Dutch civic integration courses as neoliberal citizenship rituals
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Dutch civic integration courses asneoliberal citizenship ritualsSemin Suvarierola & Katherine (Kate) Kirkb
a Department of Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam,Rotterdam, The Netherlandsb Faculty of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije UniversiteitAmsterdam, Amsterdam, The NetherlandsPublished online: 05 May 2015.
To cite this article: Semin Suvarierol & Katherine (Kate) Kirk (2015): Dutch civic integration coursesas neoliberal citizenship rituals, Citizenship Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13621025.2015.1006578
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2015.1006578
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Dutch civic integration courses as neoliberal citizenship rituals
Semin Suvarierola* and Katherine (Kate) Kirkb**
aDepartment of Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; bFaculty ofSocial and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
(Received 11 June 2013; accepted 3 November 2014)
The neoliberalization of the Dutch citizenship manifests itself through theresponsibilization, contractualization, and marketization of civic integration.We conceptualize civic integration courses as a neoliberal citizenship ritual themigrants are required to participate in to earn Dutch citizenship. By studying thepractice of Dutch civic integration, we demonstrate the repressive and productiveaspects through which migrants and course providers become objects and subjectsof the state’s neoliberal citizenship ideology. Our ethnographic data enable us tounderstand how civic integration is experienced and interpreted by state agents andmigrants. Cost optimization and quantitative policy targets have dominated; the qualityof Dutch language teaching suffered, leaving the migrants without the power tovocalize and realize their own interests. The courses have become rituals to prepare forthe civic integration examination, and the state’s professed goal to create self-reliantcitizens has been comfortably neglected in the shadow of a ritualized success story.
Keywords: neoliberal citizenship; civic integration; responsibilization; ritualization;the Netherlands
1. Introduction
The late 2000s have been marked in Western Europe by a trend of increased requirements
for migrants to obtain citizenship, including obligatory civic integration courses and tests
(Joppke 2007c; Peucker 2008; Carrera and Wiesbrock 2009; Vink and De Groot 2010).
Within this new citizenship regime, prospective citizens have to actively ‘earn’ their
citizenship status by fulfilling the demands placed on them by the state (Van Houdt,
Suvarierol, and Schinkel 2011). Although the stated goal of these citizenship trajectories is
the integration of new migrants, the implicit goals of these efforts have been qualified as
reducing immigration and appeasing the native populations wary of migrants (Joppke
2007b). However, whether the introduced measures contribute to integration is highly
contingent on how the adopted policy tools are translated into practice in particular
national contexts.
The current Dutch civic integration regime, put in place by the 2007 Civic Integration
Law (Wet Inburgering – Wi) has been informed by neoliberal ideology, which deemsmarket
freedom to be the basis of a healthy socio-political order. It has been characterized as
‘repressive’ (Joppke 2007a; Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010) due to the mandatory and
responsibilizing character of the civic integration program: the migrants were not only
obliged to attend civic integration courses, but they needed to choose and finance a course
offered by providers operating in a semi-regulated market in order to pass the computerized
q 2015 Taylor & Francis
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]**Current address: University College Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Citizenship Studies, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2015.1006578
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Dutch civic integration examination. The Dutch state thus retreated from the field of
integration by laying the responsibility for integrating on the shoulders of migrants and
course providers. How the migrants and course providers have interpreted and fulfilled their
roles in this process has therefore determined the civic integration results that were produced.
This article aims to reveal the characteristics and the workings of civic integration in
practice. We examine the organization and function of Dutch civic integration courses as
ritual. We combine a Foucauldian analysis of the ‘micro-physics of power’ (Foucault
1977), i.e. the localized rituals through which migrants and course providers become
objects and subjects of the state’s neoliberal citizenship ideology, and a cultural
interpretive analysis of ritual as meaning-making. Combining these perspectives allows us
to empirically analyze not only how state power potentially represses objects of civic
integration but also the way in which subjects nonetheless exert agency and give meaning
to civic integration rituals.
Our empirical analysis relies on original qualitative interview and nonparticipant
observation data gathered in civic integration courses in four Dutch cities. The first author
conducted her fieldwork in 2011. Sixteen semi-structured interviews were undertaken with
national policy makers involved in the formulation of the current policy and with private
companies implementing the policy. During her nonparticipant observations in civic
integration classes in Breda and The Hague, she also conducted semi-structured and
conversational interviews with various course teachers and migrants. The second author
conducted her fieldwork in Amsterdam and Utrecht from 2007 to 2008. This included
participant observation in civic integration classes and among municipal policy-makers.
She conducted 63 semi-structured interviews with municipal and national policy-makers,
migrants, and teachers. Though the two fieldworks pertain to the implementation of the
same civic integration law, they were gathered at two different phases of policy
implementation: 2007, the first year of policy implementation, is thought to be atypical
because of initial start-up problems in the new civic integration market, but the patterns
analyzed in 2007 and 2008 were still in place 4 years later. In that respect, the two data sets
confirm each other’s findings and suggest that the shortcomings of the civic integration
regime are inherent to the neoliberal logics underlying the policy.
We begin the article by setting out the theoretical underpinnings of our understanding
of neoliberal citizenship. This is followed by the introduction of the ethnographic concept
of ritual and of how we operationalize it to study the Dutch civic integration regime. After
a brief history of the evolution of Dutch civic integration policy, we present our empirical
findings. We show how the responsibilizing, contractualizing, and marketizing logics of
neoliberalism are put into practice in Dutch civic integration courses. We observe that cost
optimization and meeting quantitative policy targets have dominated the organization of
civic integration courses; as a result, the quality of Dutch language teaching suffered,
leaving the migrants without the power to vocalize and realize their own interests. The
courses have become rituals to prepare for the civic integration examination. The
attainment of the claimed objective to create self-reliant citizens has thus been
comfortably neglected in the shadow of a ritualized success story.
2. Neoliberal citizenship as governmentality
Neoliberalism transforms social citizenship from being a status with entitlements to
a contract between the state and its agencies (Handler 2005). As such, citizens are
conceptualized as independent workers and consumers playing out their roles on a level
playing field in which everyone is responsible for themselves. Citizenship thus becomes a
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commodity that needs to be ‘earned’ by performing a series of duties and tasks that proves
the migrant’s integration and investment in society (Van Houdt, Suvarierol, and Schinkel
2011).
