The role of ideations in constituting migration and integration political regime: policy, politics and governance

The paper will discuss the varieties and political arenas of the ideations in migration and integration politics, policy and governance. Focusing on the ideations provides a good ground to discuss migration and integration politics, policy and governance. Shortly put, ideation is the capacity for or the act of generation of ideas or images. More broadly, it characterises the ways ideas emerge and influence practices, directly or through an intermediate layer. Speech acts, policies, administrative measures can be seen as based on ideations and can also be diversely understood and interpreted via ideations. Ideations offer a specific lense to analyse and discuss migration and integration politics, policy and governance. Policy debates, policy designs and governance practices produce and shape the discourses of policy-making, and in this sense serve as ideational resources. This is contextual and contingent, often politically loaded but sometimes also partly neglected. The paper will discuss selected theoretical and empirical perspectives in these fields, based on but not limited to a Frontiers in Human Dynamics/Frontiers in Political Science special issue. In the paper, the rationale for the (re-)constitution of migration and integration regimes is discussed and related to the actor positions. Changing migration and integration regimes and administrative practices, the agendas of various political actors and existing public policies all interact with the discourses and practices of migrants, citizens, and street-level bureaucrats, as well as with the agency of decision-makers (politicians, officials), generating the ideations of policies and regimes.