Keywords

1 Introduction

Immigration towards Finland and France has experienced great changes during the final decades of the twentieth century: the rise and diversification of immigration towards the Nordic country and a shift from work migration to family migration in the former colonial epicenter. These changes have impacted national immigrant integration policies in two ways. First of all, these policies have been consolidated as a permanent aspect of welfare policies. If integration policies initially adopted a pragmatic take to accommodation of foreign workers and refugees addressing issues related to social such as housing, health and social services, today they are increasingly geared towards the alignment of migrants with the dominant moral order. Unlike in the North American context where immigrant integration has traditionally been cast as a progressive, linear, self-directed, and group-driven process, the state intervention in France and Finland is hefty in not only the “structural” domain of integration, reaching to its “cultural” dimension, i.e. to actively aligning newcomers’ beliefs and customs with those of the dominant population. In so far as the two countries have developed a judicial framework, institutions, and programmes that aim at regulating the target public’s ways of thinking and acting it is safe to say that the contemporary immigrant integration policies intervene at the moral level of citizenship, at the level of “good” and “bad” conduct as citizens.

Secondly, following the settlement of an increasing number of women migrants on the respective national territories has amounted in the formulation of gender-specific integration policies. Due to their weaker position on the labour market, their precarious legal status, and heavy family responsibilities, migrant women appear as a particularly vulnerable group, as in danger, and therefore in need of protection by public authorities. On the other hand, conceived of as primary carriers of foreign traditions, they are also perceived as a danger for the preservation of the unity of the two national communities. In tune with the thesis on the “return of assimilation”, assimilation being understood as a “normative and analytical concern with the nature and extent of emerging similarities in particular domains between populations of immigration origin and ‘host’ populations” (Brubaker 2001: 535), this article examines the integration policies targeting migrant women in an effort to understand how these policies create their target publics in practice, and by doing so participate in the (re)production of unequal citizenship.

The extensive gendered integration policies elaborated in France and Finland at the turn of the century make the two countries excellent laboratories for studying the categorization and socialization processes through which states fashion conforming citizens out of migrant women. An extensive literature has compared different national models of immigrant integration. France typically stands as a schoolbook example of an assimilationnist integration model fueled by the French Republican conception of citizenship bidding the principle of universalism against recognition of (ethnic) differences and individualism against collective forms of belonging (e.g. Brubaker 1998; Favell 1998). A newcomer among immigrant receiving nations, Finland has aspired to adopt a multiculturalist model of integration following the example countries like Sweden and Canada (Rastas et al. 2005) that recognize ethnic difference among citizens and accommodate them in the functioning of the public sphere and the welfare state (Borevi 2012; Saukkonen 2013). Although these differences are likely to impact the categorical definitions and the bureaucratic practices immigrant integration policies rely on they do not provided sufficient analytical premises for the study of the increasingly gendered integration policies. Feminist scholars have indeed demonstrated how women’s status and rights as citizens are cast differently from those of men within different national context (e.g. Lister et al. 2007; Siim 2000). Along with other Nordic countries Finland has been classified as a weak and France as a moderate male breadwinner state (Lewis 1992), the Nordic countries advancing gender equality more strongly than the French bearing the legacy of the post-revolutionary denial of individual social and political rights of women.

Taking stock of the two analytical lenses, scholars drawing to the intersectionnalist perspective (Crenshaw 1993; Yuval-Davis 2011), have analyzed how class, gender, ethnic and racial boundaries interact in the recognition of migrant women as citizens in France and Finland (e.g. Fassin 2006; Fernando 2013; Guénif-Souilamas and Macé 2004; Keskinen et al. 2009a, b; Rajas 2012; Keskinen et al. 2012). Although evidence gathered through the analysis of media and policy discourses points to the operation of robust intersectional inequalities, we are less knowledgeable on how the production of such inequalities operates in everyday life. Pioneering work has studied the bureaucratic practices of granting residence permits (Spire 2008), the organizing integration courses and projects (Hachimi Alaoui 2012; Manier 2010; Tuori 2009; Vuori and Hirsiaho 2012), and naturalization (Fassin and Mazouz 2009; Hajjat 2012). However, we still lack a systematic demonstration of how inequalities are produced at different levels of social action and how these levels are connected to each other.

The originality of the research resides in the comparative ethnographic study of the gendered and moral face of welfare policies targeting migrant women in Paris and Helsinki. It focuses on a particular form of “people-processing” (Goffman 1961), the process of institutional socialization defined as the public agents’ practices of (re)socializing migrant women by replacing their ways of thinking, doing and being identified as inherited from the foreign context of socialization with their national, dominant equivalents. The research demonstrates how in France and Finland the local institutional contexts and practices participate in fashioning the category of “immigrant women” by differential mobilizations of motherhood and citizenship as its constituents in the context of different national traditions of immigrant integration. The research ultimately amounts in a discussion of the inequalities produced as a by-product of the institutional socialization process shaped equally at the national and local levels, or rather, in their interactions.

2 Comparative Ethnography of Institutional Socialization

The research data has been collected through qualitative fieldwork at a Neighbourhood House in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in Paris, between September 2011 and April 2012, and in Helsinki, between September 2013 and April 2014. In addition to the 9-month-periods of intensive fieldwork at each institution, I have regularly travelled between the research sites at the period spanning from September 2011 to December 2014. The comparative design and the permanent movement between the two sites have significantly contributed to my practice of fieldwork and theorization. From site selection to data collection to interpreting differences in common processes, they have allowed for constantly and gradually “crosschecking” the research findings across the two sites as well as to examine the discovered enigmas in the light of theory in an “abductive” manner (Timmermans and Tavory 2012), in other words by defining gradually and comparatively what in the data’s diversity and abundance constitutes novelty and is worth further development.