Civic integration contracts form an important part of ‘earned citizenship’ regimes in
Western Europe, whereby new migrants accept the responsibilities that need to be
undertaken in order to acquire national citizenship (Van Houdt, Suvarierol, and Schinkel
2011). Migrants are entitled to citizenship and its benefits only when they fulfill their
responsibilities (Van Houdt, Suvarierol, and Schinkel 2011). Despite the usage of the word
‘contract’, which is rather a metaphor (Ossewaarde 2007, 494), ‘earned citizenship’ makes
integration a one-way process: ‘The state hopes to construct [migrants] as responsible,
loyal, and well-behaved citizens: they will value and cherish what they were with grace
granted, and hence they will govern themselves without needing further state discipline’
(Lowenheim and Gazit 2009, 159).
As such civic integration contracts apply ‘technologies of self’ as they aim to enhance
and improve citizens’ capacities for participation and action (Dean 2010). The advantage
of contractualization in enforcing technologies of agency is that it enables the agreement
of individuals to ‘a range of normalizing, therapeutic and training measures designed to
empower them, enhance their self-esteem, optimize their skills and entrepreneurship and
so on’ (Dean 2010, 197). For migrants, civic integration contracts entail not only an
obligation on the way to obtaining citizenship, but also an opportunity to obtain skills that
might be useful for them in their new country. For the state, it is an effective way of
producing new citizens who will govern themselves within the boundaries of the social
norms the state delineates (Lowenheim and Gazit, 158).
Not all citizens fulfill the ideal of a self-regulating subject and as such become the
object of state policies. Hindess argues that there is a hierarchical order of citizens
whereby ‘some people, the more cultivated inhabitants of civilised states, are seen as being
relatively close to the condition of individual autonomy while others are seen as being at
a greater or lesser distance from that condition’ (2002, 133). That is why states adopt
policies to improve populations which are deemed to be in need of support to reach this
neoliberal citizenship ideal. Schinkel and Van Houdt (2010) observe the same mechanism
in the Netherlands and posit that the Dutch government uses different strategies to manage
different segments of the population. ‘Repressive responsibilization’ is used for
populations that are ‘classified as a “risk” and (potential) threat to social order’ and
‘involves the moral education of citizens deemed unable to assume responsibility’ whereas
‘facilitative responsibilization’ is ‘geared at the population at large and meant to mobilize
an attachment to norms and values concerning individual responsibility that are deemed
already present’ (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010, 709). According to this conceptualiz-
ation, migrants are governed through repressive responsibilization, and civic integration
courses and examinations can be seen as tools of this responsibilization regime.
In neoliberal governance, the function of the public realm becomes one of sustaining
and enabling the private sector and responsible/responsibilized subjects (Clarke 2004, 42).
Neoliberal governmentality transfers governmental responsibility to private individuals,
communities, or the market with the goal of producing responsible, risk-averse, and
rational persons who will avoid becoming a ‘burden on society’ (Lowenheim and Gazit
2009, 159). The ideal citizen of the neoliberal project is a responsible self-managing
subject whose rights and claims to belonging are based on their performance in the free
market. Even though neoliberal ideology deems individualized market-based competition
to be superior to other modes of organization (Mudge 2008, 706–707), the markets are not
given a free hand as the state transfers its responsibilities to the market. Marketization
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generates new forms of surveillance and scrutiny as the problem of contracting, regulating,
and inspecting ‘at arm’s length’ leads to questions regarding the quality, level, and
conditions of service provisions (Clarke 2004, 32–33). This is where ‘technologies of
performance’ come into play by introducing ways of calculating the capacities of state
agents and citizens in order to optimize policy results (Dean 2010). The setting of
performance indicators (‘benchmarking’) and the establishment of quasi-markets
(‘privatization’ of formerly public services and contracting out) are means of optimizing
performance (Dean 2010, 197).
Although performance indicators are meant to increase output and quality of services,
literature on privatizations of public services has shown that quantitative indicators
produce perverse effects such as setting goals that can be easily reached and measured and
putting more into the presentation of facts than in the actual services (Uitermark and van
Steenbergen 2006, 269). High workloads and bureaucratic regulations necessitated by
government at a distance can lead to more focus on meeting bureaucratic targets and
placing clients in options without much discussion about client needs (Handler 2005, 115).
As research in workfare agencies has shown, limited resources and the pressure to reach
performance targets lead street-level bureaucrats to create adaptive practices (Brodkin
2011) such as ‘creaming’ – taking on clients who generate positive numbers (see e.g. Soss,
Fording, and Schram 2011) and ‘ritualization’ – developing activities that fill the time but
do not necessarily serve the clients (Brodkin 2011). Quantitative performance indicators
are an effective disciplinary tool, as they make it possible to qualify, to classify, and to
punish (Lowenheim and Gazit 2009, 151). They discipline the behavior of not only both
those who provide the service (course providers), but also those who receive the service
(migrants) by imposing specific norms and behaviors and by steering them toward certain
goals and objectives.
3. Rituals of neoliberal citizenship
The Foucauldian governmentality perspective on citizenship focuses on the effects of
government policies and discourses on the subject positions of actors and the proliferation
of power/knowledge regimes. In this article, we combine this perspective with a Geerzian
interpretive analysis, which takes meaning-making as the chief objective and main
circumstance of human existence (Geertz 1973). As all political and cultural constructs,
citizenship is also given meaning – ‘a set of culturally constructed and historically specific
guides, frames, or models of and for human feeling, intentions and actions’ (Ortner 1997,
136) – through rituals. Rituals dramatize abstract civic ideals and link them to practice.
Rituals make ideological content tangible, link it to experience, and legitimize the social
and political order (Eriksen 2010, 238).
According to Foucault, ‘Power is everywhere’ and ‘comes from everywhere’ so in this
sense is neither an agency nor a structure (1998, 63). Examining civic integration as a
meaning-making ritual allows us to formulate a dynamic understanding of actor agency in
the field of civic integration. How civic integration is enacted as ritual is a manifestation of
neoliberal thought, which imbues it with authority and truth. From a governmentality
perspective agency is ‘that which is made or denied, expanded, or contracted in the
exercise of power’ (Ortner 1997, 146). Although this power-centered approach tends to
exclude examination of the desires, intentions, beliefs, and values of those subjects on
whose interest the workings of power are exposed (Ortner 1997, 157), cultural interpretive
search for meaning assumes a more active engagement of an actor in a project, game, or
drama (Ortner 1997, 146). Adopting an anthropological definition of agency ‘as intuitive
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cultural competence that has to be developed by repetitive performances’ (Verkaaik 2010,
71) allows us to frame the role of actors in the repressive and productive aspects of power.
