Exclusion and immigrant incorporation: The politics of citizenshi

In both Sweden and the United States immigration has increased, and public concern over immigration, integration, and social citizenship has become heightened. Across affluent Western countries, immigration and integration concerns have been molded into a consensus on the need to instill discipline, but conflict has emerged through public discussions of where discipline is to be applied. Analyzing media content and public documents, I find that in Sweden and in Europe more broadly, as in the United States, some disciplinary political narratives suggest that immigrants themselves are deviant and should be targeted for exclusion from the social rights of citizenship; other narratives hold that immigrants can best be incorporated by using the state to facilitate the expansion of the secondary labor market. It is popularly claimed that the expansion of secondary labor markets promotes economic inclusion, which is held to be the foundation for integration. While this has proven an effective wedge among voters, I probe the validity of this neoliberal claim by reviewing the integration of previous labor immigrants in Sweden through industrial-sector jobs, and by examining immigrant economic inclusion and social citizenship in the U.S. I use comparative data on inequality and immigration within the United States and across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries to assess trends in relationships driving social citizenship politics. In interviews with policy makers and integration officials and reviewing the labor union confederation literature in Sweden, I find satisfaction with the operation of the Swedish social democratic division of labor in immigrant policy-setting and integration; as well I find on the national level a lack of concern with the wider, politically-transformative implications of prominent social citizenship politics. This allows me to demonstrate how state actors and even labor institutions can be steered into facilitating neoliberal wedge politics and reforms that undermine social citizenship in favor of concentrated accumulation.