National Integration and Immigrant Literature

Abstract

National elections often nurture the worst side of politics and bring to the fore some of the most sensitive national issues, those judged to be of greatest importance for the majority population and the election or re-election of the political parties concerned. Consider, for example, the 2008 Austrian and United States elections, the 2007 French presidential elections, the 2003 and 2006 Dutch general elections or the 2001 Australian elections: whilst local particularities do and did arise in each national discourse linked to migration, it is fair to say that in all cases the topic was a difficult if not dangerous one for politicians to handle. Indeed, ‘immigration is to modern politics what violent crime was in the 1980s: an apparently marginal issue that can swiftly overwhelm a campaign’ (The Economist, 10 October 2008).