| Abstrakt: |
This article argues that civic integration requirements demanded for residency and citizenship rights in EU Member States are currently prone to have counterproductive societal outcomes, because their focus shifted from their impact on societal goals to judgments of individual desert. The notion of "integration" was originally perceived as a property of the whole society and described its functioning and social cohesion. However, this article shows how this concept has instead progressively become a property of individuals with non-EU, non-Western immigrant backgrounds and used to describe their compatibility with, and belonging to, society. This development has created confusion about how to evaluate integration strategies. Integration policies in EU countries increasingly focus on selecting migrants who "deserve" to belong. However, the pursuit of this goal - limiting belonging to those who earn it - often conflicts with upholding broader societal goals. Representative of these goals, for instance, is when integration requirements become burdensome and exclusionary, not least because those who fail to integrate are not expulsed but remain in society, albeit with precarious legal rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
