This chapter is primarily aimed at presenting the various outcomes of refugee interaction with the German administrative state. What impact did the integration regime have on the everyday lives of refugees? What did the refugees in the best possible position to ‘integrate’ achieve in terms of being accepted into German society, having met the official goals of integration? Among these questions, this chapter serves as the conclusion to the final part is what I consider the integration regime. After navigating arrival, language learning, private housing and relationship building, refugees should be in a position to find work and consider settling in. The integration regime promised, among other things, a livelihood through language learning. Here I will examine how refugees were rewarded for following the legal and symbolic frameworks of integration.

Ephemeral integration

In the previous chapters, the state and policy were discussed in terms of local administration, deploying Gupta's ‘blurred boundaries’ approach that pushes back against the reification of the state by arguing that the government often enacts policy to reaffirm the interests of ‘powerful minorities’ and that the actual state only exists in the ‘social imaginary’ (Gupta 2012, 56). However, Sökefeld adds another layer to the discourse, differentiating ‘the state’ and ‘government’, and noting that ‘the state-idea is closely linked to the idea of the nation which on such occasions is celebrated through its symbols and heroes’ (Sökefeld 2016, 10). In doing so, he presents an important distinction that questions the universal understanding of how the state may be interpreted. He frames ‘the state-idea as a container’ with particular importance to the analysis of Gilgit-Baltistan, while at the same time concluding that ‘the walls and borders of the container are often negotiated and made penetrable by the state-system’ and that ‘the container system is very leaky’ (Sökefeld 2016, 13). Similarly, both anthropologists (Ong 2006) and geographers (Darling 2017) have reinforced notions of the scale and space of citizenship; that is, they attempt to free citizenship research from attachment to the state. However, Tuckett argues that ‘cultural citizenship’ actually ‘reinstates the legal-political aspects’ of citizenship, which means it is from encounters with the state and institutions that refugees form their ‘culturally specific modes of behavior’ (Tuckett 2018, 74).