Since the turn of the century, millions of migrants have crossed and re-crossed Europeâs lattice of internal and external borders. In 2017, approximately 52 million of them had moved for work, their opportunities multiplied by the eastward enlargements of the European Union in 2004 and 2007 (International Labour Office 2018). Millions more, displaced by war, endemic violence, and persecution in countries like Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and most recently, Syria, are seeking or have been granted asylum. There are also kinship migrantsâthe wives, husbands, children, and extended kin brought by the aforementioned groups within or outside the legal framework of family reunification. Finally, in a swiftly warming world, there are climate refugees, those fleeing crises caused by the conjunction of environmental catastrophe, imperiled economies, and dysfunctional political systems (United Nations 2018). In the near future, tens of million are expected to be displaced in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia alone. The result of these movements is a new, kinetic, and âsuper-diverseâ (Vertovec 2007) Europe, teeming with an ever-expanding array of identifications, communities, languages, dialects, memories, and histories. It is a Europe where difference is organized not merely by borders but within and across their physical and imaginative horizons.
The most critical long-term issue posed by migration to and across Europe is not the multiplicity of diversities, however, but the confrontation with particular forms of difference that challenge the integrity of extant social bodies and create the possibility for reconfiguring circuits of mutual belonging. In popular, scholarly, and policy discourse, this is framed in the hegemonic terms of âintegrationâ (Rytter 2019).
We argue against using this vernacular term for analytic purposes. Integration remains underspecified, referring variously to migrantsâ employment outcomes, educational attainment, language acquisition, or participation in political institutions. The emergence of âcivic integrationâ programs in recent decades (Joppke 2007) has broadened governmental intervention, as policymakers now aim to flesh out the skeleton of inclusion with âculture.â In courses and programs, migrants learn about traditions, cultural scripts, and national rituals while being encouraged to adopt an attitude of tolerance for difference in the name of mutual respect. Here, integration becomes a matter of recognizing holidays and histories, of adopting values, and of learning to âdo as the Romansâor Dutch, Germans, Norwegians, and so onâdo.â
There is a notable thinness to concepts of integration, despite attempts to include all possible variables. These concepts typically share a state-centric vision of integration. All share an insistence on reducing complex processes to relatively straightforward indices of success or failure. Their shortcomings quickly become apparent when one tries to use them to recognize and describe an empirical reality that exceeds employment statistics, graduation rates, or civic integration certificates. Whatever their import, these indicators cannot capture processes wherein identities are revised and adopted, where traditions are jettisoned and appropriated, where the borders of everyday belonging are drawn and redrawn. Brought up against the reality of contemporary Europe, thin integration concepts leave much to be desired. We count at least six critical issues.
First, thin concepts conceive of integration processes as teleological rather than experienced unevenly in time and with fluctuating ambivalence. For most migrants, the ends of integration remain open and evolve, encompassing recognizable outcomes but shifting goals. These goals may involve employment, education, and retraining but are also shaped by a host of interactions and exchanges that occur outside of the workplace, school, or retraining course. Further, the linear understanding of integration begs various questions about a migrantâs status when measurable gains are lost. For instance, when migrants lose work, are they de-integrated (or disintegrated)? If so, are the non-migrant unemployed not also de-integrated? What becomes of the integrated migrants or non-migrants whose skills and education are made redundant by economic or technological changes? And what to make of a migrant who learns the local language, celebrates national holidays, but faces discrimination and persistent exclusion? A âthickerâ concept would embrace the possibility that the destinations of integration cannot be divined beforehand because they are constantly changing even among the people who move toward them. Moreover, it would grasp that the processes we call âintegratingâ are productive of novel social bodies, of which both migrants and non-migrants are constitutive actors.
A second deficiency of thin conceptions of integration is the mistaken idea that integration is something that is done either to migrants by the authorities or by migrants to themselves, who may have to explicitly disavow elements of their identity to gain acceptance (see Fuglerud 1997). In either case, this concept perpetuates the idea that migrants, as the sole or primary locus of change, are to be absorbed into some pre-constituted, unchanging whole. There is little concern, for instance, in âhow immigrant groups respond to citizenship laws and integration policies, and how their presence and participation affect the meanings and practices of citizenshipâ in general (Bloemraad, Korteweg, and Yurdakul 2008, 170). And even when scholars and policymakers protest that their vision of integration involves both migrants and non-migrants, the implicit premise is that integration is a collaborative process wherein the former aim to become more like the latter, as measured using the aforementioned indicators.
