The borders of integration : paperwork between Bangladesh and Belgium

This chapter draws on the experience of Bangladeshi men in Belgium to argue that integration should be conceptualized not as the outcome of ideal-type national models of citizenship and integration, but as the product of the intersection of migrant aspirations and strategies with regulatory frameworks. It argues that a comprehensive engagement with identity theft and new forms of paperwork that straddles South Asia and Europe offers insights into what integration entails, and how it materializes through everyday practices and dilemmas. The struggles for paper documents and processes that establish the paper identities and civic participation that are foundational to integration provokes us to rethink what such processes and policies entail. In other words, integration is also about the struggle to integrate. Such struggles include troubled border-crossings and anxious arrivals, and moral claim-making civic participation, and collective protests in the re-settled context. The chapter suggests that the everyday aspirations and prolonged disappointments of people in resettled contexts are foundational to comprehending what integration implies. The processes and dilemmas that enable and disable people to integrate in Europe rely on 'paperwork'.