The Integration Nation. Adrian Favell
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analysis (on this issue, see Brubaker 2015: 131). I will return to these issues in later chapters.
A recent wave of critical and ‘reflexive’ migration studies – influenced by critical race theory, border studies and citizenship studies – has raised similar points about the insidious properties of conventional thinking on immigration, in the context of the overwhelmingly uncritical use of ‘integration’ in mainstream studies and policy formulations (key works I refer to include: Raghuram 2007; De Genova 2010, 2017; McNevin 2011, 2019; Anderson 2013, 2019; Anthias 2013, 2014; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Nail 2015, 2016; Dahinden 2016; Amelina 2017; Fox and Mogilnicka 2017; Korteweg 2017; Schinkel 2017; Valluvan 2017; Rytter 2019; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss and Cassidy 2019; for an overview of this literature, see Gonzales and Sigona 2017; Collyer, Hinger and Schweitzer 2020; Shachar 2020). These interventions have, in part, revived critiques of immigrant integration as a form of ‘methodological nationalism’ that can be traced back to the late 1990s (Bauböck 1994a, 1994b; Bommes 1998, 2012; Favell 2001 [1999], 2003; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). The critique of ‘immigration’, ‘integration’ and ‘citizenship’ as a cardinal form of thinking-for-the-state has earlier roots in the Bourdieusian scholarship of Abdelmalek Sayad (1994, 2004 [1996]). It can also be linked clearly to anarchist critiques of state-centred thought (Scott 1998) and to Foucauldian thought more generally on governmentality (Walters 2006, 2015). The influence of Étienne Balibar’s post-Marxist work (2001) on homo nationalis and race, class and nation might also be noted. In immigration and migration studies, the critique was strongly emphasized in core works on post-national membership (Soysal 1994; Jacobson 1996; Faist 2000; Benhabib 2004; Bosniak 2006) but can also be read via the Weberian approaches to nation-building and immigration politics pioneered by Aristide Zolberg (1983, 1989, 1999, 2006); his influence shows up strongly in much of the most influential political sociology of international migration (e.g., Brubaker 1992, 2001; Hollifield 1992, 2004; Koslowski 2000; Torpey 2000; Joppke 2005; Janoski 2010; Hampshire 2013; FitzGerald and Cook-Martin 2014; Waldinger 2015; FitzGerald 2020; for the contours of this line of thought, see Joppke 1998a; Waldinger and Soehl 2013).
The political sociology literature provides a comparative historical frame on nationalism and nation building that can be linked back to the more overtly decolonial impetus of much of the newer critical migration studies. Viewed this way, integration as nation building sits at the heart of the ongoing mission of liberal democracies to generate power from the successful management and governance of populations – whether ostensibly local, national or global in its scale of operation. Wherever it is used, at whatever scale, integration implies an organized, functional and consensual view of society: one whose configuration of institutions is able to categorize and differentiate its own members by at once individualizing, internally unifying and externally bounding them. This entails a default model: one in which the integration of newcomers is into one single, indivisible ‘state’ (the process), thereby constituting one single integrated ‘society’ (the end state). Without all these elements present it is not really ‘integration’; the power of the liberal democratic state depends on it. The theory of society invoked by the term is therefore prototypically the modern advanced (western) nation-state. A critical view is needed to expose these assumptions, as well as to make sense of their implications in relation to other confusing uses of the term: for example, regional ‘European integration’, or even the possibility of an ‘integrated’ global society (a question posed in the sociology of Richard Münch, e.g., 1996). Moreover, it is a performative action to invoke as a benchmark the ‘successful’ integration ‘process’ towards building better ‘communities’ along different dimensions. This points towards the inescapably normative implication of integration scholarship in its relation to formulations of integration policy.
Towards a new political demography
Ordinarily, questions of ‘integration’ are identified in order to specify a range of ‘post-immigration’ interventions or processes that are distinct from, and follow after, ‘immigration’ policy as such – selection, border control, rights of entry and abode, who is in an ‘immigrant’ category and who is an unwanted ‘alien’ or ‘illegal’, or merely a ‘tourist’ or ‘visitor’, and so on. This is important because there is often an implied prioritization imposed on the two kinds of policy: successful integration presupposes a well-functioning border regime that must be cleared first and which has effectively fulfilled all the other definitional operations noted above. As suggested by Roger Waldinger, the typical view of ‘immigrant integration’ is emphatically one of the nation-state with its back turned to the border (Waldinger 2015): immigration has occurred, the border has operated and been affirmed in its (legal) crossing, and the duly designated ‘immigrant’ is now observed as subject to various pressures and opportunities that will ‘integrate’ them as ‘equals’ into their new ‘home’ society. Aspects of a migrant’s existing life that may already be ‘integrated’ outside the border are not relevant to this question – except perhaps as hindrances or resources in the new, encompassing (national) societal integration that is meant to take its place. There is already here an implied deficiency: as a result of crossing that border, the immigrant needs to change, to be or to do something in relation to whatever it is they must integrate into to achieve the desired parity.
Yet it is the fact that they are subject to integration – the possibility for the ‘immigrant’ of a successful implantation, settlement and development towards full membership – which defines who is deemed to ‘immigrate’ in the first place. The purposive nation-state building or bordering properties of integration thinking become clear here. The underlying assumption of national societal integration in this sense precedes the operation of the immigration policy at the border (see also Joppke 2011, citing Niklas Luhmann, on this point). Other kinds of people who have crossed the international border at the same time – such as tourists, business-visitors, truck drivers bringing goods, or ‘illegal’ migrants – must be excluded from the functional vision of national ‘society’. They do not, by definition, need integration. Although all these other activities imply presence, social interaction and ‘integration’ in other senses – for example, as part of an integrated regional or global economy across borders, or a transnational family structure – they are not part of the exclusive, power generating, nation-state building that centres on the ‘immigrant’ who can and should be ‘integrated’. It is those who are identified and observed as subject to integration – the immigrants – who thereby confirm the unit in question as a distinctly national society: it is a ‘nation’ because it is defined, differentiated (as a national ‘society’) and legitimated (as having national ‘sovereign’ jurisdiction) through this particular way of seeing an abstract population as a unit – as made up exhaustively of insider nationals, outside foreigners, and those who have crossed the line between these categories (see also Schinkel 2017). In other words, among foreigners only ‘immigrants’ can integrate and become members like the supposed ‘natives’, and they must do so in order that the successful society as a ‘nation’ continues to be made up of ‘full’ and recognized citizens: that is, full membership of a club to which all nationals, by definition, belong.
This circular reasoning underlines the normative affirmation via notions of immigration and integration of the necessary nationalization of a population which belongs here in this territory, to this society, and the distinctions it must draw between itself and all those considered as ‘foreigners’ and ‘aliens’, who do not; it is, in effect, a question raised anew as an anomaly in the modern world system every time a foreigner crosses a border, and potentially changes jurisdiction, as an ‘immigrant’ (Joppke 1998b). An additional anomaly occurs in colonial settler states as they become reconceived as immigrant ‘integration nations’: where immigrants over time effectively become the ‘natives’ and indigenous populations become ‘national minorities’, also needing ‘integrating’ (Mamdani 2020; Sharma 2020).
In spatial terms, these normative definitions and delineations of immigration and integration continue to play a key role in sustaining the conventional ‘container state’ view of national society – the so-called ‘Westphalian’