Diversity-integration dispositif and the immigration state

Over the past decade or two European landscapes of governance of immigrant populations have undergone significant transformations. In the first place, state integrationist agendas have gained a remarkable prominence. This is evident through the ever-increasing consolidation of integration as the frame through which the subject of immigration is understood, as well as the proliferation of myriads of integration-invoking legal and institutional measures. At the same time, many of these cultural political contexts have experienced a diversity turn. Public and private institutions alike have been not only touting diversity as a value but have been adopting, developing and recalibrating practices aimed at managing it. Diversity, as a historically very specific problematization of social heterogeneity, has - just like integration - assumed the status of a social good that no sensible person could disagree with. Yet critical scholarship has tended to treat these two transformations separately. In this paper, I trace the intertwinement of diversity and integration as joint imperatives of contemporary immigrant governance. And more specifically, drawing on Foucault, I suggest that the two are best understood as co-constitutive elements of an ascendant dispositif. Such a conceptualization opens up not only a possibility of making sense of an incredible variety of often incongruent and incommensurate treatments of integration and diversity problematic within one coherent analytical framework. It also points to the ways in which contemporary nation-states have been reinstating their relevance in face of increased transnational migration movements by reinvigorating the notion of nationally-scaled togetherness through the domestication of alterity.