Immigrant integration has been an ongoing issue for advanced capitalistic societies in Western Europe and North America. The basic concern is how dangerous a threat to national security and social cohesion is the increased level of cultural, religious, and ethnic plurality that immigrants bring. After the 9/11 attacks and the 2005 London metro bombings, it appeared to many that these concerns were not unwarranted, and immigrant-receiving countries have taken the issue of immigrant integration as one of their top priorities. Enormous time, energy, and money have been dedicated to create policies to ease the integration of immigrants so that they, while remaining economically active, will not pose a challenge to the unity and security of their host society.
In the introduction, I argue that social and political integration of immigrants into their host country is taken as a âcollective goalâ for policy makers and academics. However, there is no common agreement on how to accomplish the integration of immigrants. The academics and policy makers use the term âintegrationâ in various different and sometimes opposing ways. I criticize the dominant approach to immigrant integration for its analysis of the issue from the host countriesâ perspective. The aim of this study is to argue that integration should be understood as a democratic justice problem . In this chapter, I will focus on the political theories offering normative principles of justice with regard to minority rights and will try to justify recognition theory as my choice of analysis of immigrant integration.
I believe that the best way to accomplish this objective is to start with the existing debate around immigration and the issue of justice within political theory literature. When it comes to the question of the integration of immigrants, the social and political theory literature is very rich, diverse, and fragmented. As mentioned in the previous chapter, this issue has generally been approached from an assimilation and multiculturalism axis , with a focus mainly on the legal rights of minorities within a liberal framework. In this chapter, I will trace back the history of debates about minority rights in order to position the issue of immigrant integration within the political theory literature.
First, I will introduce the debate about minority rights within liberal political theory to understand the normative foundations of multiculturalism both as a social and as a political theory. In this context, the liberal justifications of multicultural theory will be explained with regard to Kymlickaâs understanding of multiculturalism. I will argue that even though the focus on group rights has helped to elevate certain injustices suffered by immigrants on an institutional level, it has also caused these theorists to overlook the socio-economic pathologies that immigrants face in their working life and affairs with their national counterparts and cultural groups. By keeping the problem within the confines of public sphere and with reference to the democratic demands of rigidly identified immigrant groups, the task of realizing justice within the multiculturalist framework is basically left to the state.
Next, I will propose a relational and pluralistic understanding of individual autonomy with reference to recognition theories. My main focus will be on Honnethâs recognition theoretic model, which I believe is the most analytically suitable one to analyze the socio-economic barriers to immigrant integration. I will give a brief outline of Honnethâs theory to show how approaching the issue of immigrant integration from a recognition theoretic perspective can unravel in a more comprehensive manner the economic and social pathologies that create barriers to immigrant integration. I will put special emphasis on the importance of the recognition of esteem of immigrants within the capitalistic structure.
Liberal Justification of Minority Rights
According to Kymlicka, the history of debates on minority rights can be categorized into three consecutive phases. The first debate about minority rights occurred before 1989âthe collapse of Soviet Unionâand was about picking a side between two opposing approaches to the understanding of individual autonomy. On the one hand, the classical liberal approach opposes culturally particularistic policies because it supposes that multicultural policies will override the neutrality and impartiality of political institutions. Liberals prioritize individual basic rights over particular definitions of the good. In this sense, liberalism constructs its understanding of freedom and equality on the basis of the unencumbered and atomistic individual. On the other hand, the communitarians believe that as individuals we are completely attached to our community and culture and have separate obligations to our community. To illustrate, Sandel argues that we have constitutive attachments to our culture and community that we cannot get rid of without deconstructing our identity (Sandel 1984, p. 90). In the first debate, cherishing minority rights was seen as possible only through a communitarian defense of the value of community. However, this apparent duality between communitarian understanding of the âembedded individualâ and the liberal principle of neutrality for the actualization of negative freedom of individuals was questioned within liberal circles with the emergence of the national minority question after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Accordingly, the second debate was focused on the possibility of minority rights within a liberal framework. In this debate, political theorists approached the issue from the liberal point of view and tried to answer the question of âwhat is the possible scope of minority rights within liberal theory?â (Kymlicka 2007, p. 30). The foundation of this debate was grounded on the empirical reality that minorities in Western liberal countries demand âat least some forms of public recognition and support for their language, practices, and identities,â and these countries have already been accommodating specific minority rights within a liberal framework (Kymlicka 2007, p. 30). In the second debate, in which Kymlicka was an influential contributor, liberal political theorists tried to lay out normative reasons about why autonomous individuals who embrace liberal values may need special minority rights. Thus, the explanation of the importance of cultural membership came to the forefront of the literature.
