From indigène to entrepreneur immigrant: Racism in the era of neoliberalism

Abstract

In the past two decades, there has been a shift to the so-called civic integration model across European countries along with the development of a European migration regime. This article explores the ramifications of the civic integration model as it is introduced in France, situating it within the long history of colonial racial mechanisms deployed to manage the colonized populations. I argue that characterized by an entanglement of bio-sovereign exception and neoliberal rationale, the civic integration model and the mandatory integration contract it introduces enact a novel racism that marks the immigrants as non-European and thus yet-to-be integrated subjects, all the while engaging them as prudent individuals of entrepreneurial quality who must ‘own’ and ‘improve’ their nature in return for legal residency. In order to make sense of why and how the immigrants themselves are engaged in the processes of racialization through a contractual relationship, I explore the ways the French state has contested the nature and population-ness of non-European subjects across history. Employing a genealogical perspective, I thus trace the birth of the entrepreneur immigrant of the current neoliberal context in the colonial mechanisms of racism that gave birth to the figures of indigène during colonial rule and Muslim French under colonial developmentalism of the postwar era.