“Foreigners, you have to make more of an effort to become Europeans!”: Ethnographies of the State-sponsored Fabrication of National Indigenousness in Western Europe

Recent attempts by Western European countries to harmonize the practices and discourses surrounding “legal” immigration in the region are grounded in a ritualized vision of civic voluntarism that demands that newly arrived immigrants to Europe individually and actively earn the right to eventual residency permits or citizenship status. In EU countries, the spread of nation-specific integration programs intended to integrate (im)migrants coupled with increasing codification of the cultural dimensions of naturalization procedures exemplify the rise of a new “daily plebiscite” that is defining new forms of “rooted” but also neo-liberal European citizenship.