Unravelling the integration paradox The uprooting and home-making of Euro-Maghrebi minorities across racial formations

Much of the integration literature revolves around the unwillingness of undeserving immigrants to adapt to majoritarian cultures while discrimination is set as aside as largely perceived or as almost naturally deriving from immigrants lagging in terms of inherited cultural and social capital. My ethnographic study focuses instead on the power stratifications that lay enmeshed in such discourses, not least the uneven access to recognition and resource distribution. It examines the emigration phenomenon of EU citizens with a Maghrebi background, aiming to shed new light on the so-called ‘integration paradox’. Through an in-depth portrait of a Belgian-Moroccan female, making her way from Belgium to the UAE and Australia, I describe how racialized hierarchies co-structure the privilege to feel at home. Rather than voluntary, European expatriation is reconsidered as a painful uprooting. In so doing, ‘integration’ emerges as a regime of differential inclusions that co-determine professional futures and a sense of belonging.