The Europeanization of migrant integration policy and the role of think tanks

While the role of EU institutions in managing migration and the external borders has received substantial attention in the literature, policies on "diversity governance" and the governance of settled migrants have remained insufficiently explored. Yet, as migrant integration becomes an increasingly controversial issue across Europe, the EU policy framework has undergone important changes that both reflect and shape national-level developments in this policy area. Employing policy analysis and a virtual ethnography as tools, this paper critically investigates the developments of the EU framework on migrant integration, paying particular attention to a central actor "behind the curtains": think tanks. First, I propose a typology of the various (sometimes opposing) political rationales that converge in EU policy. I argue that while the early predominantly welfarist and neoliberal approach to integration was only vaguely interested in questions of values and identity, the recent reformulation of the EU’s integrationist strategy represents a break from universalist ideas of a "European community". Second, I juxtapose these developments to the rising importance of using "evidence" in the governance of migrant integration, where EU institutions strongly rely on input from a handful of mainly Brussels-based think tanks. The paper finds that their involvement across the past two decades notably in two spheres – managing public content on behalf of the Commission, and developing indicators of integration to predict policy needs – makes them a crucial player in the construction of the discourse on "integration" at EU level. Think tanks are, moreover, in the midst of what I theorize as the "scientification" of migration governance: an empiricist and technocratic approach to governance that takes these issues out of the political realm of contestation into the realm of regulating the "facts" of social life, where the idea of "integration" becomes normalized as the hegemonic paradigm of dealing with "immigration societies".