Lessons on the Boundaries of Belonging: Mapping Boundary Constellations within the French Civic Integration Program

• In Event: 510 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. The Politics of Immigration and Citizenship

Abstract

Civic integration programs, which target non-European migrants and typically include instruction and assessment of the language, laws, and values of a receiving country, have become an increasingly common tool for both protecting and defining the boundaries of national belonging. Citing the static images of the nation within integration policies and the constitutive role of contrast in group formation, scholars have expressed concern that integration programs may belie their official purpose of facilitating migrants’ entry into society by, instead, highlighting and intensifying the boundaries that separate migrants from the national community. In this paper, I address this potential paradox by examining the nature of the symbolic boundaries that French integration program discourses draw between migrants and the French nation, as well as the extent to which the program discourses represent these boundaries as crossable, blurring, or shifting.

Relying on data from ethnographic observations and field interviews, I find that the main boundaries in the integration program discourses were those of religion, language, and culture, and that these boundaries were applied differently to three groups- North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans, and East Asians. The French nation was defined as modern, liberal, and secular. Migrants were represented as traditional and less evolved, with problematic religious practices and unequal gender relations. Most of the boundaries appeared bright and requiring assimilation and the reliance on essentialized representations appeared to limit the possibilities for boundary crossing; however, the immigrant origins of many of the program’s staff did provide a model for crossing, blurring, and straddling certain boundaries.

Author

• Elizabeth Anne Onasch, Northwestern University