We thus envision both the state agents implementing civic integration policy and the
migrants who participate in civic integration courses as actors who are actively engaged in
meaning-making and face empowerment and disempowerment while dealing with the
civic integration regime.
Leach (1969) argues that rituals do not so much tell us about the beliefs of the
individuals involved but about social relations being established (in this case between
the state, its representatives, and migrants). As such, rituals address fundamental social
conflicts and incoherencies (see for instance: Geertz 1957; Gluckman 1954).
Conceptualizing civic integration as ritual also allows us to frame the inherent
contradictions and tensions within civic integration. Rituals have to be ambiguous because
the ideologies they enact are always simplifications of the world, which contradict human
experience (Eriksen 2010, 236). The ideal of neoliberal citizenship is fraught with
ambiguity; citizens must be forced to be free, and free markets must be controlled to assure
quality. Civic integration is thus sufficiently ambiguous as to make the ritual meaningful
for a range of actors with conflicting interests/power positions. Our ethnographic data are
organized around these two key ambiguities and how they are enacted, made meaningful,
and constrain various ritual actors.
Citizenship or naturalization ceremonies have been conceptualized by scholars as
‘rites of passage’ (Fassin and Mazouz 2007; Verkaaik 2009, 2010) as they mark the
acquisition of a new citizenship and thus the change of civic status. We extend this concept
to the whole process of attaining citizenship, and in particular to citizenship courses and
tests for migrants. We take the civic integration trajectory of migrants to the Netherlands
as ‘an open window onto the “mind” of the state’ in terms of showing how the state
perceives that people should be constituted as citizens (Lowenheim and Gazit 2009, 148).
The municipal case managers and private course providers act here as the agents of the
state. On the one hand, the state’s expectations from these agents are emblematic of
the dominant neoliberal governance regime in the Netherlands. On the other hand, as the
migrants are exposed to these state agents, they obtain cues as to how the Dutch state views
them, how they are expected to ‘conduct their conduct’ (Rose 1999), and how they should
‘satisfy the state’ (Lowenheim and Gazit 2009, 152). Although both the state agents and
migrants surrender to the demands of the neoliberal state, they also create their own
strategies to deal with the state’s requirements of civic integration courses and citizenship.
4. History of Dutch civic integration
In the Netherlands, the primary stimulus for civic integration was, what was believed to be,
a mismatch between unskilled migrant workers with limited competence in the Dutch
language and the post-industrial labor market (Entzinger and van der Zwan 1994). As such
the focus of integration policy shifted from structural marginalization to language
marginalization (taalachterstand), and Dutch language acquisition became central pillar
of the new integration regime (Bjørnson 2007, 69).
The Civic Integration for Newcomers Law (Wet Inburgering Nieuwkomers – Win)
came into effect in 1998 and made it mandatory for all long-term migrants (except for
nationals protected under international or EU law and a selection of other ‘Western
countries’) to follow a civic integration course to improve their Dutch language skills
(Fermin 1999, 96). By linking language skills to labor market participation, the policy
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made language a commodity and espoused a marketized view of the citizen-subject
(Bjørnson 2007, 67).
The obligation to attend civic integration courses was legally solidified through
contracts between the migrant and the municipal government. However, most
municipalities could not enforce integration contracts through sanctions as most drop-
outs had an acceptable reason to stop attending, such as illness or pregnancy. The
subsequent Civic Integration Law (Wi) in 2007 addressed this issue by replacing the
requirement to attend a civic integration course with the requirement of passing the Dutch
civic integration examination. The change of policy was justified by the argument that a
lack of tangible policy impact was the result of a lack of migrant responsibility for their
integration. The obligation to complete civic integration became more rigorous as
penalties were introduced for not participating in the courses.
While the mandatory character of the civic integration program responsibilized the
migrants, the aim of the program became one of producing ‘the individualized, self-
regulating, late-modern citizen’ (Bjørnson 2007, 66). The public debate leading to the new
Wi problematized the ‘cultural deficiencies’ of migrants, which were framed as being
obstacles to their integration (Schinkel 2007). Therefore, the integration courses would be
used as pedagogical tools to teach migrants the skills and virtues deemed necessary for
acquiring Dutch citizenship. That is why the civic integration courses were revised so as to
include the teaching of cultural norms and values deemed to be necessary in order to
participate in Dutch society. After the completion of a course, migrants are obliged to pass
the computerized civic integration test assessing their attained knowledge of the Dutch
language and society. Not passing the examination may lead to monetary fines and the loss
of the migrant’s residence permit (Entzinger and Groenendijk 2006, 7).
The supposed failure of civic integration under the Win was also assumed to be the
result of poor class quality and availability provided by state-funded regional education
centers (ROCs). Thus, the government decided to privatize civic integration courses under
the Wi, which required municipalities to contract language schools and reintegration
bureaus to provide civic integration courses. Marketization would release municipalities
from forced contracting with the ROC’s and ‘lead to increased municipal freedom to
provide made-to-measure programs and a better balance between price and quality’.1 It
was believed that the market itself, along with a state certification system, would control
the quality of the programs included.
Initially, migrants (with the exception of asylum seekers and religious clergy) were
required to search for and finance their own civic integration courses. When the
government made the passing of the civic integration examination a mandatory condition
for obtaining Dutch citizenship, the expectation was that the migrants would immediately
feel obliged to enroll a civic integration course. Private course providers counted on this
expectation and set up training facilities, but the migrants were not showing up. This was
both a threat to the financial viability of course providers and to the attainability of civic
integration policy goals. When the policy targets could not be attained in 2007 and 2008,
the cost of civic integration was blamed for low migrant turn out for courses. This problem
was initially dealt with as of 1 November 2008 by a parliamentary amendment to the law
allowing municipalities to offer a course to all migrants.2 Courses began to fill up.