Although I attended different activities at the two institutions, Wednesdays quickly became the high point of my research as they were that for the local migrant women as well. The residents’ café in Helsinki and the sociocultural workshop in Paris were organized on this day and drew in the largest regular public of migrant women. As a participant observer, I paid close attention to the physical and relational organization of the institutional setting and to the interactions between the social workers and the migrant participants to the institutional activities. My field notes account in particular for how different symbolic boundaries (Lamont and Molnar 2002) are mobilized in these encounters and through what practices the first seek to transform the conducts of the former. Observing, for example, where and with whom the clients interact and how the social workers moderate the interactions or govern the common activities provide examples of boundary-work in action. I here privilege the analysis of the ethnographic research data that notably allows for examining how the local institutional context explains variation in the process of institutional socialization. I therefore somewhat omit the analysis of the 10 recorded interviews with the Neighbourhood Houses’ social workers and the Houses’ directors, and consequentially the question of the individual social workers’ or street-level bureaucrats’ discretionary practices, personal background, and representations of the target public (Lipsky 2010; Dubois 2009). The ulterior development of this analytical strand would further enrich our understanding of the nuances of the process of institutional socialization.

Another limit of my research concerns the process of generalizing the empirical findings established at the local level, here at a single public institution in each capital city, towards the national context. In order to identify the local and the national explaining of the institutional socialization process’s variation I have analyzed a corpus of key policy documents participating in the politicisation of immigrant integration by gender. Firstly, I have examined how the sociopolitical category of “immigrant women” is constructed in France and Finland in the presence of different cultural repertoires related to immigrant integration, female citizenship, and welfare. Secondly, I have observed how the category, defined at the macro level, is or is not adjusted in action at the local institutional context. As reasonable as it may seem to remain cautious about making strong claims pertaining to differences at the national level based on ethnographic data, the comparative research disposition yet allows for teasing out national particularities as well as for tracing regularities in the (unequal) process of institutional socialization of immigrants.

3 Practicing Institutional Socialization

The starting point of this research shares the basic insight of Michael Lipsky’s (1980) seminal work on the practice of public policies: “Street-level bureaucrats are major recipients of public expenditure and represent a significant portion of public activity at the local level. Citizens directly experience government through them, and their actions are the policies provided by the government in many respects”. Instead of studying immigrant integration policies at the level of different “philosophies of integration” (Favell 1998) or “cultural idioms” (Brubaker 1998) or yet of much criticized “national models” (see Duyvendak and Bertossi 2009), the focus here is on the everyday practice of national policies. In other words, this research turns to how the ideals and norms related to citizenship and integration are effectively put in practice and how these practices shape the very policies in question. The observation of the institutional socialization process at the local level in Paris and Helsinki reveals that the ways migrant women are recruited to the Neighbourhood House’s activities, mixed across ethnic boundaries during the institutions’ activities, and educated about acting as “good” citizens significantly influence the makeup of the target public.

3.1 Recruitment

When interviewed about the workshop’s purpose and organization SaminaFootnote 1 explains that it was initially destined to support local parents in building a bond with their children, not to perform immigrant integration per se but to work on parental education: “In 2007, the year when I started here, I remember it well, there was this Turkish woman. She explained to me that she had difficulty in establishing a relation with her daughter, although she was a very good mother and the child was doing well at preschool. Something was lacking. So, I wanted to work on this, parentality, the bond between the child and the parent”.Footnote 2 However, at the time of my research, the workshop revolved around language and civic training in the form of a collective creative project, preparing a theater play interrogating women’s and men’s roles in the family and in French society and all but one attendant were foreign nationals. The regular public of the Parisian sociocultural workshop consist of a dozen women: two Algerian and two Moroccan migrants, a group of three to five Tamil migrants, and an Algerian-born French woman of Jewish confession.

A closer look at how the group came to be reveals the central role played in its assemblage by Samina, a former associative activist and a descendant of Algerian migrants, today in charge of preventive social work Neighbourhood House. When not animating the sociocultural workshop for migrant women or the homework help group for school children, Samina meets local residents in precarious legal, residential, socioeconomic, and/or family situations in the confines of her office. Through her activities she therefore comes to a regular contact with local families and it is precisely through these encounters that she individually recruits women to participate in the Wednesday workshop. The two Algerian women, Sabba and Akila, and the Algerian-born Annie as well as one of the Moroccan women, Rahma, and two of the most loyal Tamil attendants, Suddha and Salima, have been recruited individually and separately by Samina. Rahma, Suddha and Salima have since invited their co-ethnic friends to join the activity. The Tamil group’s tendency to grow larger and Samina’s attempts to control its relative weight are revelatory of the boundary-work Samina as a gatekeeper performs. Having barred Suddha’s neighbour from joining the group in December on the grounds of the collective project’s already “advanced” state and her sisters joining because of her not living in the neighbourhood appear as easy excuses for Samina’s urgent preoccupation with the maintaining a “representational balance” within the group: “It has happened to some associations at the neighbourhood that they go from open-to-everyone to exclusively the Chinese or the Sub-Saharian. That crowds out the others. I think it’s important we have a balanced representation of different groups”.Footnote 3 The recruitment practices point to the paradoxical nature of ethnic boundaries in the practice of welfare policies: firstly, ethnic identification is important not so much as a facilitator of individual and collective mobilization but rather as an element of a top-down management of “diversity” (Amiraux and Simon 2006). It hence appears as being tolerated as a tool of government participating in the perpetuation of the Republican model of integration – notorious for keeping the public sphere of life void of manifestations of ethno-racial forms of identification – rather than as an element of bottom-up ordinary social organization.

