The notion of 'immigrant integration' is used everywhere – by politicians, policy makers, journalists and researchers – as an all-encompassing framework for rebuilding 'unity from diversity' after large-scale immigration. Promising a progressive middle way between backward-looking ideas of assimilation and the alleged fragmentation of multiculturalism, 'integration' has become the default concept for states scrambling to deal with global refugee management and the persistence of racial disadvantage.
Yet 'integration' is the continuance of a long-standing colonial development paradigm. It is how majority-white liberal democracies absorb and benefit from mass migration while maintaining a hierarchy of race and nationality – and the global inequalities it sustains. Immigrant integration sits at the heart of the neo-liberal racial capitalism of recent decades, in which tight control of nation-building and bordering selectively enables some citizens to enjoy the mobilities of a globally integrating world, as other populations are left behind and locked out.
Subjecting research and policy on immigrant integration to theoretical scrutiny, The Integration Nation offers a fundamental rethink of a core concept in migration, ethnic and racial studies in the light of the challenge posed by decolonial theory and movements.
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Yes, you can access The Integration Nation by Adrian Favell in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Demography. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
International migration is frequently cited as one of the key ‘global challenges’ facing the planet. Along with other economic, political and ecological ruptures, it is often rolled into a more generally perceived ‘crisis’ of liberal democracy. A constructive and ostensibly progressive attitude to migration management was a hallmark of the ‘global era’ of the 1990s, which gave way to the much more anxious and politically contentious debates of the 2000s and after about the future of globalization. Yet a forward-looking view on ‘immigrant integration’ is still the commitment of much academic and policy research, seeking to respond to ongoing international migration in a positive way. Such work is trapped in a paradigm caught between modernist social theory and the demands of ‘impact’-oriented applied social research. This is the doxa of mainstream thought on migration, expressed in an unquestioned linear view of immigration, integration and citizenship that anchors the power of notionally post-colonial nation-states in the North Atlantic West. Introducing the elements of a new political demography, in this opening chapter I expose the mainstream linear view, then discuss some of my background assumptions about mobilities, diversity and the persistent idea of society beyond the nation-state.
Integration research as ‘normal science’
The influential Washington-based think tank, the Migration Policy Institute, defines immigrant integration in the following way.
Immigrant integration is the process of economic mobility and social inclusion for newcomers and their children. As such, integration touches upon the institutions and mechanisms that promote development and growth within society, including early childhood care; elementary, postsecondary, and adult education systems; workforce development; health care; provision of government services to communities with linguistic diversity; and more. Successful integration builds communities that are stronger economically and more inclusive socially and culturally. (Migration Policy Institute: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/topics/immigrant-integration)
Integration is thus a broad and progressive concept. In these soft, pragmatic formulations of idealized ‘immigrant integration’, the nation-building context is often left invisible, only implicit. The societal scale of the question is not specified, although a state of some kind is clearly presupposed. The concept encompasses a very wide range of policy interventions and legal mechanisms including formal naturalization and citizenship processes, the incorporation of associations and third-sector organizations, anti-discrimination and equal opportunities in education and the labour market, inclusion in housing and social policy, law and order issues, as well as policies promoting cultural diversity (see a longer discussion in Favell 2015: 75ff). Similar kinds of definitional frameworks have been proposed by international organizations such as the OECD (2018) and the European Union (Horizon 2018; European Commission 2020a), national policy commissions and high-level reports. One or two countries even have a ‘Ministry of Integration’. It is also the refrain of international research funders whose financing for explicit research on immigrant integration, especially since the perceived European Mediterranean ‘migration crisis’ of 2015, has been vast (European Commission 2020b). Looking globally, integration policy and integration research can be found not only in obvious settler countries which may have long elaborated ideas similar to receiving states in the North Atlantic West, but also in countries in every continent facing what are often seen as unprecedented challenges of international population movements.
This massive and growing output might be characterized as the ‘integration industry’ of mainstream policy-oriented research (see also Boswell 2009; Scholten and van Breugel 2018; Vertovec 2020). An example is the very influential ‘indicators of integration framework’, introduced by the refugee studies scholars Ager and Strang in the early 2000s (see Ager and Strang 2004, 2008: 169ff). It provides a model of integration in the form of a business school-type diagram: a kind of inverted pyramid in which legal foundations (formal rights and status) lie under facilitators (language, educational and cultural skills) that support mechanisms of social connection (interactive bonds, bridges and networks), which underpin outcomes (successful measures of socio-economic attainment, health and education outcomes, and so on). These ‘domains’ are interrelated but are said to be multidimensional and multidirectional. A toolkit is offered with this framework, breaking down each of these indicators into sub-questions that can measure the behaviour or performance of new migrants against established populations. As with the think tank formulation cited above, the theory of society here is nebulous – there is no clear causal structure, scale or context, and no real sense of history; and the idealized processes elide the kind of state and political power necessary to imagine governing institutions able to create a functioning society in its image. But highbrow social theory is not the target: the society and the groups it speaks of are all assumed to exist. Rather, the diagrams and toolkit are directed to policy makers who need to have some clear and operational policy measurements to hand as benchmarks of progress and failure in order to report, or to justify, further intervention. Initially focused on new refugees in Scotland, the framework has been adopted in policy debates about new and diverse migrant arrivals around the world (for an overview, see Donato and Ferris 2020: 11–14). It continues to provide a justificatory model for progressive-minded government propositions (in its latest form, for the UK Home Office, see Ndofor-Tar et al. 2019).
