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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]

In this introduction, we situate the growing and diverse literature on affect and citizenship as only beginning to capture the world around us, where tensions and hope run high. We present a brief overview of the literature on affective citizenship, with particular attention to how affect is implicated in the politics of identity, resistance, and control. We argue that this issue builds on nascent discussions already underway in journals like Citizenship Studies, and that the pieces included here extend our understanding of both the emancipatory and exclusionary potential of affective citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]