Despite the subsidizing of courses, the responsibilizing aspect of Wi remained intact.3
Migrants choose the appropriate course provider and make the necessary learning efforts;
the private course providers deliver price-quality optimizing courses that prepare
immigrants for the examination enabling them to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens;
and municipalities, themselves accountable to the government, regulate and enforce
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migrant and market performance. Quantitative targets and financial sanctions for
noncompliance have been set in order to manage the performance of all these actors. The
government thus has limited its role to a regulator and enforcer of individual and market
accountability. The state and migrant enter a civic integration contract, and only when the
migrant has fulfilled the requirements of this contract and passed the civic integration
examination, is she/he entitled to the status of citizenship and its rights and benefits. Thus,
the state was able to simultaneously withdraw from the civic integration arena while
maintaining its power to discipline both migrants and the implementing state agents.
Both the civic integration contracts and performance indicators constitute symbolic
rituals of the neoliberal civic integration regime: Contracts commits the parties to reaching
the goal of civic integration and performance indicators both discipline the parties to meet
the targets and give evidence of policy success or failure. This is a productive strategy for
the government as it can still claim success when the targets are met and dismiss failure as
a shortcoming of the migrants or the course providers when they are not met. Indeed, a
recent report of the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) has claimed that civic
integration courses have been ‘successful’ (Klaver et al. 2012). What lies beneath the
success story?
5. Ritualized responsibility
The key actors in the implementation of national Dutch civic integration are
municipalities, course providers, and migrants. These are by no means homogenous
groups; for instance, the municipal policy-makers and civic integration course managers
do not always share the same perspective on civic integration as the municipal case
managers and civic integration course teachers. Moreover, the migrants participating in
civic integration courses come from a wide variety of background and often have different
motivations. However, the incentive structure created by civic integration does allow us to
speak in terms of municipalities, course providers, and migrants as distinct groups.
When the government introduced the subsidizing of civic integration courses for
migrants in 2008, the municipalities acquired the responsibility for implementing civic
integration. Although the national government accepted financing the courses, the subsidy
was conditional on reaching the policy targets. The following tools were used to monitor
the achievement of civic integration policy goals:
. quantity: maximization of the number of migrants following a course,
. quality: fulfilling performance targets as defined by the quality benchmark,
. price: optimization of course costs.
These three tools were intertwined in practice, as they are all tied to a financial
incentive system, which translates neoliberal citizenship ideals into practice.
The municipalities receive 30% of their funding for civic integration from the
government when they offer a course and the remaining 70% when the migrant sits the
examination (Significant 2010, 32); in turn, the municipality pays 70% of the course costs
if the migrant sits for the examination and the remaining 30% if she/he passes it
(Significant 2010, 33). The government thus disciplines the municipalities, who discipline
the course providers, who then in turn, together with the municipalities, discipline
migrants. The carrots and sticks attached to the financial system puts pressure on all actors
in the responsibility chain to focus on the end goal of passing the examination.
The first step in the civic integration ritual was an appointment between a
representative of the municipality, course provider or a private assessment agency, and
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a migrant. While some migrants, who were legally obliged to pass the examination, were
summoned by the municipality, other migrants signed up voluntarily. After the initial
appointment, the migrants were assessed for her/his language level and learning capacity,
the results of which were used to determine how many hours of training would be
allocated. Migrants were assessed by an interview, with a test, or during a ‘bridging class
(brugklas).’ It is questionable to what extent these initial interviews provided a healthy
assessment of language learning abilities, especially for individuals with negligible Dutch
language skills.4 In some municipalities the 3-hour computer-based TIWi (Toolkit Intake
Wet inburgering), which resembles an intelligence test, was used to assist the language
assessment. The second author requested a course from the Utrecht municipality and went
through an assessment, which took several hours and was very exhausting.5 The municipal
case manager administering the test was very critical of the assessment saying, ‘The
municipality doesn’t understand that many people can’t handle this’.6 While operating as
agents of the state, many street-level bureaucrats were critical of state policies in light of
their empathy for the migrants they worked with. However, as Verkaaik also
demonstrates, the engagement of street-level bureaucrats in the repetitive form of ritual
led them to accept its implicit logics (Verkaaik 2010, 77).
The result of the assessment test, which was accorded an objective status, determined
the hours and level of teaching the migrant was assigned. During our observations of civic
integration courses, however, we encountered at least two or three people per class (in
classes of 20) who obviously had a higher language level and learning capacity but had
been misallocated to a course below their language level. Official inspections of course
providers in Rotterdam also observed cases of literate migrants placed in alphabetization
courses or illiterate migrants who had not been allocated enough hours (Rekenkamer
Rotterdam 2011). When the inspectors asked the teachers why they did not act on this, they
replied, ‘The client manager has decided’ (Rekenkamer Rotterdam 2011, 106). Although
teachers were often critical of the content and implementation of civic integration, their
work was directed toward preparing students to pass the examination, and they often saw
these issues as matters out of their control.
In cases where the migrant was deemed in need of a civic integration course after
assessment, they were given information on the course that matches ‘their level and
needs’. It was believed that marketization would lead to increased choice for migrants as
the market would be obliged to offer attractive programs tailored to the customers’ needs.
In practice, however, made-to-measure courses proved to be impossible due to the sheer
volume of participants (Kirk 2010). The migrants were distributed on the basis of several
fixed criteria: age, sex, employment/unemployment, level of education, number of years in
the Netherlands, and years of work experience (Kirk 2010). The goals of migrants were
also taken into consideration but only in terms of if they ‘want to work’ or ‘participate
more fully in society’ (Kirk 2010). The client managers who led the intake procedure,
however, did not always base their decisions on the migrants’ ambitions and (im)
possibilities but on their own judgment and factors such as the closeness of the migrants’
house to the course location (Rekenkamer Rotterdam 2011, 116). Many migrants did not
feel that their wishes and ambitions were understood or taken into account (Tan et al.
2009, 35). Furthermore, migrants were not addressed at their language level during these
sessions and did not obtain this information on paper (Rekenkamer Rotterdam 2011, 121–
122). Therefore, before the migrants even start their civic integration program, it became
clear that they would have little say in choosing their integration course. The fact that the
authorities perform the assessments in the Dutch language also limits their ability to
protest and minimizes their voice.
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After the assessment, the municipality made an offer to follow a program provided by
one of the contracted course providers in that city. If the migrant accepted the offer, she/he
had to sign a civic integration contract with her/his supervisor at the municipality. This
contract entailed the desired goals, length, and content of the course, what the supervision
and support would entail, and what the possible sanctions for noncompliance would be.
