Individualised Integration and Contractual Civic Integration Policies A Dutch Case Study

In a Europe where diversity politics are becoming notably stricter, there is an ongoing shift towards an “individualised” integration where the responsibility for successful outcomes is increasingly placed on the migrant. This chapter asks why the Dutch civic integration policy has had almost exclusively negative evaluations, arguing that this stems from the “contractual” ideology that increasingly underpins Dutch integration. This has led to interactional approaches where migrants are expected to “deliver” their individual integration in exchange for rights. Such contractual civic integration policies, on the one hand, do not lead to policy approaches where newcomers’ personal circumstances, ambitions and health are taken into account. On the other hand, contractual civic integration policies aiming to measure “deservingness to belong” also tend to clash with certain desirable societal outcomes. Instead of being installed and adjusted based on empirical research measuring whether they actually support emancipatory results, these policies are frequently amended based on (arbitrary) benchmarks of when individual newcomers are deemed to have integrated “enough.” The main conclusion of the chapter is that to fundamentally improve the policy outcomes of civic integration policies, legislators and policy-makers should recognise the ramifications of the shift towards individualised integration in order to reverse it.