The labyrinth of migration and integration policies: discourses on the citizenship of refugees. The case of Belgium.

Scholars agree that international migration challenges a national conception of citizenship. It puts the nation-state as the only source of authority for citizenship under pressure and uncovers the exclusionary mechanisms inherent to this conception of citizenship. National governments are adopting even more restrictive policies as a response to the increasing numbers of asylum seekers. But at the same time, refugees are told to integrate as fast as possible in the society. Scholars state that these tensions are transforming the concept of citizenship. However, there is little empirical research on this possible transformation. As research shows that the way refugees and their citizenship are discursively constructed in policy plays an important role in the integration process of refugees, we want to investigate how the refugees' citizenship practices interact with the policy discourses to construct their citizenship position. For this purpose we conducted a discourse analysis of the migration policies in Belgium between 2011 and 2014 focusing on how the citizenship of refugees is framed and what kind of citizenship is allocated to them and an ethnographic study focusing on the reactions of young refugees towards these discourses. In line with critical theories of citizenship we make use of a broad definition of citizenship. Our analysis shows that refugees are denied agency as full citizens in migration policies by categorizing migrants as profiteers and criminals or as victims. Within the group of refugees, young refugees are often approached as victims and even more vulnerable. Participant observation and in-depth interviews with young refugees provide insight in their different trajectories towards political awareness and creation of subjectivities in light of these discourses. In this paper we show that policy discourses and the practices of refugees do not produce a dichotomy between citizens and non-citizens, but that a more complex gradation comes about.

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