Migrants also signed a contract with the course provider binding them to follow the course.
Like the civic integration website, these contracts were in Dutch. Some migrants were
reported to have signed the contract without understanding it and knowing exactly what
the consequences were (Rekenkamer Den Haag 2009, 13).
In an ‘information’ event in 2007 conducted by a course provider in Amsterdam we
observed, migrants were not so much given information as forcefully asked to sign a
contract, many could not read, binding them to that particular provider.7 This particular
course provider was desperate to get migrants on the road to passing the examination and
justified their tactics as a matter of financial survival. Those in fear of losing residence or
welfare benefits seemed to be easily intimidated. One class in Amsterdam from the same
course provider included a semi-illiterate Surinamese woman with welfare benefits.
Although she could not read or write well she spoke Dutch as her mother tongue and had
lived in the Netherlands for many years. In an interview, this woman said she had been
forced to sign a contract for a civic integration course when what she needed/wanted was a
literacy course. The course provider was ‘creaming’ (Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011) as
this woman’s Dutch fluency made her a ‘good customer’, who could pass the civic
integration examination and resulting in 100% payment. This ‘customer’ could not leave
however inappropriate the civic integration course was for her because if she did not meet
the terms of her contract, she could lose her welfare benefits.8 Although the defensive
reaction of the course provider when asked about this situation did seem to show that they
felt this might be inappropriate, the focus of having as many migrants pass the examination
as possible made the managers defend their efforts keep this woman in a civic integration
course.
As a result of binding contracts, migrants did not have the option to freely choose and
shift courses. If they were dissatisfied, migrants like the aforementioned Surinamese
woman felt powerless in the face of legal contractual obligations.9 Many migrants ran the
risk of being stuck with a low quality course, which fell short of fulfilling their needs. For
example, middle to highly educated migrants with higher learning capacities who arrived
with little knowledge of Dutch were often first directed to the beginner’s course with a low
tempo.10 It was often not clear to them if they could move on to the more advanced course
within the time limit of their civic integration contract.
Under the Win, courses could take a long time and nonparticipation was not
sanctioned, which it was believed led to absenteeism; at the end of 3 years there were still
participants who had not reached the desired language level. Under theWi, participants got
a course for at most 18 months that could only be prolonged in special circumstances
(illness, serious learning difficulties, etc.). The institutes were required to keep attendance
records, and participants were called when they did not show up. If students did not attend
the course or make the expected progress, the institute contacted their municipal
supervisor. The supervisor could then fine the student.11 New migrants were obliged to
pass the examination within three and a half years of signing the contract.12 Course
providers were keen on disciplining the migrants because they risked not getting paid
if their students did not pass the examination. This is not surprising as the civic
integration regime equally disciplines them (and in turn the municipalities) through the
performance targets. As such, the mechanism of repressive responsibilization is
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omnipresent and not only applied to migrants as Schinkel and Van Houdt (2010) suggest
in their typology.
For migrants, failure could affect their residence status (not obtaining a permanent
residence permit or citizenship) and access to welfare benefits. What struck us during our
fieldwork was the atmosphere of fear in many classes. When we sat in class, some
migrants assumed that we were sent by the municipality to check on them, in one
particular case one of us was assumed to be a ‘government spy’ and almost assaulted as a
result.13 Many migrants seemed only to express their dissatisfaction during interviews if
the teacher was not present; for instance, the most critical remarks were voiced during
informal chats during the break in Turkish.14 The uneasiness and apprehension of those
subject to this regime highlights the vulnerable and subordinate position of migrants vis-a-
vis the state and its agents (Lowenheim and Gazit 2009, 153). That said, there were
migrants who expressed satisfaction with their courses and civic integration more
generally. The majority seemed to simply take a ‘grin and bear it’ approach and focused on
passing the examination in order to meet their own strategic interests, which included a
desire to learn the Dutch languages, to simply pass the examination in order to eventually
obtain a residence permit, Dutch citizenship, and/or to secure welfare benefits.
The agency of migrants and street-level bureaucrats is shaped by the focus on the civic
integration goal of passing the examination. The examination, however, is a multivocal
symbol; different meanings can be read into it by different actors (Eriksen 2010, 231).
It could be understood by teachers as a reflection of the learning required to integrate. For
some migrants, it is a strategic step on the road to naturalization. For public managers and
private course providers, it is a route to meeting quantitative policy goals. As such, the
actor-specific reading of the examination has a profound impact on the experience of civic
integration courses. By fulfilling their ritualized responsibilities, all these actors have
found their own way of satisfying the neoliberal citizenship goals of state.
6. Ritualized production at the civic integration factory
To meet their quantitative targets, municipalities required course providers to be ‘flexible’
meaning that new participants were able to join and exit the courses at any moment.15 The
course providers had to find a method to meet this demand. Some providers opted for a
‘carrousel model’ where the whole lesson program is designed at the A2 level, the target
language level for the examination. The different lessons corresponded to the themes of
the civic integration examination. The chapters rotated so that everyone has had all the
lessons. One could begin with any lesson from 1 to 15 depending on their starting moment,
which meant that classes are almost always composed of a mix of students who are at the
beginning, middle, or end of their civic integration course. As a result, the courses were far
from being tailored to the needs of individual migrants. Yet, the carrousel model served
the interests of course providers well as private enterprises aiming to minimize costs and
maximize results. It would not have been cost-efficient to have half-full classes composed
of students who were at the same level as it would increase the costs per student and
require the hiring of extra personnel for extra classes.
The mixed-level classes were seen as one of the most problematic aspects of the civic
integration courses by migrants in various cities (Gelderloos and van Koert 2010;
Rekenkamer Den Haag 2009; Significant 2010). Especially the slow-learners and fast-
learners were suffering from this system as the courses failed to meet their needs: For these
two groups, the level was either evaluated as too high or too low (Significant 2010, 28). All
the course teachers we interviewed mentioned being unable to provide their students with
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the attention they needed because of the diversity of levels. Beginners had difficulties
catching up as they first needed to reach A2 level to be able to understand the themes, and
advanced students in the class were expected to help them out.16
It was eventually up to the teacher to deal with this situation. Experienced language
teachers made sure that their students first reach A1 level.17 Inexperienced teachers,
however, had difficulty in adjusting the pace to heterogeneous classes. At times we
wondered if the teacher, who was often not a qualified language teacher, was speaking at
A2 level to the class and whether all students were able to follow her/him. Furthermore, at
an institute observed in The Hague, classes did not seem to have fixed teachers – two of
the three groups visited were assigned teachers at the last minute – which meant that
teachers sometimes had no idea beforehand about the students and their levels. Private
course providers stressed ‘flexibility’ as an important selection criteria for teachers, but the
current working circumstances are ‘very restless’ both for teachers and students (Dekker
and Mevissen 2009, 23).