The other most striking industry of work surrounds the formulation and analysis of cross-national indexes to identify international best practices. One organization based in Brussels – the Migration Policy Group (Solano and Huddleston 2020) – provides a synthetic index (the MIPEX index) measuring implementation and attainment in integration policy in countries worldwide, in terms of labour-market mobility, education, political participation, access to nationality, family reunion, health, permanent residence and anti-discrimination. This constitutes an enormously influential database of information that informs advocacy, political debate, press coverage and policies internationally and nationally, as well as swathes of academic research on comparative integration policies and outcomes. As with the ‘indicators’ framework, these and similar tools have built a ‘normal science’ of immigrant integration that fills migration studies and increasingly mainstream social science journals with new applied studies (using ‘indicators’, see, e.g., Phillimore and Goodson 2008; Cheung and Phillimore 2014, 2017; also the burgeoning range of social stratification, health or education scholarship, e.g., Heath and Cheung 2007; Kalter et al. 2018; Ruiz and Vargas-Silva 2018; Understanding Society 2020; using ‘indexes’, see Howard 2009; Janoski 2010; Koopmans, Michalowski and Waibel 2012; Koopmans 2013; Vink and Bauböck 2013; Goodman 2014, 2015; Bilgili, Huddleston and Joki 2015; Helbling et al. 2017).
Much of the recent applied research wants to argue that integration can be conceived in ways that do not presuppose the heavy presence of the nation-state-society as a normative backdrop. For instance, Ager and Strang (2008), as with much of the recent proliferation of local studies on refugees in Europe funded after the ‘crisis’ of 2015, seek to limit its meaning to interaction between groups in local communities, usually a city. Quantitative researchers often understand it as a neutral set of observations that can be specified to particular sectors of society – such as integration into the labour market (Demireva and Heath 2017), or norms of educational attainment (Kalter et al. 2018). Yet, as I will detail, intercultural-type thinking on integration tends towards normative idealization: it is good at offering affirmative examples of mutual recognition in local contexts but typically empties these scenarios of the inevitable relations of power and domination between nationals and newcomers, majorities and minorities, that reproduce inequalities and racism. The systematic empirical work of the quantitative sociologists, meanwhile, excels at measurement and modelling inequality but effectively reduces integration to atheoretical descriptive terms: comparing the ‘newcomers’ to so-called ‘natives’ on various measures to see whether this or that group has attained a certain parity on this or that dimension of social life, with no account of why such differentiation and stratification might occur in the first place.
What is missing is a theory of society: of how and why these categories have been constituted historically and conceptually – as a distinctive feature of ongoing liberal democracy and modern development – and how this all fits together as a whole – of what makes certain populations ‘immigrants’ and what they are supposedly integrating into. This becomes inevitable if the thinking is to go beyond an empty science of arbitrarily constructed social statistics conflating categories of policy practice and categories of analysis (on this issue, see Brubaker 2015: 131). I will return to these issues in later chapters.
