The Integration Nation. Adrian Favell
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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 and citizenship processes, the incorporation of associations and third-sector organizations, anti-discrimination and equal opportunities in education and the labour market, inclusion in housing and social policy, law and order issues, as well as policies promoting cultural diversity (see a longer discussion in Favell 2015: 75ff). Similar kinds of definitional frameworks have been proposed by international organizations such as the OECD (2018) and the European Union (Horizon 2018; European Commission 2020a), national policy commissions and high-level reports. One or two countries even have a ‘Ministry of Integration’. It is also the refrain of international research funders whose financing for explicit research on immigrant integration, especially since the perceived European Mediterranean ‘migration crisis’ of 2015, has been vast (European Commission 2020b). Looking globally, integration policy and integration research can be found not only in obvious settler countries which may have long elaborated ideas similar to receiving states in the North Atlantic West, but also in countries in every continent facing what are often seen as unprecedented challenges of international population movements.
This massive and growing output might be characterized as the ‘integration industry’ of mainstream policy-oriented research (see also Boswell 2009; Scholten and van Breugel 2018; Vertovec 2020). An example is the very influential ‘indicators of integration framework’, introduced by the refugee studies scholars Ager and Strang in the early 2000s (see Ager and Strang 2004, 2008: 169ff). It provides a model of integration in the form of a business school-type diagram: a kind of inverted pyramid in which legal foundations (formal rights and status) lie under facilitators (language, educational and cultural skills) that support mechanisms of social connection (interactive bonds, bridges and networks), which underpin outcomes (successful measures of socio-economic attainment, health and education outcomes, and so on). These ‘domains’ are interrelated but are said to be multidimensional and multidirectional. A toolkit is offered with this framework, breaking down each of these indicators into sub-questions that can measure the behaviour or performance of new migrants against established populations. As with the think tank formulation cited above, the theory of society here is nebulous – there is no clear causal structure, scale or context, and no real sense of history; and the idealized processes elide the kind of state and political power necessary to imagine governing institutions able to create a functioning society in its image. But highbrow social theory is not the target: the society and the groups it speaks of are all assumed to exist. Rather, the diagrams and toolkit are directed to policy makers who need to have some clear and operational policy measurements to hand as benchmarks of progress and failure in order to report, or to justify, further intervention. Initially focused on new refugees in Scotland, the framework has been adopted in policy debates about new and diverse migrant arrivals around the world (for an overview, see Donato and Ferris 2020: 11–14). It continues to provide a justificatory model for progressive-minded government propositions (in its latest form, for the UK Home Office, see Ndofor-Tar et al. 2019).
The other most striking industry of work surrounds the formulation and analysis of cross-national indexes to identify international best practices. One organization based in Brussels – the Migration Policy Group (Solano and Huddleston 2020) – provides a synthetic index (the MIPEX index) measuring implementation and attainment in integration policy in countries worldwide, in terms of labour-market mobility, education, political participation, access to nationality, family reunion, health, permanent residence and anti-discrimination. This constitutes an enormously influential database of information that informs advocacy, political debate, press coverage and policies internationally and nationally, as well as swathes of academic research on comparative integration policies and outcomes. As with the ‘indicators’ framework, these and similar tools have built a ‘normal science’ of immigrant integration that fills migration studies and increasingly mainstream social science journals with new applied studies (using ‘indicators’, see, e.g., Phillimore and Goodson 2008; Cheung and Phillimore 2014, 2017; also the burgeoning range of social stratification, health or education scholarship, e.g., Heath and Cheung 2007; Kalter et al. 2018; Ruiz and Vargas-Silva 2018; Understanding Society 2020; using ‘indexes’, see Howard 2009; Janoski 2010; Koopmans, Michalowski and Waibel 2012; Koopmans 2013; Vink and Bauböck 2013; Goodman 2014, 2015; Bilgili, Huddleston and Joki 2015; Helbling et al. 2017).
Much of the recent applied research wants to argue that integration can be conceived in ways that do not presuppose the heavy presence of the nation-state-society as a normative backdrop. For instance, Ager and Strang (2008), as with much of the recent proliferation of local studies on refugees in Europe funded after the ‘crisis’ of 2015, seek to limit its meaning to interaction between groups in local communities, usually a city. Quantitative researchers often understand it as a neutral set of observations that can be specified to particular sectors of society – such as integration into the labour market (Demireva and Heath 2017), or norms of educational attainment (Kalter et al. 2018). Yet, as I will detail, intercultural-type thinking on integration tends towards normative idealization: it is good at offering affirmative examples of mutual recognition in local contexts but typically empties these scenarios of the inevitable relations of power and domination between nationals and newcomers, majorities and minorities, that reproduce inequalities and racism. The systematic empirical work of the quantitative sociologists, meanwhile, excels at measurement and modelling inequality but effectively reduces integration to atheoretical descriptive terms: comparing the ‘newcomers’ to so-called ‘natives’ on various measures to see whether this or that group has attained a certain parity on this or that dimension of social life, with no account of why such differentiation and stratification might occur in the first place.
What is missing is a theory of society: of how and why these categories have been constituted historically and conceptually – as a distinctive feature of ongoing liberal democracy and modern development – and how this all fits together as a whole – of what makes certain populations ‘immigrants’