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This paper focuses on desire in the problematization of immigrant integration in Canada, the UK and Netherlands. I argue that the immigrant’s affective orientation towards society became viewed as the source of these problems, and not the communities or societies orientation towards them. The integration exam becomes a suitable solution because it solves multiple problems at once. The exam works as the mechanism through which desire is manufactured by making tangible the object of desire in the first place and by making society itself more exclusive. I turn to the implementation of the exam content to explore of what this might mean for the kinds of citizens that the exams produce, arguing that they primarily work to produce unstable citizens, rather than more ‘affected’ citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]