The construction of the citizenship of young refugees: a discourse analysis and ethnographic study in Belgium

One of the reasons why international migration is so central to the politics of many European countries is the challenges it sets to a national conception of citizenship. It puts the nation-state as the only source of authority for citizenship under pressure and uncovers the mechanisms of exclusion inherent to this modern conception of citizenship. National governments are adopting even more restrictive policies as a response to the increasing numbers of asylum seekers. But at the same time, refugees are told to integrate as fast as possible in the society and are supposed to become citizens who actively participate in the labor market and in social, cultural and civic domains of public life. Scholars state that these tensions are transforming the concept of citizenship. However, there is little empirical research on this possible transformation and how this is experienced by migrants themselves. Moreover, as research shows that the way refugees and their citizenship are discursively constructed in policy plays an important role in how it is received and acted upon by people, both refugees and non-refugees, we want to investigate how the refugees’ practices interact with and are influenced by the discourses in policies to construct the citizenship position of these refugees. For this purpose we conducted a framing and categorical analysis of the migration and integration policies in Belgium between 2011 and 2014 where we focused on how the citizenship of refugees is framed and what kind of citizenship is allocated to them. We combined this with an ethnographic study focusing on the reactions towards these policy discourses of young refugees in Belgium. In line with some critical theories of citizenship we make use of a more broad definition of citizenship: we do not approach the citizenship of migrants solely as a legal status reflecting membership but also as a dynamic process of becoming political whereby one can negotiate his or her belonging and identity within society and struggle to make oneself visible and heard (Isin & Turner, 2002). Our analysis shows that refugees are denied agency as full citizens in the migration policies by categorizing migrants as profiteers and criminals on the one hand and as victims on the other hand. Within the group of refugees, young refugees are often approached as victims and depicted as even more vulnerable. Participant observation and in-depth interviews with young refugees provide insight in their citizenship practices, different trajectories towards political awareness and creation of new subjectivities for themselves in light of the exclusionary discourses of which they are very aware. In this paper we show that the discourses in migration and integration policies and the practices of young refugees do not produce a simple dichotomy between citizens and non-citizens, as often is assumed, but that a more complex and continuous gradation between full exclusion and full inclusion comes about. References: Isin, E. F., & Turner, B. S. (2002). Citizenship studies: an introduction. Handbook of citizenship studies, 1(4), 1-10.