Contesting Integration, Engendering Migration

Theory and Practice

F. Anthias, M. Pajnik, F. Anthias, M. Pajnik

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137293992
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137294005
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book aims to further the understanding of migration processes and policies in a European context with a particular focus on evaluating integration and the gendered aspects of migration, integration and citizenship. Integration is regarded as a contested concept and as entailing a variable and problematic set of discourses and practices.

1

Introduction: Contesting Integration–Migration Management and Gender Hierarchies

Floya Anthias and Mojca Pajnik

This book engages with the discourses and practices of integration within a range of European societies, attending to broader debates at the European and more transnational level. It provides a cross-disciplinary theoretical, empirical and policy-oriented analysis of the integration– migration nexus within debates and policies. Particular foci of the book address the following: theoretical and empirical considerations of migrant incorporation in Europe; citizenship, belonging and migration; gendered structures, experiences and policies; intersectionalities in migration (providing an intersectional lens for analysing the incorporation of migrants against the background of experiences related to ethnic, gender and class structures); and migrants’ strategies of coping with nationally embedded protectionism. The book examines the impact of policies and gendered life patterns (family obligations, gendered employment, care roles) on integration processes.

The chapters address a wide range of these issues from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, analysing the situation of migrants across European societies with the focus on discussing the (im)possibilities of integration and citizenship. The book aims particularly, therefore, to provide an evaluation of some of the difficulties and problems with current policies on integration, both in relation to broader aims of democratization and equalization and in relation to the complex ways in which gendered assumptions and practices are embedded in the policies and outcomes of European migration regimes. Discourses and practices of migrant incorporation cannot be understood outside current political and economic developments at the larger European level. It is also important to analyse integration and citizenship in the context of specific policies and their consequences for migrant populations across a range of European states: Austria, Finland, Germany, the UK, Italy, Slovenia and Cyprus are among the countries presented in this book.

Migrant labour sustains economic life in European states by responding to demographic and labour market shortages, and migrants often fill labour market positions that are unattractive to non migrants. The lives of migrants are strongly conditioned by a skills and status-based migration system which determines who can enter and who can stay. This migration management system determines residence rights, work permits, political participation, welfare benefits, access to health services and possibilities for family unification and family life. The book provides analyses of specific integration–migration policies such as family reunion, residence, citizenship, political participation, labour market (work permits) and so on, pointing critically to their exclusivist nature.

We also discuss some of the analytical and political problems of integration discourses and practices, on the one hand, and citizenship on the other, particularly in relation to developments around new forms of racism and exclusion, securitization discourses and the current economic crisis in Europe. In these post-fordist times of welfare cuts, migrant workers are the first to lose jobs and work permits. This makes them vulnerable to precarious conditions within informal labour markets and puts them at risk of illegality, thereby strongly determining their everyday life.

Such developments also function to differentiate the ‘well-integrated’ or ‘deserving’ migrants from the ‘undeserving’. The former are seen as those who have acquired the values of the dominant society; they are regarded as eligible for naturalization and the acquisition of citizenship. Well-integrated migrants can become ‘nearly’ one of ‘us’ (but never completely so) whilst the ‘undeserving’ are seen as ‘too different’, as an impediment and indeed, at times, as a threat to a sustainable society (compare Kontos, 2011; Anthias et al., 2013). In addition, structural exclusion, partially produced through migration policies, is seen to be the responsibility of individual migrants who are believed to ‘have failed to integrate’.

In this way, the story of the book is the story of a European Janus-faced (Anthias, 2013) approach to migration and diversity that, on the one hand, purports to provide mechanisms of inclusion and, on the other, reproduces through its policies the very exclusions that it attempts to tackle.

