this – as a defence of ‘people’s’ democracy or the national welfare state, for example – but they need to be clear they do so for normative reasons (as in, e.g., Miller 2016). Critical scholars, however, with other values rooted in the struggle against global inequalities, against racism, and for notions of a transformative politics on a planetary scale, should steer well clear of its conceptual use. Only by critiquing the idea of immigrant integration can we contribute to decentring western views and decolonizing the language and terms of mainstream migration studies (Mayblin and Turner 2021).
As a whole, this book makes the case for a new critical reflection on the use and centrality of integration as a concept. After an opening chapter laying out the field of reference and the elements of a new political demography, the chapters build analytically to show how the notion of integration emerged as the core idea of nation building in diverse post-immigration scenarios, how it has evolved in relation to other concepts in various national contexts, and how it may be re-conceived in terms of changing notions of transnational and global society.
Chapter 1, ‘Integration as a Paradigm’, locates my work in relation to both the burgeoning new currents in critical migration studies as well as the established political sociology of immigration of an earlier generation. It goes on to establish the elements of an approach able to think outside the standard linear paradigm of immigration, integration and citizenship. Chapter 2, ‘Integration and Assimilation’, explains how in technical terms empirical integration research owes most of its scientific operationalization to US-centred models of assimilation, establishing the dominant image of the United States as the prototypical country of immigration. American research has become increasingly influential in international comparative work as it has developed in quantitative sophistication, establishing a clear and dominant transatlantic paradigm of ‘immigrant integration’ that is now at the heart of mainstream migration studies, and which has influence all around the world. Chapter 3, ‘Integration and Multiculturalism’, notes how integration has become the preferred term for post-immigration processes, and traces its rhetorical rise in Western Europe during the post-war period: first in Britain in the 1960s where it was adopted then rejected, then in France as part of a neo-republican wave in the 1980s, before its diffusion across all of Europe and back to Britain, with the eclipse of multiculturalism. Integration is intended to chart a middle way between other concepts of managing diversity, but the shift to cultural issues – particularly religious diversity – and the limits it poses in terms of solidarity or welfare provision, reveals its exclusionary nationalist core. These debates however underline its common-sense tenacity in mainstream and notionally progressive thinking about the future of nation-states. Chapter 4, ‘Integration and Race’, digs back further to the influence of civil rights and ideas of racial desegregation (both social and spatial) in the United States as a key dimension of the idea of integration first defended in terms of race relations in 1960s Britain. It explains the problematic intersection of race and questions of immigration and integration cast by the shadow of the American experience – and its roots in European colonialism. As this gets lost in many conventional forms of migration and ethnic studies, a covert racialization is smuggled into conceptions of integration in the contemporary context – notably in persistent functionalist argumentation about the supposed backwardness of unintegratable migrant culture and around the unexamined notion of ‘whiteness’ in conceptions of ‘native’ populations. The chapter also explores this in terms of the technical production of race and ethnicity statistics as part of the state’s management of diversity. Chapter 5, ‘Integration and Transnationalism’, then evaluates transnational scholarship and its claims that porous borders and mobilities have facilitated new modes of managing and processing diversity in receiving contexts that might benefit migrants, receiving and sending societies alike. It builds sceptically to an account of the ongoing bordering effects of even the most idealized of contemporary integration models, which reinforce global inequalities and render the integration paradigm an ongoing form of internal colonialism. Chapter 6, ‘Integration and Decolonization’, concludes by assessing the prospects of a decolonial rethink of integration. It first spells out the historical view of coloniality and decolonization that underpins my contemporary analysis of the ‘integration nation’. Then it considers different notions of local, regional, global and planetary integration linked to the idea of open borders, contrasting emergent forms of free movement and post-national rights in the global era of the 1990s and 2000s with the severe re-nationalizing effects of the COVID-19 crisis. Ultimately, an alternative politics to colonialism and neo-liberalism must reject the reaffirmation of integration – even in its most progressive-seeming social democratic forms – and look towards less consensus-based and more conflictual examples of contention, mobilization and solidarity, pursuing transformative change on a global and, ultimately, planetary scale. There must be a total rethink of conventional ideas about immigration, integration and citizenship if resurgent forms of nationalism and racism worldwide are ever to be effectively challenged.
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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
