ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the European Union (EU) policy on the integration of migrants and how the various instruments of integration policy contain contradictions at conceptual and implementation levels; as such they also contain elements which can and have been interpreted positively, opening up spaces for progressive and emancipatory politics. It attempts to (re)conceptualise the framework of the EU and national policies on migrant integration, as it evolved with an emphasis on ‘Eurocrisis’. The chapter argues that the debates on integration are at heart of the dissensus or fundamental disagreement about migration issues at large, whereby certain aspects of migration are constructed as acts of deviance and certain migrants as deviants. Whilst some actions continue and the migrant integration statistics are produced by Eurostat, the funding on the actual migrant integration programmes have been cut back after the 2008 financial crisis and after the 2015 ‘asylum and migration crisis’.