Contesting integration and citizenship: An intersectional lens

Integration is a concept that is taken for granted in much political debate. It is rarely discussed critically or contested, but instead simply adopted as a taken-for-granted concept which is useful in the management of migrant populations. Within a European context, its recent manifestations have gone hand in hand with more stringent migration controls, on the one hand, and with securitization discourse and policy, on the other. Generally, inclusion is treated primarily as entailing the adaptation of migrants to the ‘host’ society (Kontos, 2011; Pajnik and Campani, 2011; Anthias, 2013; Anthias et al., 2013). Indeed, current debates within the EU oscillate between a concern with restricting migration and with the integration of migrants and minorities. There is no doubt that there are real and valid concerns over how to facilitate the inclusion of migrants, within Europe’s increasingly divided cities particularly, and within the complexities which attend multi-ethnicity and growing complex diversities. However, the current European integration–migration management system (Kofman, 2005) approaches integration and citizenship issues in terms of migrants’ assimilation to the dominant social and cultural national contexts. Despite the discourse of two-way integration that stems from European policy documents, the integration imperative hardly acknowledges the multilocality of migrants that extends beyond national frameworks. Nor does it properly attend to modes by which multiple voices and values can be brought into dialogue to create a more sustainable multiculturality than that which seeks to produce consensus to dominant values and the concern to ‘instil’ national/European values in migrants, for example through citizenship tests, pre-departure integration tests and mechanisms to enforce the circularity of migration.

Integration is a concept with sociological, political and legal facets. Despite increasing globalization and transnationalism, integration discourse ‘nationalizes’ and ethnicizes citizenship, marking populations in terms of national and ethnic characteristics and privileging those who are constructed as inside given national and ethnic boundaries. As such, the integration concept not only reinforces methodological nationalism but also fails to properly attend to differences which go beyond a focus on ethnicity, such as economic, gender, sexual and regional differences, as well as to people’s increasingly transnational lives. As such, the nation-based focus of integration is at odds with the nature of modern societies today and the lives of people worldwide. Various mechanisms by which a nation-based focus or nationalizing citizenship (Brubaker, 1996; Joppke, 2010) is reproduced within migration and integration policies are a central theme of many of the chapters in the book.

In this book we take the view that it is impossible to analyse integration outside the lens of larger social inequalities and hierarchies, outside a transnational and intersectional frame and without reference to the specific experiences and perceptions of migrants as active agents in contemporary Europe. Therefore, the analysis of integration discourses, policies and practices is complemented by how these relate to broader social inequalities and to the ways migrants understand, experience and negotiate these in their everyday lives. It locates integration processes in social, political, economic and cultural practices of exclusion and marginalization of migrants across Europe, using a transnational focus (Glick-Schiller et al., 1992).

The analysis of migrants’ own experiences with European migration structures found in this book demonstrates how an assimilationistlike integration cannot acknowledge the ‘translocational positionality’ (Anthias, 2002) of migrating subjects, that is, the complex and at times contradictory social location of subjects who are at the interface of different and intersectional social categorizations and their positioning within multiple and complex structures of hierarchy and belonging.

To attend better to these issues, a central theme of the book, alongside the concept of integration, is to provide a gender perspective in integration–migration management. Migration discourses, policies and migrants’ own experiences are gendered (Anthias and Lazaridis, 2000; Kofman et al., 2000; Morokvasic, 2004). Gender processes interrelate with other hierarchies that produce unequal power relations. Thus, integration and citizenship issues cannot be understood without considering how different power hierarchies around gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality intersect. Looking at specific integration mechanisms like family reunion policies, spousal migration policies or gender-based violence in various European countries, the book explores how they relate to the production of specific masculinities which have disciplining effects on migrant men and women alike.

Using an intersectional sensitivity to the study of migration and migrant incorporation (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992; Verloo, 2006) can allow movement away from a nation- and ethnic-based focus and help to develop an understanding of citizenship that captures participation, belonging and the engagement of ‘citizens’ (the notion that includes non-citizens) (Pajnik, 2011). It is hoped that the book can contribute towards exploring alternative approaches to those currently signalled by the notion of integration, including notions of solidarity, cosmopolitanism and interculturalism, which can inform a more coherent and sustainable approach to understanding the various forms of engagement of migrants (see the chapter by Anthias).

