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National majorities and their governments often demand that immigrants and other minorities must be "good": they should work hard, contribute to society, and adapt to dominant cultural norms. Such stereotypical labels for national outsiders, ranging from "good immigrants" to "good Muslims" and "model minorities", imply that their inclusion and recognition becomes conditional on fulfilling certain standards of behaviour and identity that are predetermined by the national majority. The affected minorities respond in diverse ways, at times striving to be recognised as "good" and at times rejecting these regimes of conditional inclusion and citizenship openly. This book offers ground-breaking insights on how these dynamics of conditional inclusion and "good" citizenship play out today, with a focus on migrant and immigrant-origin minorities in Europe and the Americas. This book shows that conditional inclusion is a globally widespread tool for controlling and rank-ordering minorities. As immigrants respond through diverse struggles for inclusion and recognition, these struggles reveal a hidden battleground of citizenship on which minorities negotiate who can be included and accepted in a given state or society. Their experience shows that conditionality is not an outlier of citizenship, but rather one of its universal core principles. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.
List of contents
1. Introduction-Good immigrants, permitted outsiders: conditional inclusion and citizenship in comparison 2. Claiming membership: boundaries, positionality, US citizenship, and what it means to be American 3. Cultivated intuition: reframing migrant responses to the "Public Charge" policy 4. "Muslims are finally waking up": post-9/11 American immigrant youth challenge conditional citizenship 5. Citizens-in-waiting: strategic naturalization delays in the USA and UAE 6. Being Muslim 'without a fuss': relaxed religiosity and conditional inclusion in Danish schools and society 7. New models of the "good refugee" - bureaucratic expectations of Syrian refugees in Germany 8. Intergenerational narratives of citizenship among EU citizens in the UK after the Brexit referendum 9. Labouring for inclusion: debating immigrant contributions to Chile 10. The transnational continuum of conditional inclusion: from marginalised immigrants to rejected returnees
About the author
Andreas Hackl is a political and economic anthropologist at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His research focuses on inequality, migration, forced displacement, and the internet economy. He is the author of The Invisible Palestinians: The Hidden Struggle for Inclusion in Jewish Tel Aviv.
Summary
This book offers ground-breaking insights on how the dynamics of conditional inclusion and “good” citizenship play out today, with a focus on migrant and immigrant-origin minorities in Europe and the Americas. The book shows that conditional inclusion is a globally widespread tool for controlling and rank-ordering minorities.
