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Public policies have always been concerned with the integration of specific migrant and non-migrant others, as well as with that of society as a whole. What is meant by integration has clearly changed over time and, with it, the precise nature of the policies designed to enact it, at both the individual and the societal level. Despite this shifting conceptual foundation, something called 'integration' has been an official policy goal for the last 50 years or more, at least in liberal democracies. As far as the integration of newcomers is concerned, this liberal consensus has begun to change in the last few years. Integration is used much more instrumentally, today, as a fixed and measurable set of requirements for the attainment of certain rights, including citizenship. While some migrants have always been excluded from integration policies, we can now also see a significant rise in the creation of barriers to their equal participation in social systems. In some cases, this even affects citizens who are either identified with specifically targeted migrant others-including black and minority-ethnic groups and national minorities-or who returned to their own country of origin after having lived abroad. The widespread anti-immigrant populism that provoked these developments started before 2014 but has become more pronounced since 2015 and 2016. The tensions that these changes create are exacerbated by the progressive withdrawal of government from practical support for integration over the last decade or so, and the corresponding increase in the role of market forces and the voluntary sector.

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Whereas refugees with an insecure residence status have long been excluded from integration measures in Germany, they have recently become the target of integration policies at both the national and the local levels, especially in cities. This chapter compares these policies through category analysis. The core argument is that there is a difference between the logics underlying the policies at the two levels: the national Integration Bill is mainly marked by an ethno-national framing of integration which contributes – through the introduction of the notion of ‘likely or not to stay’ – to a further fractioning of the refugee label and thus the deterioration of rights for many asylum claimants. While it posits integration as a privilege and duty for ‘genuine’ refugees, it aims to undermine the integration of those not deemed to be deserving, following the logic that the disintegration of the latter is necessary to reserve integration capacities for the former. At the local level, in contrast, participation matters more than legal status and refugees are increasingly viewed as a potential resource for and part of a heterogeneous urban society. Yet, also at the local level, integration is ultimately tied to disintegration, as local authorities attempt to select who comes to the city in the first place.

In most German cities today, refugees are welcomed and supported by a large and growing number of individuals and collectives whose volunteer work covers almost all aspects of refugee reception. At the same time, the arrival and establishment of refugees has been met with xenophobic protest and violence in many German localities. Focusing especially on the example of a local welcome initiative, but also considering exclusionary civil-society practices, this contribution explores recent civil-society involvement in refugee reception against the legal and political context of asylum in Germany. It will be argued that measures of forced dispersal, deterrence and discomfort, in particular, have materially and discursively produced the framing of current refugee movements as a ‘crisis’ and have triggered the differing actions and reactions among local populations. The fact that the ‘refugee crisis’ has been presented not only as a threat, but also as a ‘humanitarian crisis’ that needs to be tackled by both German state actors and civil society has encouraged the wave of positive reactions. Furthermore, taking into account local negotiation processes of asylum is significant if we want to understand the recent and often contradictory civil-society responses. The paper draws on observations from an ongoing research project on local migration regimes and urban asylum, as well as on other studies dealing with refugee reception in Germany.