The book

In Chapter 2, which follows this introduction, Floya Anthias, in a largely conceptual piece, proposes that we should be cautious and wary of the tropes of integration, as these reinforce social boundaries and hierarchies whilst purportedly being aimed at their dismantling. Arguing for an intersectional perspective as well as a broader focus on solidarity and equalization, she suggests the need to recognize the complex heterogeneities of social life, which are seen as temporal and situational rather than given and marked. In the political arena she suggests a move away from the discourse and policy of integration towards facing the challenge posed by the situated, complex and intersectional nature of heterogeneity. This relates also to the role of boundaries and hierarchies in power relations and how people engage, negotiate and resist them as well as internalize them. Using the example of the UK, Anthias demonstrates how gendered bodies are at the heart of much discourse on ‘deviant’ others who are seen as incapable of integration. She argues that it is necessary to develop a way of conceptualizing integration which does not construct a dichotomy between ‘them’ and ‘us’ (primarily conceived as third country migrants versus white Europeans) and which attends to social solidarity more broadly conceived. She draws together some insights from notions of solidarity, interculturalism and intersectionality as ways of overcoming some of the current difficulties in integration discourses and practices, developing an alternative framing to the problem of integration.

Chapter 3 demystifies integration as a ‘two-way’ process or a contractual agreement between migrants and the host society. Dora Kostakopoulou’s analysis of historical accounts of integration and her scrutiny of the concept from a legal perspective show the persistence of paternalism and ethnocentricity. She critically evaluates the integration requirements migrants are asked to meet in order to be able to enter, reside, reunite with their families and naturalize in the host country. The analysis of such requirements shows how integration that rests on artificial homogenization is, in reality, a one-way process aimed at procuring conformity, discipline and migration control. The civic integration paradigm is critically addressed as a crucial feature of a renewed, albeit old-fashioned, nation-based politics used by political elites to provide answers to a wide range of issues and to elicit support for a controlling state in the first decade of the 21st century.

Chapter 4, by Nicos Trimikliniotis, discusses contradictions in EU integration policy at conceptual and implementation levels based on the analysis of the current EU policy frame, as defined in official EU documents. He shows how the social, political, economic and ideological factors defining the crux of integration in a European context are premised on the logic that migrants are essentially responsible for their own accommodation. While the post-Maastricht regime of unifying and integrating the EU established free movement of the factors of production, including labour, it also generated external/internal frontiers and exclusion/inferiorization mechanisms. Integration as a current policy priority defining who can and who ought to be integrated is conceptualized as ‘a new form of racialization’ whereby certain migrants are treated as ‘deviants’. Trimikliniotis shows that debates on integration are at the heart of the dissensus or fundamental disagreement about migration issues at large, and that integration policies serve to reproduce the exclusion of migrants.

Chapter 5, by Moritz Jesse, shows how the EU and its Member States apply different legal rules to third country nationals and Union citizens in various fields with negative consequences for the prospect of their inclusion into receiving societies. The chapter assesses migration laws on rights to family reunification, employment and occupation, as well as integration. It demonstrates that there is a blunt separation between wanted, for example, highly skilled individuals, and unwanted immigrants, for example, family members of migrants. Legislation is sharply tailored to encourage or discourage immigration accordingly. In sharp contrast to political rhetoric, integration measures especially for family members are primarily used to prevent (legal) migration of unwanted immigrants. In the eyes of migrants, they merely represent elements giving rise to unnecessary distress and uncertainty and form another legal barrier to their inclusion into the receiving society. The author argues that in such an atmosphere, where vital rights for integration (for example, secure residence or family life) are dependent on factors beyond the control of the individual, inclusion and fair treatment for third country nationals through an approximation of rights with Union citizens are illusions and not reflected in any legislative reality.

In Chapter 6, Mojca Pajnik discusses the potential of the concept of citizenship to tackle realities of cross-border living and the public activity of migrating subjects. Rigidly ethnic conceptions of nationality have deflated the potential of the concept of citizenship and have resulted in the largest attention in citizenship debates being still devoted to citizenship as a legal status. The chapter attempts to rethink citizenship so as to encompass the variety of belongings of multiple displaced subjects who are on the move. It draws attention to processes of the depoliticization of citizenship, such as a) nationalization by naturalization, b) assimilation, c) contractualization (the concept of ‘market citizenship’) and d) subordination through integration. Some of these trends have resulted in the invention of modified or new citizenship conceptualizations, such as that of transnational or post-national citizenship, differentiated or multi-layered citizenship, and so on. These are examined in the chapter, which provides an argument for a restoration of the political dimensions of the concept of citizenship.

