The labyrinth towards citizenship: contradictions in the framing and categorization of immigrants in immigration and integration policies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Restrictive policies in Europe are accompanied by exclusionary discourses concerning national citizenship for immigrants, depicting them dichotomously as either ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’. In our analysis of immigration and integration policies in Belgium, we focus on how these political discourses interact to differentiate between categories of immigrants who are included or excluded to some extent in ways that are more complex than the dichotomy suggests. We conduct framing and category analyses of migration and integration policies to reveal a discursive field consisting of four central frames that generate seven categories of immigrants with varying degrees of deservingness. Instead of a linear path towards citizenship, migrants are trapped in a labyrinth. We reveal four important contradictions in the policy discourse, leading to the conclusion that permanently probationary citizenship status is the highest attainable goal for certain immigrants. Finally, we discuss the implications of this labyrinth for the socioeconomic position of immigrants.