Institutional conversion power and the capability to belong: The capability approach to immigrant flourishing (CAIF)

The capability approach holds that comparable resources can yield unequal freedoms because conversion factors intervene. Migration applications show that legal status, racialisation, credential recognition and institutions shape what immigrants can do with what they have but say less about how resources and their bearers become institutionally intelligible and actionable. This article develops the Capability Approach to Immigrant Flourishing (CAIF) around institutional conversion power, the authority of migration regimes, professional bodies, employers and public institutions to classify identities, validate or devalue credentials, authorise claims and control access to recognition systems, and distinguishes it from institutional capability, institutions’ demonstrated capacity to correct unequal conversion. Drawing on capability theory, the politics of belonging, institutional classification and relational perspectives, CAIF specifies three linked mechanisms. First, institutional classification and recognition, which partly constitute the actionability of resources. Second, sequential gatekeeping, institutional proximity and claims-making entitlement, which determine whether formal available resources become reachable opportunities. Third, recursive capability trajectories across time and place. CAIF distinguishes the capability to belong from the politics of belonging and defines immigrant flourishing as the dynamic relationship among substantive freedom, freely chosen functionings, dignity and lived wellbeing. It explains how institutional authority produces divergent capability sets among immigrants with comparable resources.