Political implications

A large number of the changes to citizenship and integration policies in Europe since the late 1990s have been built around an integrationist ideology. Whereas there are several arguments against making integration mandatory or a precondition of access to rights, offering language courses, orientation about the institutions, culture and history of the country, or job training are all welcome activities. For some interviewees from the CRIs in Wallonia in particular, the mandatory nature of the integration courses was acceptable in exchange for enough investment in integration to allow a larger number of migrants access to courses. Forcing some unwilling to follow a course in order to allow other, more willing migrants access seems an acceptable approach for many. However, there are no intrinsic guarantee that the courses will remain free of charge.

A more in-depth analysis of the policies and their implementation allows one to discuss in more detail the practical role of integrationism in the everyday working of the policies. Research with migrants who have experienced the citizenship policies of the UK has shown how such policies are experienced mostly as hoops to jump through and as restrictive notions of UK history and society (MacGregor and Bailey, 2012; Byrne, 2014; 2017; Bassel et al, 2018; Prabhat, 2018; Bassel et al, 2021; Fortier, 2021). However, my interviews on citizenship policy, both in the UK and in Belgium, showed a limited use of integration as a concept in the everyday work of the officials. From this point of view, citizenship policies do not even seem to be about mono-or multi-culturalism. Rather, integration requirements seem to be relatively arbitrary trials non-citizens have to go through in order to prove to be deserving of equal rights.

A further point is that integrationism has been strongly linked in north-western Europe to the push to increase rates of participation in paid work by migrants and their descendants. The choice to tackle the issue through migration and cultural policies – rather than through stronger anti-discrimination policies, less deregulated labour laws, and public intervention in the economy – is in line with broader neoliberal tendencies (Schinkel and Van Houdt, 2010; Van Houdt et al, 2011; Suvarierol, 2015).