Secondly, the significance of ethnic boundaries is contested by deliberately insisting on gender boundaries. The workshop’s first year, 2008–2009, witnessed the participation of two French-born women initially participated in the workshop, geared towards parental practices. Samina however accounts for the disengagement of the non migrant women in the following terms: “More mothers with no French skills turned up and I guess that made the “French” flee”.Footnote 4 The absence of the “franco-French” that she regrets has subsequently led her to adjust the workshops contents to its de facto public: “I didn’t really think about it, that it became more about the women [than children and parents]. But it’s true. And so it also became more about the mothers’ language skills and well-being, and, how to put it, about them, eh, as women”.Footnote 5 Today, Samina identifies two key goals of the workshop. In line with classical goals of immigrant integration, she believes it to be her task to prepare the women for integration through linguistic and civic training. In accordance with the general tendency of psychologization of social problems and politicies (Bresson 2006), supporting the public’s “well-being as women” with help of “psycho-social” tools like discussing one’s experiences and emotions within a peer group however appears as a novelty of this type of welfare policies. Migrant women are here recruited to the integrating activities not only in order to inform them about civic norms but also to establish links between their struggle to belong to the host society and the (dis)organization of their intimate experiences and practices of acting as mothers, spouses and citizens.

The deviation from the initial purpose and the multiplicity of its objectives allow for the heterogeneous makeup of the group. Namely, the goal of advancing women’s well-being allows for taking aboard non migrants and non mothers: “I think we should take all women who need to learn French language better and who might be home alone. It’s about the women really. [--] It’s a retreat from heavy domestic responsibilities”.Footnote 6 Sabba, a 70-year-old Algerian woman with no residence permit and few social contacts, and Annie, a French citizen of Algerian origin, in her fifties recovering from severe depression, divorced and without children exemplify this broadened scope of the target public. In terms of managing the ethnic and gender boundaries that define the target public Samina therefore proceeds by their transvaluation (Wimmer 2013): in so far as she insists on including in the group “all women”, not only migrants or only mothers, she advocates for the primacy of the first over the former, in contrast with the Helsinki recruitment practices.

No particular activities have been designed for the migrant public at the Helsinki Neighbourhood House. The social workers of the House repeatedly explain that immigrant integration is best assured through the newcomers’ welcoming in the House’s “normal” everyday activities. The integrative agenda is hence at once recognized as a sociopolitical urgency and yet explained away by stressing “normalcy” as pathway to integration in keeping with the Finnish welfare policies universalist tradition. The institution’s “normal” activities are currently heavily oriented to families. Every activities varying from music to crafts to outdoors play are offered to toddlers, accompanied by their mothers, and during the House’s opening hours anyone is welcome to enter its premises and socialize with other attendants. However popular these activities might have been in the past, they now draw in a far smaller crowd than the Wednesday “residents’ café” that attracts from 5–20 women with their children every week. The café’s running principle is simple: each Wednesday one local resident cooks, others come in and buy the food, and engage in commensality that is thought to favour relations among neighbours and across ethnic boundaries. Unlike at the Paris institution, the very form of the activity hence does not rule out the participation of certain publics, like the non migrant women. Consequentially, at the Helsinki Neighbourhood House, the regular attendance consists almost exclusively of Finnish and Somali born women with their children. Men are a rare sight at the institution as well as women belonging to other ethnic minorities of which the Estonian, the Russian and the Turkish are yet well represented within the neighbourhood.

The public is a result of a recruitment strategy that differs from its Paris counterpart in two principal ways. First of all, it lacks the individual and authoritarian dimension of Samina’s methods. As the Neighbourhood House is surrounded by a park and a playground that the local residents readily frequent with their children, the team of five social workers has the habit of systematically presenting the House’s activities to any parent – or mother – making use of these premises. This practice is considered to be particularly important with regard to migrant parents as Leena, a newcomer in the team of social workers, explains:

The immigrant mothers might have misconceptions. Like they might think that it costs to come inside. And no no! We have to explain that no, that actually it’s good for them and us and the community that they come inside.Footnote 7

The argument reveals a twofold recruitment agenda. Responding to the follow-up question on how the migrants’ participation is good for them, Leena explains:

Many immigrant women lack social contacts. Like they just live here but don’t know anyone. And when you’re just with your child all the time, and we don’t know what the family and the husband is like, you can end up very isolated. This place is here to break with that.Footnote 8

In contrast to the Paris case where Samina’s stressing of gender in defining the target public, the Helsinki public agents rather perform a contraction (Wimmer 2013) of the gender boundary along the principle of motherhood. Due to the familialist nature of the institution non mothers are rarely met at the institution and the public of migrant women benefitting from the institution hence limited to that of migrant mothers.

On the community’s good, Leena indeed adds: “Well, it’s just that as we all live here we should all know who lives here. [pause] And given the multicultural nature of this neighbourhood it’s very important that immigrants come here and are represented here”.Footnote 9 The latter argument’s importance is illustrated by the effort the House’s longtime workers have made in bringing in the local Somali mothers, a large local minority and one of the most marginalized ethnic minorities in Finland. Pirkko who has worked at the House since its inauguration in the early 1990s, accounts for how the local Somali families were initially involved in the House:

There’s a whole story to that! It was not self-evident at all. When the first Somali refugees arrived in this neighbourhood, maybe in 1993, first they didn’t come. We [social workers] tried to make contact with them but there was a language barrier and it was hard. First it was the Somali children that started to come. Through the kindergarten and the school we tried to invite the mothers too but they didn’t come. We were quite frustrated. But then, one afternoon, there was a delegation of like four or five Somali men. One of them spoke quite good Finnish. We were surprised but asked them to come in. They came in and had coffee but we didn’t talk much. Then they came back the following week, the same delegation. They had coffee again and we showed the premises and activities. There were a lot of children, Somali and Finnish everywhere and Finnish mums with their small kids. The men left and we shook hands. After 2 weeks, the first [Somali] mothers came and then more and more. We later understood that they had been suspicious about what we do, like maybe we teach religion or something else or that maybe there are men present. But they approved. Later sometimes they [the men] came to the park, but no more into the House, and since then we’ve always had a lot of Somali mothers here.Footnote 10

