Constructing Dutch Immigrant Policy: Research-Policy Relations and Immigrant Integration Policy-Making in the Netherlands

The development of Dutch immigrant policy over the past decades has been characterised by the rise and fall of several policy frames. The role that social researchers and research institutes have played in these frame shifts has changed significantly. This article reveals that there was a clear relation between the structure of the policy-making process in the Netherlands, including the division of labour between social research and policy-makers therein, and the culture of policy-making or how immigrant integration was framed. A trend was discerned from a technocratic policy structure with a very direct role of researchers in depoliticised processes of policy-making to more engineering-like policy structures with a strong political primacy and a more selective approach to using scientific expertise for legitimating policy discourse. This article argues that these structural changes provided an important condition for the rise of a more assimilationist frame of immigrant policy in the Netherlands.