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This paper compares and contrasts the discourses and practices of intra-EU migration in France and the UK. In both, emigration and immigration are significant and contemporary facts of national life; in each, traditional patterns are being challenged; and in both cases, scare-mongering in this regard has been a dominant feature of recent discourse. In particular, the free movement of people associated with the 2004 and 2007 (but especially 2004) enlargements of the EU posed specific policy challenges to political leaders and local communities alike. In France, the phenomenon contributed to the rejection of the EU’s Constitutional Treaty; in the UK, the government failed first to predict the numbers of economic migrants from East Europe, and then to count them once they had arrived. Both countries, finally, are experiencing significant cross-Channel mobility: a microcosm of intra-EU migration per se. France is for sale, it would appear (cheap houses), while the French are for hire (cheap labour). These stereotypes should tell us something about the range of political discourses we can expect when exploring the characteristics of intra-EU mobility, and the relations between movement on the one hand, and public policy on the other. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I will examine three different strategies of immigrant immigration in France, Britain and the United States. I will first argue that each country has developed a different form of multicultural strategy, and for each the implicit or explicit objective has been a different form of integration. In each case, the strategy has involved a form of ethnic recognition in public policy, a recognition that has not always been consistent with overall public philosophies. I will also argue that both strategies and objectives of integration have changed over time. Changes can be seen most clearly in the statements of public officials, on one level, and by the evolution of public policy on another. I will argue that these changes can be understood largely in terms of concerns about public order. Finally, I will look at questions of success and failure of integration. How can we understand success, and what constitutes failure? How do political actors understand these questions? How have success and failure been politicized, and why are some “failures” a measure of “success”? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past 50 years two sets of events have had a profound influence on the development of public policy on immigrant integration. The first is the challenge to public order posed by urban unrest in France in the early 1980s and in Britain beginning in the late 1950s. In each country, the public policy response to this urban crisis involved important elements of multiculturalism as part of a strategy to maintain public order. In each country the public policy response was also influenced by other political consideration of domestic politics, but policies that at least implicitly recognized differentiated community (or "minority") needs and benefits were common to each of these approaches. The second set of events is generally related to the challenge of Islamic terrorism, and the recognition that some of it has domestic roots. In this context, there have been overlapping similarities in the approach of all European countries to questions of immigrant integration. The first similarity has been a movement towards policies of civic integration, and the second, a movement towards anti-discrimination policies. If the first has constrained policies of multiculturalism, the second has given new support and legitimacy to racial and ethnic diversity. Nevertheless, I argue below that national models—or policy paradigms— are still useful for understanding why convergence has been limited, that public philosophies in each country have differentiated both the intention and the approach of integration policy, and that these differences are most evident in the relative success and failure of different integration policies. If criteria by which success of integration is judged on the European level appear to have converged in European standards, national policy approaches have shaped the success of integration programs, sometimes in unexpected and contradictory ways. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]