Today, the workers encourage migrant mothers to invite their friends to come whether they are local residents or not which has contributed to a situation in which on a typical Wednesday half of the attendants are native-born Finns and the other half women of Somali origin. This points out a second significant difference in how the recruitment practices amount in shaping the target publics in Paris and Helsinki. Although ethnic boundary-work is important at both institutions, it is performed differently and amounts in drastically different publics. By i.e. forcibly maintaining a “representational balance” mainly through individual selection and gatekeeping and actively encouraging the mobilization of ethnic networks for recruitment of new attendees. In so far as the Helsinki social workers accord little thought to questions of “representational balance”, they may have well produced the situation Samina deliberately tries to avoid, that of an “overrepresentation” of a single group and of maintaining “bright” ethnic boundaries rather than blurring them (Alba 2005). Furthermore, the Helsinki recruitment practices contrast with the Paris ones in that the individual and psychological agenda appears as less salient than one emphasizing individual and collective participation in local social life in line with the strong trend of active citizenship in the Nordic welfare states (Hvinden and Johansson 2007), also termed as “participatory solidarity” in the French context (Paugam 2011), that stresses the importance of justifying ones deservingness of social entitlements by actively participating in different sociopolitical schemes, here the local integration activities.

3.2 Mixing

The practice of institutional socialization of migrant women shows that in order to be considered a “good” and deserving citizen mere participation in the local public life, or at least in that of local public institutions, is not enough. Once the migrant women have entered the Neighbourhood Houses a crucial practice of institutional socialization is activated: the women are brought to interact with “different people”. As migrant women are brought out to the public to participate in particular forms of all female sociability they are hardly invited to cross the gender boundary. The class difference is also only marginally present at the institutions albeit for different reasons. In Paris, Samina concludes on my question concerning the Neighbourhood House’s task of advancing “mixity”: “Mixity here has nothing much to do with class. They’re all working class or poor anyway. So mixity is basically a polite way to say you want people of different “horizons” [laughs] or origins to meet.Footnote 11” In Helsinki, on the other hand, class difference is a taboo and its apparent invisibility even celebrated by the workers. Leena explains: “That’s one of the great things about places like the Neighbourhood House. You just come in as a mother and you know each other as mothers. You don’t even know each others’ or each others’ husbands professions or titles, or revenues, you don’t know! You’re there just as a mother.Footnote 12” The research then shows that difference is, at both institutions, mainly understood in ethnicized terms.

The Paris institution’s director, Pascal, proudly affirms that the House has an important role to play as a “multicultural meeting place in a neighbourhood with a strong communitarian organization”.Footnote 13

At 2 pm on Wednesday afternoon, the nine of us sit around a table in an empty classroom at the Paris Neighbourhood House: eight women from the neighbourhood and me. The women are of Tamil and North African origin, sitting on opposite sides of the table. They are neighbours and already more or less know each other, at least by sight or reputation. It’s the group’s first meeting and we’re uncertain of what is about to happen. To break the ice, Samina, the social worker managing the gathering, hands out French staple product biscuits from a supermarket plastic bag: Petit beurres, Oursons, Pepitos. We help ourselves to tea and coffee that she has prepared in the rudimentary kitchen corner. Except two, all women have come with children who are being entertained in the adjacent room by Paul, another social worker. Mothers make sure that the children also get some before sending them back to play. When the children leave us in peace, Samina goes to the white board and gives us the theme of the day’s workshop: “What is it to be a woman?” We start to brainstorm, to fill the white board with roles, duties, and rights of the feminine folk.

Halfway through the workshop, I accompany Samina outside for a cigarette break. Annoyed, she bursts out: It’s driving me crazy! This communitarianism! I’m trying to make them mix, to make them sit not always in their small groups of Tamils or Moroccans or Algerians. But they always do it. It’s adults so I can’t tell them where to sit either. It’s mad though, it’s so strong!

Samina nervously sucks on her cigarette which she quickly smokes out. Samina rolls her eyes and we re-enter the classroom. I resume my place among the women and my activity of writing in French about my insights into being a woman. Suddha, having difficulty writing in Latin letters, starts teaching Tamil syllables to me. As I slowly pronounce the syllables, Samina stops by, shakes her head and sighs “Useless!”Footnote 14

The considerable effort Samina puts in encouraging – or forcing – the workshop’s participants to interact across ethnic boundaries shows at once just how pervasive the Republican tradition of integration is and, at once, how shaky it is at the level of ordinary practices. Fluent in Arabic, Samina never uses the language at work systematically responding in French even when participant occasionally address her in Arabic. The group is indeed discouraged from using any other languages than French as this would be, according to Samina, “irrespective to the group”. The institution’s “French only” policy, intended to downplay ethnic boundaries and creating a neutral civic space, bears resemblance to the assimilationnist logic of the colonial era which used the language as a major tool for the diffusion of Republican ideas and for combating foreign influences (Hajjat 2012: 112–113). Although Samina submits herself to a significant pressure in trying to intervene at the level of sitting arrangements and language use, the public ends up mixing (broken) French with Tamil and to a smaller extent Arabic as well as to sit in small groups made of co-ethnics.

In Helsinki too, the workers identify creating conditions for interethnic sociability as a key task but undertake this quite differently from the Parisian boundary-blurring mode (Alba art. cit).

On a foggy Wednesday morning, I make my way towards the bright lights of the little wooden house. At the entrance, I bump into one of the social workers, Pirkko. “Welcome! How are you?” She takes me in her arms and welcomes me to the house. I remove my shoes and outer garments, pick a pair of woolen socks from a basket by the door, and follow the smell of fresh bread to the kitchen. Habibo, an elderly Somali lady, also greets me with a hug. She is in charge of the café today, cooking with the help of her two daughters and two younger Somali women. They point towards a chair and invite me to join the cooking. I say hello to the three Finnish women sitting in the dining room with their babies and pick up a kitchen knife and carrots. The women’s conversation regularly slips into Somali one of them translating bits and pieces so that I can follow the discussion: shopping, beauty products, travels. The social workers are curious to see what happens in the kitchen, pop their head in from time to time, and comment on the cooking process of traditional Somali food in anticipation of the “intense flavours”.