This is curious, as migrant movement toward the non-migrant norm is at times perceived by migrants and non-migrants as problematic, even dangerous. This was the case, for instance, in Norway, where the emergence of a slang-filled ethnolect of Norwegian called kebabnorsk was widely greeted not as evidence of generative mixing between foreign- and native-born Norwegians but a threat posed by the former to the latter. Turks met a similarly ambivalent audience in Germany, ultimately appropriating the derogatory term for their ethnolect, Kanakensprache, as a form of self-identification. In Norway, language anxiety helped spur policymakers to implement new language requirements for prospective kindergarten workers, reifying the connection between quantifiable measures and colloquial understanding of integration. In Germany, by contrast, since the 1990s Feridun ZaimoÄlu, who has been praised as a poet of the German language and won many literary awards, helped introduce Kanakensprache into German prose. A thicker integration concept would elucidate these developments, discovering in them a process of asymmetrical co-productionâone that is at times responsive to, even appropriative of, policy but at other times runs parallel to, even independent of, it. Such elucidation would make space for a broader array of actors, including not only migrants and settled non-migrants but the waves of humanitarian actors and international activists who materialize at the sites of migratory crisis (Cabot 2019a, b).
Third, thin concepts of integration offer only a partial and highly selective account of where new patterns of inclusion and exclusion unfoldâor do not. Once more, the indicators of integration orient and selectively filter our gaze. Scholars look, for example, at civic integration courses (RugkĂ„sa 2010) where official histories and invented traditions (Hobsbawm 1983) are promulgated alongside strongly worded encouragement to find work. They look also at the labor market, where that encouragement, mixed with the imperatives to support oneself and oneâs family members, including those left behind, compels an often-desperate search for employment (see Rytter and Ghandchi, this volume). They look at schools to see how first- and second-generation children are faring compared to their non-migrant peers. They look at the spatial organization of urban areas and read conclusions into the distribution of peoples, weaving âmyths of failed integrationâ (Andersen and Biseth 2013) from the concentration of peoples in the centers, pockets, and suburbs of European cities. In other words, they situate immigrants into the places where integration is easily measured, failing to appreciate that this ease comes at the expense of the more nuanced understandings that may emerge when one considers all experiences, encounters, exchanges, including emotional and erotic entanglements (see Ghassem-Fachandi, this volume), as potentially integrative or disintegrative.
Fourth, there is the emphasis on âcitizenshipâ and the associated language of official rights and obligations. One need not deny the importance of formal civic, political, and social rights (Marshall 1950) to nonetheless contest the use of citizenship as either the basis of or proxy for integration. Cases abound where rights are extended but not accessible, accessible but their invocation is deemed inappropriate or indicative of failed integration, or where the language of rights is not robust enough to express the more personal and intimate aspirations of new arrivals. Even when rights are granted, non-migrants often demand new citizens do more than follow the letter of the law, as the hegemonic understanding of integration is more or less synonymous with cultural assimilation (see Brubaker 2001). Migrants are called to mirror non-migrants in everyday tastes and habits (see Butticci; Bendixsen and Danielsen; Sohail, this volume). Often, migrants, who refuse to abandon aspects of their previous selves and desires, are perceived as indifferent to this mirroring and its associated social pressure, provoking offense and even aggression in some non-migrants.
If the legally inspired conceptualizations of citizenship are precise but too narrow, the anthropological ones are inclusive but too diffuse. In anthropology, citizenship is often detached from legal rights and entitlements to become a catch-all metaphor with various membership qualifiersâbiological, sexual, flexible, agrarian, pharmaceutical, and so on. With respect to migrants, concepts of âcultural citizenshipâ have proven most influential. But whether these focus on âthe right to be different ⊠without compromising oneâs right to belongâ (Rosaldo 1994, 57) or âthe cultural practices and beliefs produced out of negotiating the often ambivalent and contested relations with the states and its hegemonic forms that establish the criteria of belonging within a national population and territoryâ (Ong 1996, 738), they imply terms and forms of membership that are not remade by the encounters and exchanges between people who are themselves being remade. A thicker concept of integration would capture the relationship between the sociolegal extension of rights and entitlements, their actual accessibility, and the role that both play in hardening, dissolving, and creating boundaries of belonging and shared understandings of alterity (Isin 2002).
Fifth, thin concepts of integration tend to explicitly or implicitly center on national membership and belonging (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), at the expense of providing analytical attention to other affiliations and pathwaysâof friendship, neighborhood, city, occupation, trade union, political movement (see Cabot, this volume)âthat also figure prominently in migrant and non-migrant experiences. This neglect may also lead to overemphasizing artifacts and practices deemed essential by some actors to national or ethnic traditions. A thicker concept of integration would focus less on the constructedness of traditions than on their inventiveness and evolution, as well as the diversity of practices and policies intended to regulate them (Sahlins 1999). Further, integration, national and otherwise, is not opposed to but includes transnational and global dimensions and its effects on local inclusion and exclusion. Globalization and capitalist expansion have undermined the ability of states to regulate territoriality through assertions of national s...