Migrants repeatedly expressed their dissatisfaction with the carrousel method as the
heterogeneity of the group hampered their progress (as there are always things that need to
be repeated for the new classmates) and created an instable group constellation that did not
allow them to get acquainted with their classmates and create a collective idea of working
toward a common goal.18 From the view of the neoliberal citizenship regime, however,
this is a productive strategy as it once more emphasized that individuals are alone in
fulfilling their responsibilities and that their interests are secondary to the needs of the
system that needs to deliver results.
Kwaliteitsgroep Inburgering (Civic Integration Quality Group)19 also observed the
shortcomings of the carrousel model and duly advised municipalities to create fixed
beginning moments in the year, but the municipalities were not willing to take up this
advice as they were under pressure from the central government to reach the minimum
target of number of participants,20 which they could only ensure by a constant registration
of new students. Migrants, course teachers, and providers alike participated in a system
designed to meet the ‘production targets’ of the civic integration factory. Although the
municipalities stated that the examination is not a goal in itself but simply a means (see
Gemeente Amsterdam 2006, 28), it became a central tool in municipalities’ efforts to
discipline the course providers and the participants.
The privatization of the provision of civic integration courses was meant to produce a
good supply of courses from which migrants could choose. To inform the choice of
migrants, a civic integration benchmark (Keurmerk Inburgering) was developed. Blik op
Werk, the organization managing the benchmark, provided a website where course
providers are ranked on the basis of their examination pass rates and consumer
(municipalities’ and participants’) satisfaction scores.21 The idea was that migrants, as if
buying a new vacuum cleaner, can consult the website, read the reviews, and buy the
product, i.e. the course, which seems to be the most satisfactory. That the Blik op Werk
website was in Dutch, whereas most of the ‘civic integration customers’ presumably did
not speak much Dutch yet, was not seen to be problematic, especially since the
municipalities ended up choosing the course providers for the migrants.
Even though Blik op Werk believed that the benchmark gives a trustworthy measure of
the quality of the courses, linguistic experts from the Kwaliteitsgroep Inburgering argued
that it did not provide a sufficient measure of quality; it did not offer an evaluation of the
actual content of the courses.22 As long as this benchmark remained the most important
indicator for success, there was not much incentive to provide more ‘quality’ than was
necessary to pass the examinations. In order to survive, the course providers focused on the
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examination, not on the individual goals of the migrants. Furthermore, this incentive
system also limited the capacity of many teachers to meet the students’ needs. The
municipal reimbursement scheme forced some teachers to send students to sit for the
examination even when it was clear they would be unable to pass. According to one
concerned teacher, this was very detrimental to the self-esteem of some migrants who are
‘forced to fail’.23 The individual educational goals played second fiddle to their ability to
pass the standardized examination.
All participants were playing their role in the civic integration ritual and thus being
forced to contribute to fulfilling the policy targets on paper. The goal of migrants and
street-level bureaucrats to pass the examination was frustrated by the same neoliberal
principles that imposed quantitative policy targets the efforts of teachers to prepare
migrants for the examination. Similarly, the neoliberal focus on economic efficiency also
stood in the way of preparing migrants for the examination.
7. Ritualized learning
As marketization coincided with the public expenditure cuts at the local level,
municipalities were inclined to select the cheapest course providers in public procurement
procedures. As quality was difficult to judge for municipality officers, especially at the
initial stages of marketization, price has played an important role in the choice of providers
(Significant 2010).24 Consequently, the winning parties had to work within the limited
budget they had signed the contract with the municipality for. This resulted in:
. cuts in material costs: course buildings, facilities, and material,
. cuts in personnel costs: hiring of unqualified personnel, freelance contracts.
Some of the classes we attended were in poorly equipped classrooms located in
neighborhood centers or old buildings while others were in state-of-the-art custom-made
learning centers. Some locations did not possess (enough) computers, whereas migrants
need to be prepared for a computer-based examination. Other locations had computers that
did not work or were old and slow (Friesland 2010, 87). During interviews with migrants
in an Amsterdam neighborhood center, we were told that the initial classes had been given
in a room with only pool tables to write on.25 Some course providers, desperate to get
started in 2007 and 2008, seemed to use whatever locations they could find regardless its
suitability. In 2011 little had changed, the classes we observed did not use audio-visual
support material either as most classrooms were not equipped for this. The courses did not
use new multimedia facilities for teaching languages. There were even some course
locations in Rotterdam that did not even have any dictionaries available (Kwaliteitsgroep
Inburgering 2011, 47).
The quality of the courses was also compromised by the learning materials. The Dutch
government chose not to designate an official preparation book for the civic integration
examination. Initially, there were no books available to meet the new civic integration
demands; some institutes told their teachers to seek out and compile their lesson material
themselves, which meant that teachers had to find and copy material themselves (Friesland
2010, 19). Some teachers were doing this in their free time (Kwaliteitsgroep Inburgering
2011, 95) as free-lance teachers merely obtained 1-hour pay for preparing their courses.26
Publishing houses have brought out a variety of textbooks to the market from which
language institutes could choose. However, some teachers found that the materials
available were not up to par and often too difficult for their students. Other teachers argued
that they could not use any books in their classes as they were too expensive. They had to
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copy from books in the teachers’ room or use books designed for Dutch illiterates, which
are provided by the Dutch government for free.27 As the latter target native Dutch
speakers, they are actually not fit for students learning Dutch as a second language.28
Rita Verdonk, the former minister responsible for the introduction of the current civic
integration system, explained that one of the ideas behind marketization was to give the
freedom to course providers to determine how they would organize the courses, e.g. to
make it interactive and computer-based or to form small groups of 10 students, as long as
they reached the goal of passing the examination.29 Yet, not only did we not encounter any
interactive or small-group courses in the four cities we observed, but many participants we
spoke to wanted to return to the ROC where they claimed the lessons had been better.
