Immigrant Integration After Diversity: The Elements of Political Demography

• In Event: Contemplating the Openness and Closure of Citizenship and Borders I

Abstract

Despite the centrality of the concept “integration” to nearly all debates on immigration policy, the term is rarely scrutinised theoretically in the academic literature, let alone in policy debate. Among policy makers it generally stands as an unquestioned progressive conception of how receiving societies process, benefit from, and change in response to migration/mobilities classified as wanted “im-migration”, usually as part of the re-fashioning of longstanding nation-building narratives. It is emphatically the view of the nation-state on new members of its “society” with its back turned to the (assumed) borders established by “sovereign” immigration policy and control. As this signals, the use of the concept is embedded both in methodological nationalism, as well as evoking an archaic functionalist vision of bounded (national) societies producing morally and politically emancipated individual “citizens”. The chapter will lay out the historical emergence of “integration” as a concept in liberal democracies, how it has been used (comparatively) in different national policy contexts, and how it relates to, and encompasses, synonymous terms in the literature, such as “assimilation”, “inclusion”, “accommodation” and “acculturation”. The pre-eminence of the term in framing post-migration processes, and its problematic relations with multiculturalism and transnationalism, points to its central role in re-inforcing essentially colonial and (usually) heavily racialised views on immigration, from the receiving state’s viewpoint only. Ultimately, the critical examination of the concept needs to be seen as central to the development of migration studies as the foundational study of what I call political demography: how a “us and them” world of territorialised populations, borders, categories of migration/mobilities, and citizens/aliens, is sustained to uphold a global system of nation-states founded on massive global inequalities.

I proceed through two main sections. In the first, I dig back into the scholarly and policy history of the term in different national contexts and intellectual traditions. In the light of this, it ought to be clear what integration means, and where other terms should be found for social processes within or beyond this. In a second section, I then go on to show how its operationalisation in social science research on post-immigration processes inevitably produces a series of problematic consequences that have often left nominally progressive scholars implicitly defending highly nationalist and arguably racist conceptions of Western society. This has been highlighted by a wave of new critical scholarship on immigration and integration. These critiques pose the question of whether integration can be decolonised as a concept: that is, used in a way that might disembed it from its colonial nation-building heritage and which may point towards a transnational, global or even planetary "integration" of society or peoples. I raise this challenge briefly in the conclusion.

Author

• Adrian Favell, University of Leeds