When it is time to have lunch Somali and Finnish women typically eat around separate tables, keep to their mother tongues, and it is rare to see members of the two groups entering private conversations beyond brief exchanges. Pirkko, watching the dining room from the doorsteps comments: “I think we’ve been quite successful in helping everyone live peacefully in parallel.”Footnote 15

Besides recruitment via ethnic networks, the ethnic difference penetrates the organization of integrating practices at the Helsinki institution quite differently from the Paris Neighbourhood House. In Paris, migrant women from different national origins are brought together to work on the theme of gender roles in an institutional context ripped of references to ethnic minorities. In Helsinki, on the contrary, ethnic differences are essential to organizing the Wednesday residents’ café in so far as migrant women are not only encouraged by the social workers to prepare food typical to their country of origin but also enthusiastically congratulated about the exoticized “intense flavours” they offer for out-group participants. The workers of the Helsinki Neighbourhood House may well have been successful in mixing migrant – essentially Somali – women with Finnish-born ones in a public space resembling a “cosmopolitan canopy” (Anderson 2011), a place where diverse people come together in amicable, yet fairly superficial terms, and where references to particular minorities are incorporated in the public space (e.g. through use of minority languages, consuming “exotic” food). The line to draw between such practices of “institutional incorporation” of ethnic difference typical to Nordic welfare states (Borevi op. cit.) and “practical orientalism” (Haldrup et al. 2006) that actually fuels Othering process is however fine and may well contribute to establish ethnic essentialization as a price to pay for integration and as the very basis of the ordinary practice of mixing.

3.3 Educating

In addition, the practices of recruitment and mixing, the form and content of the education of migrants about being a “good” citizen participates in shaping the target public of immigrant integration policies. A few weeks after the Paris group’s first meeting, Samina wants the group to focus on women’s rights in France.

  • Samina: Let’s go to the question of voting. How many have voted?

  • The women look at each other, some saying they have voted in their home countries, all except Annie lacking French citizenship. A silence follows.

  • Fatma: It’s not easy. How do you know whom to vote for?

  • Suddha: [mischieviously] You ask your husband!

  • Samina: [frowns, breathes out slowly]: “Hopeless!”

  • The women laugh and Samina suggest we have tea and exits for a cigarette break leaving to women to resort to conversing about matters of everyday life.Footnote 16

Throughout the year the women are expected to attend the workshop regularly and to prepare a collective creative project, a theatre play entitled “Femmes et hommes s’accordentFootnote 17”, staged at the Neighbourhood House on March 8, the International Women’s Day. The educating practice hence takes a manifest form that conciliates the requirement of personal engagement with that of hierarchical relations between the group’s members, namely Samina and the migrant women. The close observation of the workshop is indeed interesting in terms of both the form and the content of the education the migrant women receive at the institution. Despite the fact that Samina processes adult migrants whose attendance at the institution is not mandatory, the activity takes a school form implying a hierarchical organization that projects Samina to the role of the teacher and assigns the migrant women to that of pupils. Incarnating to a certain extent the figure of a “beurette” (Guénif Souilamas 2003), a young French woman with North African origins taking liberties in conciliating the demands of her origins and those of French society, Samina – mostly dressed in black, often in black leather pants and boots, unveiled and an avid smoker – deliberately makes a point of embracing feminism and of her love for the French language and cultural industry, and is careful not to talk about her family beyond allusions to a French-born partner and daughter as tokens of her distanciation from her origins. In the other hand, the ways she puts forth these characteristics that contrast with a number of the workshop attendants’ more “traditional” features – most are married with a co-ethnic and have children, three wear a headscarf, and all contest to a certain extent the caricature of the sexually ad socially liberated French woman that the discussions oppose to the figure of the oppressed migrant women they are likened to – to such an extent that the very emancipating potential of the French civic citizenship that the women are educated about appears as rather caricatured.

The exchange over voting rights crystallizes a major aspect of the content of the education the workshop offers to migrant women, i.e. exposing them to an individual and political conception of citizenship as well as to gender equality as key determinants of French citizenship. Separating the private and from the public, the sphere of family from the sphere of citizens, individuals from their group attachments, and feminine autonomy from masculine oppression, Samina actively draws moral boundaries around the contours of female citizenship. In Samina’s understanding, integration can be measured on a scale extending from communitarianism to participation in interethnic relations, and from confinement in the home sphere to participation in public life. To my question how the women attending the workshop differ from other local migrant women she answers: “They are more integrated and active. They participate in things and are interested in things beyond their homes and own groups.”

The Parisian institution’s emphasis on educating active citizens out of migrant women in classroom dynamics sharply contrast with the Helsinki approach characterized by the educating of migrant women about responsible motherhood in a home-like institutional environment. Leena describes the Helsinki House: “It’s very important for us to create a home-like environment so the immigrants can see what it is like in a Finnish home, how things are done and work.Footnote 18” Accordingly with the institutional setting simulating the domestic sphere, Leena describes her professional tasks:

When you have new mothers, just arrived in Finland, you have to explain them all kinds of things. Like how much clothes to put on their kids and how to wear the winter overalls. They just don’t know. But when you explain to them, they’re so happy and then they see their kids running outdoors with the Finnish kids! Or you have to explain things about food. Like what you can give to your child to drink, milk, sour milk, cream. And if you can warm them in a micro wave oven! [laughs].Footnote 19