A recent wave of critical and ‘reflexive’ migration studies – influenced by critical race theory, border studies and citizenship studies – has raised similar points about the insidious properties of conventional thinking on immigration, in the context of the overwhelmingly uncritical use of ‘integration’ in mainstream studies and policy formulations (key works I refer to include: Raghuram 2007; De Genova 2010, 2017; McNevin 2011, 2019; Anderson 2013, 2019; Anthias 2013, 2014; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Nail 2015, 2016; Dahinden 2016; Amelina 2017; Fox and Mogilnicka 2017; Korteweg 2017; Schinkel 2017; Valluvan 2017; Rytter 2019; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss and Cassidy 2019; for an overview of this literature, see Gonzales and Sigona 2017; Collyer, Hinger and Schweitzer 2020; Shachar 2020). These interventions have, in part, revived critiques of immigrant integration as a form of ‘methodological nationalism’ that can be traced back to the late 1990s (Bauböck 1994a, 1994b; Bommes 1998, 2012; Favell 2001 [1999], 2003; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). The critique of ‘immigration’, ‘integration’ and ‘citizenship’ as a cardinal form of thinking-for-the-state has earlier roots in the Bourdieusian scholarship of Abdelmalek Sayad (1994, 2004 [1996]). It can also be linked clearly to anarchist critiques of state-centred thought (Scott 1998) and to Foucauldian thought more generally on governmentality (Walters 2006, 2015). The influence of Étienne Balibar’s post-Marxist work (2001) on homo nationalis and race, class and nation might also be noted. In immigration and migration studies, the critique was strongly emphasized in core works on post-national membership (Soysal 1994; Jacobson 1996; Faist 2000; Benhabib 2004; Bosniak 2006) but can also be read via the Weberian approaches to nation-building and immigration politics pioneered by Aristide Zolberg (1983, 1989, 1999, 2006); his influence shows up strongly in much of the most influential political sociology of international migration (e.g., Brubaker 1992, 2001; Hollifield 1992, 2004; Koslowski 2000; Torpey 2000; Joppke 2005; Janoski 2010; Hampshire 2013; FitzGerald and Cook-Martin 2014; Waldinger 2015; FitzGerald 2020; for the contours of this line of thought, see Joppke 1998a; Waldinger and Soehl 2013).
The political sociology literature provides a comparative historical frame on nationalism and nation building that can be linked back to the more overtly decolonial impetus of much of the newer critical migration studies. Viewed this way, integration as nation building sits at the heart of the ongoing mission of liberal democracies to generate power from the successful management and governance of populations – whether ostensibly local, national or global in its scale of operation. Wherever it is used, at whatever scale, integration implies an organized, functional and consensual view of society: one whose configuration of institutions is able to categorize and differentiate its own members by at once individualizing, internally unifying and externally bounding them. This entails a default model: one in which the integration of newcomers is into one single, indivisible ‘state’ (the process), thereby constituting one single integrated ‘society’ (the end state). Without all these elements present it is not really ‘integration’; the power of the liberal democratic state depends on it. The theory of society invoked by the term is therefore prototypically the modern advanced (western) nation-state. A critical view is needed to expose these assumptions, as well as to make sense of their implications in relation to other confusing uses of the term: for example, regional ‘European integration’, or even the possibility of an ‘integrated’ global society (a question posed in the sociology of Richard Münch, e.g., 1996). Moreover, it is a performative action to invoke as a benchmark the ‘successful’ integration ‘process’ towards building better ‘communities’ along different dimensions. This points towards the inescapably normative implication of integration scholarship in its relation to formulations of integration policy.
Towards a new political demography
Ordinarily, questions of ‘integration’ are identified in order to specify a range of ‘post-immigration’ interventions or processes that are distinct from, and follow after, ‘immigration’ policy as such – selection, border control, rights of entry and abode, who is in an ‘immigrant’ category and who is an unwanted ‘alien’ or ‘illegal’, or merely a ‘tourist’ or ‘visitor’, and so on. This is important because there is often an implied prioritization imposed on the two kinds of policy: successful integration presupposes a well-functioning border regime that must be cleared first and which has effectively fulfilled all the other definitional operations noted above. As suggested by Roger Waldinger, the typical view of ‘immigrant integration’ is emphatically one of the nation-state with its back turned to the border (Waldinger 2015): immigration has occurred, the border has operated and been affirmed in its (legal) crossing, and the duly designated ‘immigrant’ is now observed as subject to various pressures and opportunities that will ‘integrate’ them as ‘equals’ into their new ‘home’ society. Aspects of a migrant’s existing life that may already be ‘integrated’ outside the border are not relevant to this question – except perhaps as hindrances or resources in the new, encompassing (national) societal integration that is meant to take its place. There is already here an implied deficiency: as a result of crossing that border, the immigrant needs to change, to be or to do something in relation to whatever it is they must integrate into to achieve the desired parity.
Yet it is the fact that they are subject to integration – the possibility for the ‘immigrant’ of a successful implantation, settlement and development towards full membership – which defines who is deemed to ‘immigrate’ in the first place. The purposive nation-state building or bordering properties of integration thinking become clear here. The underlying assumption of national societal integration in this sense precedes the operation of the immigration policy at the border (see also Joppke 2011, citing Niklas Luhmann, on this point). Other kinds of people who have crossed the international border at the same time – such as tourists, business-visitors, truck drivers bringing goods, or ‘illegal’ migrants – must be excluded from the functional vision of national ‘society’. They do not, by definition, need integration. Although all these other activities imply presence, social interaction and ‘integration’ in other senses – for example, as part of an integrated regional or global economy across borders, or a transnational family structure – they are not part of the exclusive, power generating, nation-state building that centres on the ‘immigrant’ who can and should be ‘integrated’. It is those who are identi...