Some were taking extra language lessons offered by the ROC in their city as they were
considered much better in teaching grammar.30 According to a recent inspection
performed for the Rotterdam Court of Audit, the ROC was the only provider who scored
‘good’ in terms of didactic qualities (Kwaliteitsgroep Inburgering 2011, 12) and one of the
only two (out of the five) course providers in Rotterdam who had sufficient number of
qualified teachers certified for teaching Dutch as a second language (NT2) (Rekenkamer
Rotterdam 2011, 51). At the three other course providers in Rotterdam 50–75% of the
teachers did not possess NT2 qualification or have related training (Rekenkamer
Rotterdam 2011, 53). The ROC was the only provider qualified enough to offer tailored
courses that could accommodate the different learning styles and needs of participants
(Kwaliteitsgroep Inburgering 2011, 13). In Amsterdam, the ROC was also evaluated
positively with regard to the quality of teachers (Vorstenbosch 2010, 18). Ironically, the
marketization thus seems to have helped only (semi-) public providers in raising the
quality of their courses.
This brings us to the economic reasoning underlying the lack of grammar lessons at
civic integration courses: qualified language teachers are expensive. Although language
teaching requires qualification, ‘civic integration’ is assumed to be a subject that can be
taught by every Dutch citizen as they possess the necessary knowledge to teach the
students about Dutch society. Two of the teachers in Amsterdam, although undoubtedly
well-meaning had physical handicaps that severely limited their teaching ability according
to students; one had a pronounced stutter and the other very limited vision.31 In The
Hague, all of the interviewed teachers had taken up their current job after losing their
previous jobs; none of them had either studied languages or had any teaching experience.
They were responsible for the ‘practical courses’ while NT2-qualified teachers taught
Dutch. Yet, as one teacher confided, language and grammar were also relevant for students
in these courses, and she was doing her best to at least correct the grammatical errors of her
students.32
The new civic integration market has meant flexible contracts and lower pay for the
[primarily female] civic integration workforce (Tonkens 2008). Although the teachers’
workloads got heavier (i.e. also due to extra administrative work required to follow up the
presence and development of students), the salaries decreased (Friesland 2010, 43).
Qualified teachers had to either settle for precarious low-paid jobs or were overlooked for
jobs in the sector because they were too expensive. Not only were these developments
detrimental to the livelihood of those working in the industry but also to course quality.
Migrants who hoped to learn Dutch were thus also the victim of these cost-cutting
measures.
The dissatisfaction of the migrants with the quality of the courses lied not only in the
fact that they were not given the tools they needed to pass the examination but also partly
in the fact that the migrants were given false expectations as to the content and aims of the
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civic integration program.When the new civic integration regimewas launched, the motto of
the campaign was ‘Het begint met taal (It begins with language),’ which gave the impression
that teaching the Dutch language was one of the key policy aims. Indeed, the Dutch language
was one of the pillars of the civic integration examination. Knowledge of the Dutch language
was tested through a computerized speaking examination, which consists of repeating
sentences, naming acronyms, and narrating a story in Dutch. The second part was called the
practical part (praktijkdeel), aims to test the candidate’s knowledgeof theDutch language and
whether she/he can ‘arrange things in the Netherlands’.
The commercial parties involved, i.e. the publishers and course providers, in turn made
a ‘practical’ operationalization of these learning targets. Some linguists in the Netherlands
defend a practical approach to language teaching33 with the argument that the best method
to teach language to the low-educated person is by translating it into practical situations
that reflect their daily world situations and not by going through grammatical structures,
which are too abstract for this group of learners. The practical camp dominated the civic
integration market as most of the available course programs did not teach grammar except
for a few extra hours of language training for the motivated. It was argued that this system
fits the low-educated migrants who constitute the majority of the target participants, and
that the highly educated could take up the higher level course (Staatsexamen track).34 As a
result, in many courses, attention was given neither to developing crucial communicative
skills in Dutch, such as listening, speaking, and pronunciation (Kwaliteitsgroep
Inburgering 2011, 18) nor to grammar and spelling, which are very important for
migrants hoping to improve their writing skills.
Another camp of linguists argued that language needs to be taught systematically for
all educational levels.35 When one has learned a basic level of language, then she/he can
employ it in different daily situations. With the current method, it is not clear whether
migrants can survive in practical situations other than those they learned during their
course. This camp seems to have lost: In the race toward the bottom in terms of the price,
there are even some course providers who advertise with ‘Pass your civic integration exam
in two weeks!’.36 Such market(ing) practices play into the focus on the examination,
making clear that learning the Dutch language is not the primary goal.
Migrants seemed to miss grammar and more classical language teaching (Brink, Ode,
and Timmermans 2009, 36; Gelderloos and van Koert 2010, 29). They found that the
practical components and the knowledge of the Dutch society are given disproportional
attention at the cost of time for teaching the Dutch language (Brink, Ode, and
Timmermans 2009, 36; Tan et al. 2009, 26). The current teaching method felt like ‘trial
and error’ as students could not grasp why something is correct and incorrect because they
did not obtain grammar lessons (Rekenkamer Den Haag 2009, 13). For migrants, the poor
quality of language teaching was the major aspect of dissatisfaction with the courses and
failing to make the desired progress in Dutch was a source of disappointment and
demotivation.
The government’s eventual citizenship goal was to provide migrants some basic skills
facilitating their labor market participation and thus to prevent them from becoming
welfare dependent. It is questionable though to what extent the civic integration courses
contribute to this goal as the target language level A2 merely corresponds to ‘basic user’.37
After 12–18 months of language training and the examination, migrants were still
dependent users – they can only be understood by those ‘who take the trouble to
understand them’ (Sligter 2009). The level attained at the course was thus only sufficient
for accessing low-skilled jobs. The idea of the current civic integration programs seemed
rather to put people to work as soon as possible.38 Participants had to work where there is
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work, which is not necessarily where they would like to work and that was ‘always a job
below their level’.39 As a result, course participants were often frustrated as the course did
not allow them to advance their language skills and thus to achieve the jobs they would be
interested in getting (Bjørnson 2007; Kirk 2010).