These goals are supported by the institutional organization that operates along the principle of open access placing no requirements of regular attendance. On the contrary, its public is free to enter and exit any day during the opening hours and to make use of the House’s premises and materials: get a cup of coffee from the kitchen, to sit down in the living room, read a magazine as watching over one’s children’s play, or to make use of the outside playground and the kitchen garden. Through these ordinary practices, migrant women are expected to internalize core elements of the “Finnish way of life”. This type of institutional organization is further supported by the extensive use of emotional labour (Hochschild 1983; Graham 2002) by the social workers in the practice institutional socialization. Educating in Helsinki occurs in private discussions between agents and clients, resembling casual conversations. Distancing themselves from the public agent’s role and aligning with that of a mother peer the workers put an emphasis on the domestic sphere of life as site of intervention. The female social workers routinely mobilize their professional competences and private experiences on motherhood as they casually sit next to the clients and make inquiries about their family life. Tilting their head towards the client, standing closer, speaking in a silent voice, and listening attentively, they make a conscious effort to give the interactions a horizontal and confidential quality. Engaging in horizontal relations with the target public is a distinct feature of the professional practice and conceived as a crucial condition, firstly, of detecting social problems at an early stage, and secondly, of reaching out to the migrant clients who social workers believe to be wary of public authorities.

The seemingly egalitarian moral order of the House is however based on a set of implicit rules migrants are expected to conform to: removing the outer garment and the shoes, speaking in a low voice, supervising one’s own kids, withdraw from reprimanding others’ children, avoiding taking too close contact too quickly with strangers, respecting the tidiness of the premises, and being autonomous. The respect of these rules forms the criteria against which the social workers evaluate the “degree of integration” of migrant clients as Seija explains:

You can tell very easily just how integrated they are. It’s normal in the beginning to be loud and not to respect the rules by mistake, but if it continues, you just understand it’s a problem of integration. The younger ones and those who have been in the country for a long time are mostly integrated and easy to communicate with. But sometimes it’s not a question of time. It’s a question of attitude and it’s hard for us to work on that.Footnote 20

As I make a further inquiry into the “attitude”, Seija mentions Amiina, a Somali woman I had noticed the workers treat with reticence:

It’s her general attitude since the beginning. She comes in, barely says hello, doesn’t smile. She behaves like a queen, as if we, because we work here, were her servants. She was once sitting down and told me “Hey, bring me a cup of coffee!” I told her to get it herself. [lowering her voice] Also, a year ago she lost a child. It was very sad, the child died at the hospital of a very serious disease. I tried to give her my condolences but she didn’t react. Nothing. I was almost crying and I was about to hug her. But it’s like something wasn’t right about the way she was mourning the child’s death. Since then I’ve just decided that I’m going to be polite but distant and leave her be.Footnote 21

In the Helsinki institutional context, the degree of integratedness of migrant women is not measured according to the criteria of civic skills of personal emancipation like in Paris. The observation makes apparent a particular type of “value-mastering hierarchy” (Bruun et al. 2011), i.e. a hierarchy of integratedness based on the mastering of values held essential to the Finnish domestic sphere such as equality but also autonomy, hominess, emotional intimacy, franchise and orderliness.

4 Motherhood and Citizenship as Elements of Immigrant Integration

Evolving at a public institution fashioned to resemble a typical Finnish home, the Helsinki variant of the process of institutional socialization resembles that of domestication. The idea of domestication takes a twofold sense: migrant women are institutionally identified as mothers and socialized mainly by normalizing their domestic practices. This variant of institutional socialization contracts the gender boundary around motherhood and, although accommodating for ethnic difference, enforces conformity to the “Finnish way of life”. As a result, it seeks to create conforming sociopolitical, mother citizens out of migrant women. In Paris, on the contrary, migrant women are more distinctly identified as future political citizens and subjected to the process of enlightenment that aims at instilling in them a personal commitment to the French Republican values and emancipating them as women from their supposedly patriarchal and oppressive families and communities. The ethnic boundary’s salience is here demonstrated by Samina’s constant effort to blur it and to replace it by gender as a primary category of collective identification. In order to explain these differences and their consequences to the more or less inclusive/exclusive nature of the category of “immigrant women” requires a joint analysis of the Finnish and French cultural repertoires of ethnic difference and female citizenship at the macro level and their adjustment by the local forms of sociopolitical intervention.

Finnish public policy documents routinely define the process of immigrant integration as one of “individual development of the immigrant with the objective to take part in the working life and society while preserving one’s own language and own culture” (Sisäministeriö [Ministry of the Interior] 2006, 17). This definition, influenced by multiculturalist aspirations, needs to be placed in the context of the short history of immigration into Finland and a lack of an established tradition in administering an ethnically diverse population. Just as the project of constructing a universal welfare state during the second half of the twentieth century has been influenced by the reference to the Swedish model in search for pragmatic solutions to urgent social problems (Kettunen 2001), the Finnish immigrant integration policies mirror the Swedish multiculturalist approach that has evolved from its 1970s programme of granting special rights to ethnic minorities to incorporating ethnic difference in the public institutions (Borevi 2012). The logic of incorporating ethnic difference into public institution means that in Finland ethnic difference is dealt with by extending the universal logic to it, for instance by minority language and religion instruction at the public school, rather than separating it from public institutions like in France or creating encouraging separate institutions catering for ethnic minorities’ needs like in Great Britain or Canada. In principle, this logic implies that in order for the state to advance equality among all citizens its public institutions have to be designed in such a manner that they allow for all individuals to participate as different as they may be from each other in terms of class, gender or, more recently, ethnic identification. At the level of the Neighbourhood House, this then explains the absence of particular activities of immigrant integration and yet the incorporation of ethnic difference to the institution’s organization in guise of encouraging the performance of once linguistic and cultural – as well as culinary – traditions and aiming at “peaceful coexistence” of distinct ethnic groups rather than at forcibly establishing interethnic relations.

