Saturday, March 15, 2014
Private Dining Room (Omni Shoreham)
Public discourse on immigrant integration in Europe has increasingly focused on the problem posed by Islam and its perceived incompatibility with liberal-democratic values. The ‘restrictive turn’ in immigration and naturalization policy can be seen as an attempt to manage this problem by erecting and enforcing both physical and imagined borders between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (d’Appollonia and Reich 2008; Fekete 2006; Geddes and Favell 1999). As such, much of the scholarly attention on integration/naturalization exams has focused on how such exams fit within the trend toward more restricted access to settlement/citizenship (Goodman 2011; Kostakopoulou 2010; Joppke 2009). This paper considers the exam as a policy response which seeks not only to manage the ‘illiberal’ Muslim migrant, but more specifically, as a response to the problematization of the migrant woman. Drawing on interviews with public servants and experts engaged in the development of the material for the Inburgeringsexamen in the Netherlands and the Life in the UK test in the United Kingdom, this paper considers how the image of the repressed migrant women shaped both the content and requirements of the exams developed. Further, I argue that a critical feminist reading of the content of the exams reveals as much about how migrant women are defined, as it does about the appropriate role for women in (neo)liberal democracies. Finally, I argue that while integration exams may seek to liberate migrant women from their so-called oppressive home cultures, they only do so by resurrecting patriarchy in another form.
