by AYHAN KAYA
The aim of this article is to elaborate the process of securitisation and stigmatization of migration and Islam in the West, and to claim that both republicanist and multiculturalist policies of integration proved to have failed in this process to politically mobilise migrants and their descendants. To put it differently, this work will argue that coupling migration with terrorism, violence, crime, insecurity, drug trafficking, and human smuggling is likely to result in the birth of an Islamophobic popular discourse and the social, political, economic and cultural segregation of migrants and their descendants in a way that invalidates both multiculturalist and republicanist policies of integration in the West.
Failure of Multicultural and Republican Models of Integration
During the 1960s, migration was a source of content in Western Europe. More recently, however, migration has been framed as a source of discontent, fear and instability for nation-states. What has happened since the 1960s? Why has there been this shift in the framing of migration? The answer of such questions obviously lies in the very heart of the changing global social-political context. Undoubtedly, several different reasons such as deindustrialization, unemployment, poverty, exclusion, violence, supremacy of culturalism and neo-liberal political economy turning the uneducated and unqualified masses into the new ‘wretched of the earth’ to use Frantz Fanon’s terminology, can be enumerated to answer such critical questions.[1] After the relative prominence of multiculturalism debates both in political and scholarly venues, we witness today a change in the direction of debates and policies about how to accommodate cultural diversity.
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