The French public response to ethnic diversity has indeed been different. In so far as French policy documents define immigrant integration in terms of the “personal engagement of the foreign national to respect the principles which govern the French Republic” (Ministère de l’Intérieur 2008: 151) they reveal a more unidirectional conception of the integration process requiring the assimilation of individual immigrants to the national mainstream and increasingly to its “principles” such as the “non negotiable values” of secularism and gender equality (Hachimi-Alaoui 2012). The local Paris variant of the institutional socialization process appears as analogous with this conception of integration as no pragmatic accommodations are made for the recognition of ethnic difference at the local institution: the workshop participants are discouraged from using languages other than French, the group collectively consumes French staple food products, and gender rather than ethnic boundaries are mobilized in order to construct the public’s individual and collective identity. In this context, integration is cast in the overtly assimilationnist terms of individual boundary crossing that contrasts with the plurality encouraging – or incorporating – Finnish approach resembling the process of ethnogenesis (Wimmer 2013), the creation of separate ethnic groups.

The first way the gendered nature of the practices of institutional socialization observed at the Neighbourhood House’s establishes undertakes boundary work along gender concerns the creation of the target public of “immigrant women” as a distinct category within the general framework of integration policies. At neither neighbourhood, no policies locally address migrant men whose integration has traditionally been projected to the professional and economic domain. Secondly, this research shows that in addition to separating migrant men from migrant women, the category of “immigrant women” is locally mobilized differently in Paris and Helsinki. In Paris, the local policies put more weight on “women” than on “immigrants” and on “all women” rather than a particular category of them meaning that Samina includes non migrants as well as non mothers in the group. The Helsinki approach is markedly different in that instead of addressing women in general, the local policies are geared towards mothers. The difference is to a certain extent possible to explain away by the national level conceptions of female citizenship. The cultural repertoires activated in the contemporary debates over women’s citizenship in Finland and France differ mainly in that in the first, the politicization of the private sphere – of family and care – has functioned as a mode of acquisition of full citizenship. The “women-friendly” (Hernes 1987) character of the Nordic welfare state casts the struggle for gender equality in terms of creating sociopolitical conditions for women to become equal breadwinners with men, hence blurring the public – private dichotomy. Women do not need to overcome motherhood in order to access full citizenship. Through generous family policies and the development of a large public care sector that employs women motherhood and care instead appear as avenues toward full social citizenship.

The French case looks different. Their status as daughters and spouses having historically relegated women to a second class citizenship with no political rights up until the second half of the twentieth century (Rosanvallon 2004) has amounted to the representation of motherhood as an obstruction to the realization of parité, the ideal of equal representation of men and women in the professional and political sphere (Revillard 2008). The French state feminism has hence preserved the public-private dichotomy to a greater extent than the Nordic one. At the Neighbourhood Houses, the Helsinki institution’s targeting mothers and supporting motherhood as a means of immigrant integration contrasts with the Paris institution’s stressing the importance of women’s political rights and empowering them through “offering a place where they can escape their heavy family responsibilities” as Samina puts it. Literally preparing the women to take the stage in front of the local public on the International Women’s Day and advising them in one-to-one about good parenting perfectly illustrates the local translations of national level differences in the conceptions of “good” female citizenship.

Finally, keeping in mind that at the level of national policies the category of “immigrant women” is constructed in a way that it theoretically applies to all migrant women it is interesting to examine the case of the groups of migrant women whose presence is significant in the neighbourhood but whom one does not encounter at the Neighbourhood House. This is notably the case of non mothers in Helsinki and of Sub-Saharian migrant women in Paris despite the latter group’s being the largest local ethnic minority. The exclusion producing effect of the local practices appears more readily at the Helsinki institution. It is true that the cultural conception of female citizenship is particularly sensitive to unmaking the family responsibilities and social inequalities as an obstacle to full citizenship (Anttonen 1998; Anttonen and Henriksson 1994). It is also true that Finnish policy documents constitutive of integration policies often and increasingly since the 1990s represent migrant women through their family status and responsibilities.Footnote 22 The marginal recognition of childless migrant women and the focus on the immigrant mother – child nexus indeed leads to the activation of the mechanism of misrecognition, understood “institutionalized subordination” (Fraser 2000: 113), of non mothers as worthy citizens. This exclusionary effect produced at the national level is further amplified at the local level by the precise form of the practices institutional socialization takes at the local Neighbourhood House. In Helsinki, the fact that an institution the agenda of which has gradually shifted from promotion of “community spirit and a sense of togetherness – respect for the individual, values and cultures, as well as mutual trust, helpfulness and openness to everybody’s views”Footnote 23 to providing early childhood education and preventive social work in the field of family policies,Footnote 24 may be held for the major explaining factor of this form of exclusionary effect. The recruitment of participants mainly at the playground surrounding the House and through the attending mothers’ personal networks and the institution’s “normal” activities being concentrated on the domestic and parental practices effectively contract the target public of “immigrant women” to that of “immigrant mothers”.

The Paris variant of institutional socialization produces a different exclusionary process. At the macro level, the French Republic’s integration policies are not so much concentrated in fostering migrant women’s social citizenship than they are, at least rhetorically, in emancipating migrant women from their position as victims of patriarchal family practices and traditions perpetuated by minority men. As the standardization of the category of “immigrant women” proceeds by its construction as an opposite to the French female citizens identifying migrant women as suffering from grappling between “the codes of their foreign families and the values of the French Republic”,Footnote 25 migrant women’s private sphere of life problematic is here identified as problematic in two senses: as a locus of anti-modern cultural traditions and a domain of patriarchal oppression. Not only are migrants stigmatized along ethnic/racial boundaries, the ideal of gender equality that now strongly informs immigrant integration policies bids migrant men and women against each other through a process of “sociocultural leveraging” (Morgan 2017) portraying in particular Muslim men as enemies of the supposedly equality-embracing French Republic and migrant women as the victims of the formers’ attitudes and practices.

