The issue of civic integration and requirements for citizenship has been a far-reaching debate that has taken place in the Swedish political context for several years. From the Liberals’ pioneering proposal for a language test for immigrants in 2002, the issue has 19 years later moved towards an increasing consensus that today finds majority support in the Swedish parliament. Although the proposal seems to contribute to greater integration, there are many critical approaches to analyse. The question that arises is whether these types of proposals, through their discursive design, create conditions that actually support integration or instead induce discrimination and exclusion of certain groups. The purpose of this thesis is twofold. One aim is to critically examine and analyse the political proposal on language- and civic knowledge for Swedish citizenship by looking at government documents and motions from Sweden's opposition parties. The thesis examines whether racist discourses are reproduced or maintained by analysing the proposal to review further how it is legitimised. The secondary purpose will be to problematise how such a proposal can affect the right to citizenship based on the risks of discrimination and exclusion. This is done by guidance from Fairclough's three- dimensional model, whose method allows to examine the textual structure, the discursive and social practice of the given material. The theoretical framework evolved from theories that sufficiently understand how civic requirements can be understood based on different exclusion mechanisms. The essay concludes that the proposal raises issues of human rights, that the state legitimises the proposal through discursive means and that there are tendencies that reproduce racist discourses.

’Inspection-zones’ are political proposals that the Sweden democrats, Christian democrats and the Moderate parties have put on their agendas for the purpose of combating the gang-related crime in Sweden’s so called ‘vulnerable areas’ since 2017. The proposals entail that the police receive extended powers to, within a geographically defined area, stop and frisk people without being required to provide a reasonable suspicion of individuals committing any crimes, which is something that today works as a protection-mechanism against arbitrary interventions. The purpose of this essay is to analyze, using a critical discourse analysis as a method, how the discourse of ‘inspection-zones’ is constructed by the political parties behind the proposals and which discourses are applied to legitimize the proposals. Furthermore, the purpose is to analyze how racist power-relations are implied within the proposals. The essay is delimited to the aforementioned parties’ latest motions in the Swedish parliament and a party leader debate where the proposals were discussed. The theoretical framework consists of a perspective on how racist discourses can change and still be considered a uniform discourse, and a perspective on how white racism can be reproduced through new discursive means. Conclusions observe that the construction of ‘inspection-zones’ as a discourse is primarily articulated by the parties around gang-related crime. The discourse around gang-related crime is articulated through shootings and organized crime, which legitimizes the proposals, since these are problems that reasonable people would like to prevent. However, the conclusions also shows that a racist ‘Swedishness’-discourse by the parties is implied within the discourse of gang-related crime, making the collective basic characteristics for ‘Swedishness’ an assessment-basis by which gang-related criminality can be expected from people. To direct the focus of ‘inspection-zones’ towards ‘vulnerable areas’ that are already rich in immigrant density, combined with the construction of this racist discourse, also seems to raise the risks of racial profiling and discriminatory practices against non-white ethnic minorities – a result that the Danish people have experienced after a similar legislation was introduced in Denmark.