Can You Become one of us? Legal Selection of Assimilable Immigrants

• In Event: 391 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Paper Session. Rethinking Race and Nation: Transnational and Comparative Approaches

Abstract

Scholars have typically drawn a sharp distinction between immigration admissions policies and policies that regulate immigrants’ integration into the society of the destination country (Hammar 1989). Yet by 2011, several European governments required many potential immigrants to demonstrate that they have the capacity to integrate before or shortly after entry. The supposed ability to integrate became a condition of admission through new policies that required national language tests, and in the Dutch and French cases, the demonstration of cultural knowledge about those countries as well. Many analysts have argued that combining integration and immigration policies in this fashion is a novel and uniquely Europ¬¬ean form of immigration control (Orgad 2010; Wallace Goodman 2011; Groenendijk 2011; Joppke 2013; Bonjour 2014). This paper draws on much deeper and broader comparisons across North America, Latin America, and Western Europe over the last century. We identify and explain what is new in the forms and logics of using assimilability as a formal criterion to select immigrants. A recurring characteristic throughout this period is that preferences for “assimilable” immigrants are used to avoid the international and domestic conflicts that accompany discrimination against named racial, ethnic, and national origins groups. A major difference in twenty-first century European policies is that while they are motivated by folk theories of which social groups are most and least assimilable, the ability to integrate is now tested as an individual cultural achievement, rather than an immutable, racially ascribed status.

Authors

• Angela S. Garcia, University of California-San Diego

• Rawan Mazen Arar, University of California-San Diego