a key construct in their work. He does so in the context of ongoing academic research in North America examining how bi/multilingualism often has been and often continues to be framed in a negative manner in the United States (Urciuoli 1996; Lippi-Green 1997/2011) and how bi/multilinguals themselves are often subjected to what Charles Taylor (1994: 25) calls the ‘misrecognition’, that is, they ‘suffer real damage, real distortion … [when] the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves’. A call for more attention to social class in research on MIL is in no way an attempt to undervalue research on misrecognition. However, it does mean questioning how much this research may achieve if the goal is to provide a complete picture of the migrant experience in terms of all of the variables impacting on it or to challenge inequality in societies, which may be seen as being as much about economics as cultural issues (if not more).
