Civic or Neoliberal? Nationalism and Immigrant Integration

This talk scrutinizes neoliberal elements in Western states' recent integration policies, often summed up as “civic integration”. These policies have commonly been considered as either “illiberal” or “liberal”, whereby the “neoliberal” element tends to get lost or overlooked. This neoliberal element in immigrant integration can be detected in the “conditionalizing” of residence permits and the access to (post-birth) citizenship on individual merit and desert. One might interpret this development from the lens of a genuinely “neoliberal nationalism”, which is a new entry in the nations and nationalism lexicon