The notion of ‘migrants being unwilling to integrate’ that has increasingly come into focus in migration and integration debates is the concern of Chapter 7, by Maria Kontos, writing on Germany. This notion fosters the image of a migrant who actively and intentionally works towards or against integration. Focusing on the issue of agency within the integration process, the chapter discusses what assumptions about the migrant as actor underlie this concept and analyses the interplay of the discourse on the ‘unwillingness of the migrants to integrate’ in Germany with policy. The chapter highlights some of the ways in which integration discourse impacts on migrants’ self-conception and their positioning in society.

In Chapter 8, Aino Saarinen and Maija Jäppinen suggest that, when considering the particular political inclusion of migrants, Finland is not a model country, as has sometimes been seen. The Nordic, residence-based welfare model aiming at universal social rights, implemented in Finland as well, is in principle favourable towards migrants. But the embedded work ethos and interplay of economic and social rights and obligations and migrants’ long-term marginalization from work life makes them vulnerable. Formally, political rights – the right to vote and stand for office, join a party or an organization or found one – are at the level of ‘best practice’, but in reality migrants have been outside political decision-making. Consequently, migration policies, programmes and action plans have been formulated for migrants, not with them. The authors discuss political empowerment as a key challenge and as a precondition for the formation of transcultural society based on two-way negotiations, mutual respect and willingness to give space to cultural diversities.

Chapter 9, by Mirjana Morokvasic-Müller, discusses integration from a gender perspective, both in its pre-migration aspect, as a condition to entry, and in its post-migration dimension, as reflected in some indicators concerning immigrants’ and their offspring’s access to the labour market. Besides selection, the integration measures, contracts and tests are used as means of restricting migration: they address only some immigrants (for example, third country migrants), constructing them as ‘Others’, and target mostly women as spouses. While women perform better in education, they are disadvantaged in the labour market, more so if tertiary educated. The author shows that the persisting discrimination in the labour market (unemployment, temporary contracts, over-qualification) of the already present immigrants, more so if highly skilled and female, sheds a new light on the overall discursive ‘preference’ for the highly skilled immigrants, welcome throughout Europe.

Paul Scheibelhofer in Chapter 10 analyses images of migrant Turkish-Muslim masculinity as present in migration and integration discourses in Austria. The chapter combines theoretical approaches of critical masculinity studies, postcolonial feminism and critical migration studies to analyse how particular notions of culture, difference, gender and sexuality are used to legitimize modern politics of governing migration in talking about migrant masculinity. In analysing recent political debates and legal measures in Austria, it is argued that the figure of a dangerous, patriarchal migrant masculinity is employed to create risk scenarios of migration lest it not be governed correctly. Representatives across political strands share these notions of dangerous migrant masculinity and use them to draw lines between good and bad diversity, define problem populations and argue for restrictive integration measures. The analysis shows that the dominant notions about problematic migrant masculinity are not mere images or prejudices, but are thoroughly connected with migration politics and the politico-economic interests they represent.

Chapter 11, by Giovanna Campani and Tiziana Chiappelli, looks at migrant women’s ‘frozen professional destiny’, taking into account the ‘gender systems’ in Southern Europe, characterized by strong inequalities between men and women. The authors discuss the subordinated position of migrant women in the labour market using the Global Gender Gap Report that points to gender bias in politics, economy, education and health. The chapter focuses on the case of Italy, in the attempt to demonstrate that the structural characteristics of the economic system and the welfare regime block the professional status of migrant women, while, at the same time, keepi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Contesting Integration–Migration Management and Gender Hierarchies
• Part I: Integration and Citizenship: Theoretical and Policy Considerations
• Part II: Questioning Integration in Practice: Framing and Perceiving Integration
• Part III: Gender, Masculinity, Integration
• Index