In Multicultural Citizenship, Kymlicka proposes a liberal justification for legal recognition of cultural group rights by putting emphasis on the cultural conditions of individual autonomy. Kymlicka argues that culture is a defining feature of individual identity. In order for individuals to develop autonomous personalities, they need to grow up in a culture where they can freely find symbolic expressions for their decisions and opinions. Hence, the liberal justification of the stateâs support for the development and protection of cultural groups has its foundation in the redefinition of negative freedom based on the identification of the self with regard to culture.
Kymlicka (1995) sets out to show that âmany forms of group differentiated citizenship are consistent with liberal principles of freedom and equalityâ (p. 34). The point is to differentiate the forms of minority rights so that the ones which do not undermine individual autonomy can be defended from a liberal perspective. In order to do that, Kymlicka distinguishes internal restriction and external protection claims. It is also important to keep in mind that he is against the differentiation between individual and collective rights since the category of collective rights can include rights of associations and trade unions. Instead of collective rights, Kymlicka uses the term âgroup differentiated rights.â
According to Kymlicka (1995), âliberals can and should endorse certain external protections, where they promote fairness between groups, but should reject internal restrictions which limit the right of group members to question and revise traditional authorities and practicesâ (p. 37). In this context, Kymlicka makes another distinction and says that societal cultures which involve not only shared memories or narratives but also common practices and institutions should be protected for their survival.
Moreover, Habermas (1998) claims that liberal states are not blind to cultural differences and these differences can be incorporated into the state through communicative action. For this, one needs to ârecognize that the bearers of individual rights [have been ascribed] an identity that is conceived intersubjectivelyâŠA correctly understood theory of rights requires a politics of recognition that protects the integrity of the individual in the life context in which his or her identity is formedâ (Habermas 1998, p. 208). Nevertheless, Habermas prioritizes personal autonomy and rejects collective rights for the reproduction of specific cultures. He believes that each and every individual should have a right to say yes or no to her groupâs value judgments.
The critics of minority rights within the liberal framework have opposed this line of argument from two major fronts. On the one hand, some claim that it is better to keep neutrality in liberal political institutions because of the existence of essentially opposing cultural values. For example, Brian Barry suggests that the importance given to the public affirmation of individual membership in cultural groups by cultural liberalists is logically unattainable especially when many cultures disagree in their substantive claims (Moore 2003, p. 159). On the other hand, some claim that individual membership in cultural groups is a completely private matter. Michael Walzer advocates for a firm division between the liberal state and ethnicity just like the separation between religion and politics (Levey and Modood 2009, p. 8). Accordingly, what matters for the liberal state is its citizensâ alliance to the civic values of the constitution, not their private feelings of belonging to specific ethnic communities.
In general, critics of multiculturalism argue that the policies that protect cultural groups promote radical cultural relativism, which undermines the liberal values of free speech and equality of opportunity (Barry 2002; Huntington 2004). They claim that too much tolerance for cultural differences is bad for social cohesion because it creates and/or protects rigid ethno-cultural groups, which may in turn breed radicalization and marginalization of ethnic groups. Thus, multiculturalism defeats its purpose, which is integration, and should be either abandoned or limited in scope to a considerable extent.
Although the liberal justification for the cultural rights of minority groups has been under attack by different fronts within liberal theory, theories of multiculturalism did translate into a legitimate explanation of the immigration and minority policies implemented by many Western countries. Multicultural theory suggests that âit is better to recognize and value [cultural] diversity, and not seek to downplay diversity, or to cast all groups within one single cultural mouldâ (Reitz et al. 2009, p. 1). To illustrate, Parekh (2000) in Rethinking Multiculturalism introduces multiculturalism as an ideal considering the inevitability of the cultural embeddedness of human beings and cultural diversity within the nation state and the desirability of i...