Governing Migration and Social Cohesion through Integration Requirements

This socio-legal project questions how and with what effects the notion of “integration” has become, in migration law, administrative and court practice, a decisive criterion based on which states select which migrants shall be granted or denied access to specific rights (e.g., right of abode, political rights, right to family reunification). This affects the way social cohesion is strived for and reveals how both in law and practice social cohesion is conceived of and who is considered to belong or not. Based on the analysis of legal texts, ethnographic data and documents our research contributes to understanding how state officials deal with different categories of mobile or sedentary foreign nationals (in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, religion, age, etc.) when deciding about the allocation or denial of rights based on the criterion of “being integrated”. The underlying rationales of policies and practices are to be interpreted within broader processes of social transformation, e.g., the rise of the human rights regime, of neoliberalism, and of a “culture of control”. Switzerland is at the center of the study. The study implies an inter-cantonal and an international comparison with two contrasting European welfare states: Germany and Sweden.