Suspect Outsiders or Prospective Citizens? Constructing the Immigrant/German Boundary in Germany’s Integration Courses

Daniel Williams
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Daniel Williams: Department of Sociology, St. Catherine University, Saint Paul, MN 55105, USA

Social Sciences, 2018, vol. 7, issue 4, 1-15

Abstract: Most scholarship on integration and assimilation in Europe has examined laws, policies and quantitative data to understand the integration of immigrants. Fewer studies have looked at the meaning of integration for immigrants and host societies. This article helps to fill this gap in scholarship by examining the construction of immigrants and Germany in mandatory integration courses in contemporary Germany. Using ethnographic observations of integration courses and discourse analysis of curricular materials, I analyze these constructions using a boundary-construction approach, where both the content of what separates immigrants from host society members, and the brightness of the boundary are used as a basis for viewing immigrants as outsiders versus citizens. I use the terms suspect outsiders and prospective citizens to describe the nature of the immigrant/German boundary based on these constructions. The findings show that three themes—gender and family norms, democracy and rights, and religious freedom—form the content of the immigrant/German boundary. Within these themes, Germany’s civic integration courses generally construct immigrants as prospective citizens by blurring the immigrant/German boundary. The nature of the immigrant/German boundary is crucial for both the integration of immigrants and for Germany. A bright boundary that invokes the notion of immigrants as fundamentally different places the burden of integration on them to change, while a blurred boundary potentially redefines what it means to be German.

Keywords: integration; assimilation; immigration; Germany; national identity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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