This chapter focuses on how the various institutional and policy aspects that determine ‘citizenship’, or ‘incorporation’ philosophies, interact with aspects relating to ethnicity, race, acceptable difference and prejudice to shape both the descriptive and substantive representation of CIOs across European countries. The chapter will start with a discussion of the existing scholarship that leads us to expect that different ways of managing the incorporation of migrants and their offspring – e.g. multicultural models as opposed to assimilationist models, etc. – take very different approaches about how to deal with the ethnic and racial diversity that migration brings along. Certain models or regimes of incorporation embrace ethnic and cultural diversity. Others are based on a notion of equality and neutrality of the state and of state institutions and policies that are supposed to be race/ethnicity/cultural-blind and which, as a consequence, discourage and de-legitimize the mobilization of ethnic, racial or cultural groups as such and their group-based claims. As we will discuss in the chapter, these contrasting understandings of how to deal with diversity are likely to lead to very different outcomes in the descriptive and substantive representation of various subsets of the CIO population. Accordingly, the chapter will focus on ‘visibility’ and ‘ethnicity’ as a key distinction in our analyses.
