FEELING LIKE A CITIZEN: INTEGRATION EXAMS, EXPERTISE AND SITES OF RESISTANCE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND THE NETHERLANDS

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the implementation of state-administered integration exams as part of the naturalization and settlement process in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Through analysis of key government documents and interviews with public servants and the experts involved, I argue that the actualization of the exam is a critical point in the policy process through which to understand how particular norms become embedded in not only the content, but the different requirements of each exam. In particular, I consider the role language-education experts, settlement experts, and the notable absence of migrants in the actualization of the exams under consideration. More importantly, I argue that while the state employs expert advice as a means through which to depoliticize the issue, the mechanisms through which this is done can in fact create spaces for the contestation of ideas. Drawing on the governmentality literature I argue that the British and Dutch borders are constructed and reified through the developing of test content, while also pointing to the ways in which non-state actors can mobilize their expertise to push for alternative, more open imaginings of the border. Through my comparison I also consider how integration has been framed as a problem with immigrants who do not have the right kind of orientation toward their ‘host’ community. The solutions to issues within immigrant communities (i.e. unemployment, poverty, poor health outcomes) rest in individuals moving from outsider to insider because these problems stem from the community’s position on the periphery of society. I argue that the immigrant’s affective orientation towards society becomes viewed as the source of these problems, and not the community's or society's orientation towards them. I then argue that the integration exam becomes a suitable solution because it solves multiple problems at once. The exam works as the mechanism through which desire is manufactured by making tangible the object of desire in the first place and by making society itself more exclusive. In this sense, the exam not only seeks to “ensure that those who desire ‘us’ are desirable to ‘us’” (Fortier, 2013, 3) by making immigrants prove themselves worthy, but also serves as a mechanism through which the state reasserts its authority over society.