The government’s original goals as well as some migrants’ integration goals were thus
clearly undermined by the content and structure of the civic integration program. Migrants
lacked the power to leave or change the ritual, so many just went along with it and focused
on passing the examination. They were learning to reproduce societal knowledge fixed by
the state and to behave and speak Dutch in practical life situations predefined by the course
program. By passing the civic integration examination, migrants’ conformism was
rewarded (Lowenheim and Gazit 2009, 155). Implicitly, they learned that to be accepted
into society, they should not challenge the state’s narratives and ideals. As such, the state
was succeeding in producing its ‘new citizen as an apolitical and simple-minded person’
(Lowenheim and Gazit 2009, 155).
8. Conclusion
Rituals both say something and do something. (Eriksen 2010, 231)
The rituals of Dutch civic integration say and do something about citizenship. In Dutch,
civic integration is known as inburgering, which can literally be translated as citizenizing.
It is a process of defining citizenship. Within this process, civic integration courses
resemble rites of passage as they need to be attended in order to be initiated into and to
earn Dutch citizenship. With the 2007 Dutch Civic Integration Law, civic integration has
become a manifestation of neoliberal ideology, whereby the migrants are responsible for
their own integration, and the market is the ideal tool to facilitate responsibilized
integration. The resulting neoliberal Dutch citizenship emphasizes a quasi-contractual
relationship between the state and citizen-workers and citizen consumer shaped by
economic rhetoric. The dominant strategy used by the Dutch government in the field of
civic integration is ‘repressive responsibilization’ (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010).
We have shown in this article that this strategy applies not only to migrants but to all the
actors involved in this process: the state disciplines municipalities who discipline the
course providers who in turn discipline the migrants.
At the same time, civic integration is a productive ritual. Through the content and
organization of the civic integration courses and examination, the Dutch state prescribes
an image of national citizenship as a community of well-behaving and conforming
citizens. Under the supervision of the neoliberal governance regime, implementing state
agents are constrained by the demands placed by the government in the form of
performance indicators. Municipalities and course providers are put under pressure to
meet the quantitative policy targets; civic integration is for them just another work arena
where they need to adjust to the conditions of neoliberal governance. In order to meet
government targets, state agents invent their own rituals, which do not necessarily serve
the civic integration goals of the state or the migrants. For the migrants, civic integration is
an arena where they are being taught the conditions of Dutch citizenship. Although
migrants possess agency, they do not have the power to leave or change these neoliberal
citizenship rituals and must surrender to them to be formally accepted as members of the
Dutch national community.
The neoliberal state, on the other hand, is satisfied as long as its policy targets are met
on paper. Indeed the courses have been declared to be a ‘success’ on the basis of the set
performance indicators (Klaver et al. 2012). As this article has demonstrated, our
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ethnographic research leads us to seriously question whether this ritualized civic
integration regime actually achieves the Dutch state’s professed civic integration policy
goal of creating self-reliant citizens. Most importantly, the migrants fail to become vocal
citizens in large part due to poor Dutch language teaching. Lessons on Dutch society may
well teach freedom, equality, and democracy, but what the organization of civic
integration courses teaches is rather submissiveness to state and market authority.
Migrants learn throughout that integration is their responsibility alone, and that they
should not expect more support than the bare minimum. Maybe this is just the idea of
citizenship anti-immigrant populations would like to see being transferred to migrants.
If that is the case, the Dutch neoliberal citizenship rituals are successful indeed.
Notes
1. TK 2005–2006, 30, 308, nr. 7, 22.2. STB 2008 12150 604.3. Starting from 1 January 2013, the Wi has been adjusted, so that migrants now have to arrange
and finance their courses themselves, as it was foreseen in the initial government plans. Thechanges that have taken place since 2013 are beyond the scope of our fieldwork.
4. Linguists, however, argue that testing language abilities by untrained officials fails to conformto the most basic criteria for judging the quality of language testing (Piller 2001).
5. Participant observation, March 2008, Utrecht.6. See note 5 above.7. Participant observation, October 2007, Amsterdam.8. Interview with migrants, May 2008, Amsterdam.9. In Amsterdam, many migrants were unaware that there was an office of complaints within the
municipality, the Discrimination Reporting Point (Meldpunt Discriminatie). The caseworkercould only spend little time on such issues and was unable to fundamentally challenge thepractice of uninformed contract signing (Interview at Meldpunt Discriminatie, August 2008,Amsterdam).
10. During a course in The Hague, students completed one writing assignment consisting ofwriting a postcard informing a friend you have moved to another city in 3 hours.
11. However, during the research we understood that this rarely happened.12. Wi, 2006, Article 7, Paragraph 1. Asylum seekers and ‘old migrants’ have 5 years to fulfill their
obligation (Significant 2010, 11).13. Participant observation, February 2008, Amsterdam.14. Talks with migrants, October 2011, The Hague.15. Interview with course manager, October 2011, Utrecht.16. Participant observation, October 2011, The Hague.17. Interview with teacher, March 2011, Breda.18. Interview with two members of Kwaliteitsgroep Inburgering, November 2011, Utrecht.19. See www.kwaliteitsgroepinburgering.nl.20. Interview with two members of Kwaliteitsgroep Inburgering, November 2011, Utrecht.21. http://www.blikopwerk.nl/inburgeren/kwaliteitsgids (accessed on 27 May 2012).22. Interview with two members of Kwaliteitsgroep Inburgering, November 2011, Utrecht.23. Interview with course teacher, March 2008, Amsterdam.24. See also Rekenkamer Den Haag (2009).25. Interview with four migrants, May 2008, Amsterdam.26. Interview with teacher, March 2011, Breda.27. See note 26 above.28. See note 26 above.29. Interview with Rita Verdonk, November 2011, Nootdorp.30. Talks with migrants during the break, October 2011, The Hague.31. Interview with migrants, May 2008, Amsterdam32. Talk with teacher, October 2011, The Hague.33. Interview with Wim Coumou, November 2011, Vaassen.34. Interview with Marli Tijssen, CINOP, October 2011, Den Bosch.
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35. Interview with Wim Coumou, November 2011, Vaassen.36. Interview with Marli Tijssen, CINOP, 18 October 2011, Den Bosch.37. See http://www.coe.int/t/DG4/Portfolio/?M¼/main_pages/levels.html (accessed on 1 June
2012).38. Interview with two course managers, October 2011, Utrecht; Interview with course teacher,
March 2011, Breda.39. Interview with teacher, March 2011, Breda.
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