At the level of the local institution, the fact that Samina personally recruits the workshop’s attendants among the public already using the institutions services and discourages the mobilization of ethnic networks for bringing in new participants, along with the local institution’s “anti-communitarian” ethos and engaging the attending women in a collective project the content of which revolves around the opposition between “good” French female citizenship and its antithesis incarnated by the figure of the Muslim migrant woman together offer strands of explication of the Sub-Saharian women’s absence despite Samina’s self-declared attention to “representational balance”. In the one hand, given the educating practices content, participating in the workshop means for North and West African Muslim women submitting themselves to considerable symbolic violence. In the other hand, Samina has not made a conscious effort to recruit women from the stigmatized minority of Sub-Saharian migrants in a similar manner to the Helsinki institution’s workers’ efforts to bring in the Somali migrants. In Helsinki ethnic difference is indeed taken into account through building alliances with local minorities and accommodating for linguistic, cultural, and religious plurality at the institution. To the extent that the Neighbourhood House has been successful in recruiting local Somali women – occupying a stigmatized social position in Finland like the West Africans in France – its activities are in line with the national level multiculturalist policies. Although the ethnic boundary here appears as a less salient factor of exclusion from the target public than in Paris the migrants’ presence at the local institution being limited to the local Somali women opens the question on whether this group does not run the risk of being represented as a radical case of ethnic difference as it alone accounts for the “multicultural” element at the local institution and as more dependent on welfare services than other minorities which, at least at the neighbourhood studied, are not regularly seen as key clients of public services.

5 Conclusion

Although attending the Neighbourhood Houses that this research concerns is not mandatory for migrants, the inequality related outcome of attendance should not been overlooked. These public institutions matter because they are durable in time and space, in contrast to associations and short-lived projects, and accessible in immediate spatial proximity. As such they feed into the citizens’ perception of their relation to the state and, in the case of migrants, mediate their perception of the dominant national population (Kumlin and Rothstein 2007). The agent-client encounters are crucial for inequality as they inform the formers’ evaluation in interaction of the deservingness of the latter which in turn feeds back into the social structures and to the very design of welfare policies (Dubois 2010). This research shows that national level conceptions of ethnic difference and women’s citizenship contribute greatly to the construction of the category of “immigrant women” and of the immigrant integration policies that aim at fashioning good citizens out of migrants. The Helsinki case study shows that the Finnish multiculturalist approach to ethnic difference indeed creates openings to the inclusion of ethnic minorities at the public institutions’ everyday activities and that the Nordic tradition of advancing women’s social citizenship makes family policies an effective pathway to social inclusion for migrant women. The Paris case, on the contrary, illustrates the obstacles the Republican tradition’s persistence poses to the mobilization of minorities and how the current discourse that reifies gender equality as a new key value of the French Republic amounts in the stigmatization of Muslim migrants.

The comparative research based on an ethnographic study of local level immigrant integration policies however significantly nuances the picture the study of national integration policies paints and the local level to some extent also portrays. The careful examination of the ordinary practice of institutional socialization, the process of transforming migrant women to “good” female citizens, shows that the ways women are recruited to the local institutions, mixed across ethnic boundaries, and educated about functioning as a full member of each national society induce adjustments to the holistic macro level definition of the target public, i.e. the category of “immigrant women”. The intertwining of ethnic and gender boundaries, modes of accommodation for ethnic difference, and form of the socialization activity itself drastically transform the target public in both cities. The Helsinki case shows that applying integration policies at a local institution that is penetrated by the agendas of early childhood education and family policies and that is fashioned to resemble, in its material and functional dimension, a typical Finnish home contract the category of women to that of mothers. The needs and aspirations of non mother migrant women are effectively misrecognized and neglected by this type of institution that is particularly prevalent in the disadvantaged neighbourhoods of the Finnish capital. At the local level in Helsinki, it rather the family status than ethnic difference that unequally conditions migrant women for recognition as worthy members of the local and national community. The Helsinki case study also points to the danger the Finnish “multiculturalist” model of immigrant integration runs of essentializing immigrants as eternal ethnic “others” through the mechanism of institutional incorporation of ethnic difference.

The Paris case study then points to the inclusive potential of weighing gender boundaries against ethnic boundaries in the local fashioning of the target public of “immigrant women”. Somewhat surprisingly the very heterogeneity of the goals that the Paris workshop pursues allows for the inclusion of a broader spectrum of women than do the Helsinki policies strictly limited to families. Adding to the initial objective of parental education that of immigrants’ linguistic and civic education and yet advancing women’s well-being allows Samina to recruit workshop attendants of different family status and situation. The workshop indeed makes inclusive openings towards non mothers as well as non migrants. However, the pervasiveness of the Republican model of integration and the stigmatization of Muslim migrants through the discourse on gender equality contribute to producing social exclusion along gendered ethnic boundaries and in the absence of local efforts to recruit members of the stigmatized minority of North and West African Muslim migrants at the institution’s activities the momentum is missed to locally reshape the target public in a more inclusive manner than the national constructs of “good” citizenship.

Although my research is limited to the analysis of one institution in each country, it makes the case for extending the analysis of immigrant integration at the level of local practices. Whether migrant women are expected to learn to think, act and be like emancipated, politically-motivated citizens or a self-sacrificing, sociopolitically-knowledgeable mothers makes a dramatic difference in the everyday practice of institutional socialization. It contributes to the previous research by broadening the lens of ethnic difference to examining how national repertoires of gendered citizenship condition the formation of migrants’ citizenship bond. That the ethnographic filed research shows that immigrants’ level of “integratedness” is evaluated against the criterion of participation in local social life and their individual conformity with the national moral order reflect the well documented trends of decentralization, territorialization, and individualization of welfare policies. Therefore, the cases under study do not only speak of differences in ways of governing ethnic and gender difference but also testifies of recent convergences between the “universalist” Finnish and the “corporatist” French welfare regimes with significant effects on the conditions under which minority men and women may be recognized as worthy citizens.