This unquestioned, progressive doxa of ‘immigration’ and ‘integration nations’ in the modern world – largely reflective of a certain skewed vision of the United States as a prototype – is the foundation of a particular legitimated liberal democratic global order associated with the nation-state, with its locus in the North Atlantic West. It is the supposedly progressive nationalism we live and breathe as our everyday normal state, repeated endlessly by politicians, dominant media, popular culture – and academics writing about ‘immigration’. Mainstream proponents of ‘immigrant integration’, who fail to see how their propagation of concepts is embedded in the doxa of immigration, integration and citizenship, reproduce this state power blindly. This applies as much to the normative typology building in institutional studies of the policy and politics of immigrant integration as to the more positivist-minded social science of integration of ‘ethnic’ and ‘migrant’ groups as it gets operationalized in comparative and quantitative studies.
It has become a cliché that key concepts in the social sciences and humanities are ‘essentially contested’. This may be true sometimes, but such contests may also reflect intellectual confusion or dissimulation. In fact, digging into the historical origins, logic, contextualization and contemporary application of the concept ‘integration’ reveals a rather coherent and clear genealogy. Viewed this way, it is clear the use of the term commits scholars – including those who see their work as strictly positivist – to both political (i.e., normative) and methodological nationalism, as well as effectively an apologetics of the consequences of colonialism and empire. They may wish to buy into 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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