"Their curtains are always closed!" - Lived ‘integration’ experiences between solidarity and othering in Dutch small-town contexts

Small towns across Europe, including the Netherlands, have started playing an increasingly important role in refugee reception and integration. In some places refugees are welcomed and met with solidarity; in other instances, local governments and residents protest their arrival, mobilizing narratives of refugees as threats to national security and ‘cultural identity’ (Ambrosini 2016). Despite these trends, we have limited insights into how refugees’ arrival is actually interpreted in small towns as most literature focuses on big cities and metropolitan areas. Given that small towns often have less experiences with refugee reception (Schneider 2022, Glorius et al. 2019), it appears crucial to better understand how local communities respond to refugees’ arrival and how refugees themselves experience their lives in these contexts. Based on fieldwork in four small towns in the Netherlands and qualitative interviews, this paper seeks to explore which narratives about migration in general, and refugees in particular, are constructed, mobilized, and negotiated in Dutch small-town contexts – in more central and more peripheral areas - and how refugees, together with long-term residents, shape local identities and community life. By zooming in on the intricacies of localized integration dynamics from the perspective of refugees, this paper seeks to decenter and critically engage with state-driven policies promoting linear integration trajectories. This paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of local integration experiences, showing that (successful) ‘integration’ goes beyond economic paradigms of employment and self-sufficiency, rather involving active negotiations with varying local contexts, dominant discourses on migration, old and new traditions as well as personal aspirations.