Integrating Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States: Policies and Practices

Abstract

This volume surveys a new trend in immigration studies, which one could characterize as a turn away from multicultural and postnational perspectives, toward a renewed emphasis on assimilation and citizenship. Much scholarship in the past fifteen years or so, enticed by the discovery of “globalization,” has looked at contemporary immigration as obliterating and undermining some traditional principles of nation-states, such as the congruence of political and cultural boundaries and citizenship. In this new orthodoxy, multiculturalism had replaced assimilation as a mode of immigrant integration, and post- or transnational identities, affiliations, and protections had devalued, perhaps even rendered obsolete traditional citizenship. Immigrants were thus depicted as harbingers of a new multicultural and postnational world, in which the national fixity of identity, rights, and organizational capacity had dissolved (for influential statements, see Soysal 1994 and Basch et al. 1994).