Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on one year of fieldwork to examine the (Dutch) state from the vantage point of (Egyptian) immigrants. Zooming in on the practices through which Egyptians managed the Dutch state in their everyday life, I argue for an understanding of the state as (re)assembled in practice.

Paper long abstract:

Despite recurrent critiques (e.g. Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002; Schinkel 2003), conventional immigration research still draws on the language and ideas of state policies, thus contributing to the elusive image of immigrants as a policy problem. Building on one year of ethnographic fieldwork among Egyptians in Amsterdam, I turn things around: from state-centered perspectives on immigration to an immigrant-centered perspective on the state. In doing so, I draw on but analytically move beyond the literature on the everyday practices through which immigrants construct a sense of home and belonging (Fog Olwig 2007; Feldman-Savelsberg 2017a) and cross-border affective circuits (Groes and Cole 2016). Unsurprisingly, the state figures prominently in these ethnographic accounts, both as an idea and as a system (Abrams 1988). Nevertheless, and probably because of the initial analytical move away from the state, very few scholars have turned their gaze back to the state. I aim to fill this gap by zooming in on the state as it assembled, disassembled and reassembled in the lives of Egyptians in Amsterdam. For the Egyptians I worked with, the Dutch state could be many things: a source of hope, fear and doubt; an educator, care-taker, and administrator; kin, friend, and foe. In its multiplicity, the Dutch state was a policy problem: How to understand and manage the Dutch state? In this paper, I explore how Egyptian immigrants solved the policy problem in practice in order to advance an understanding of the state as produced and re-produced through immigratns' everyday practice.