The Integration Nation. Adrian Favell
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has centred on the failed target for the designated ‘immigrant’ population. This was infamously set by a former prime minister, David Cameron, as a net immigration of (only) 100,000 persons per year. This created a huge political outcry, as for years the real number was never lower than 300,000 (Cohen 2017). The target has since been scrapped, and the overall number is still growing (Vargas-Silva and Rienzo 2020). At the same time, 150,000–200,000 British nationals leave the British population annually (although they do not leave their citizenship). The huge controversies over Brexit in part centred on the fact that more than half of the ‘immigrants’ identified in these official UK statistics were in fact non-nationals from EU member states – over which the state had no legal control or restriction. They were EU citizens, with a kind of European citizenship that allowed them to come and go as they pleased, and live and work in British society, without in fact becoming, legally or politically, immigrants. There was no implication they would need to become full members; they were not subject to integration. In fact, they were ‘free movers’ and might have been better thought of as part of that floating international population. Yet the British state felt obliged to call them ‘immigrants’ and include them in those statistics. Politicians, the media and even many scholars referred to them as ‘EU immigrants’, even though this was a legal falsehood (Favell and Barbulescu 2018). Brexit, of course, ‘resolved’ this question – with further complications for ‘immigrant integration’ which I will trace later.
Other ‘immigrants’ in the same statistics had in contrast always been chosen and identified at the border, with strictly selective entry via work or family reunification rights, the two typical motives, unless they were recognized refugees. These immigrants were legally and politically designated as such in conventional terms. They have always been subject to integration and could follow the line all the way to membership and full citizenship. Counting and identifying them as part of the population ensures the continuity of the box that contains the total British population and secures its power. Integration would ultimately resolve the anomaly of their international migration. Yet, from this point of view, all other ‘mobile’ populations are irrelevant, including a large majority of the resident long-term non-nationals, who have a ‘right to remain’ – but also remain anomalous.
Integration and citizenship
The United Kingdom has its peculiarities as a nation-state, but this complicated set of arrangements regarding migration, immigration, free movement and other forms of mobility is not atypical of liberal democracies worldwide. To summarize, the archetypal liberal democratic nation-state – the ‘integration nation’ – is able to define itself when it identifies a (usually small) subset of the mobile international population as ‘immigrants’: those who have crossed a border and ‘settled’, and who are therefore subject to ‘integration’. Going beyond its formal definition (i.e., receiving nationality or a passport), citizenship as full membership will be defined by this process. This imposes a particular kind of obligation on both the state and the immigrant. This obligation does not apply to many other mobile populations, present on or passing through the territory, who are thereby ‘foreigners’ or ‘aliens’ and irrelevant to this question and excluded from it. This is regardless of whether they are in fact socially present, engaged in interactions with or connected in some way in the society – unless, of course, their legal status changes and they become ‘immigrants’. From the point of view of ‘integration’, the anomalous position of long-term or permanent foreign residents, as much as the undocumented or irregulars present, here becomes apparent. Asylum seekers awaiting a decision on ‘settlement’ and ‘immigration’ are also anomalous. Later, we will see how transnational populations more generally create further anomalies for ‘immigrant integration’. These groups are not yet, and may never be, a part of its national population, as defined by the sovereign designation of who is considered a member and who is not. Immigrants in contrast have to be, however diverse they are or however recently they arrived. Their linear progress towards citizenship is crucial to the nation-state’s power. In other words, this process – what is called ‘integration’ – defines the nation-state-society at its borders, as much as the means by which it binds all its members together in some unified and recognized sense as legitimate and formally equal citizens.
The state asserts these powers by naming these processes and its components, and claiming sovereignty over them (Sayad 2004 [1996]). The inherent political demography of nationalism and nation building I have been describing becomes methodological nationalism when it is blindly reflected in research on ‘immigrant integration’, rather than foregrounded and studied: i.e., work that simply assumes the object of study to be the objective process of transforming outsider ‘immigrants’ into insider ‘citizens’ of a pre-existing population container, according to measures of attainment of parity with existing members. Such work overlooks how those same actions work to define, constitute and reproduce the container itself, and how other categories of people are left out, made invisible or fail by definition to attain these statuses.
This key point – about how integration defines what is immigration – can also be made in relation to how integration defines true or accomplished ‘citizenship’ as full membership. Two examples may make the point. Citizenship requires integration in order to fulfil its richer potential of signalling more than just formal legal status; it denotes a membership that is fully and equally recognized and functioning in that society (as a specific territorial unit). A new citizen who holds a passport and can claim the formal rights it bestows but who is facing racial discrimination at work, or who is practising violent ideological beliefs that break the laws of the country, is not conventionally considered to be integrated. By the same token, a culturally or nationally distinct newcomer who is successfully pursuing a career and can express their voice freely and equally in politics, yet who is not considered by their neighbours yet to be really British (or French, or whatever) is also not (quite) integrated – even if on all other technical measures they might be. Citizenship as fully accomplished and recognized membership matters to integration: there is a process of becoming taking place with an end point that can be attained, and which provides a normative benchmark of its success. The emancipatory mission implied in this moves integration from a pastoral to a governmental (biopolitical) logic. As we will see, integrating newcomers on these terms means that many are effectively set up to fail (see Anderson 2013).
The duly designated ‘immigrant’ who has been able to fully integrate as a ‘citizen’ affirms the successful national sovereignty of the nation-state over the complex social, economic and cultural processes that produced this outcome. It is an assertion of sovereign power strictly delimited to the transformation of selected foreigners into immigrants and then citizens that could have been seen otherwise as part of the emergence of some unbounded global or post-national society within or beyond a national territory. Transnational visions of society have no need to limit the discussion to selected ‘immigrants’ and will very likely seek to dissolve the artificially maintained political and legal lines between different forms of mobility or international movement. Indeed, they will also often seek to dissolve distinctions between ‘mobile’ and ‘immobile’ populations. In the linear definition, integration necessarily does limit the discussion to ‘immigrants’ who have moved and crossed an international border.
These definitional properties of integration in the standard view also offer a clue to the pervasive, often default, use of the term to encapsulate post-immigration processes in society. As the discussion suggests, the definitional use of integration implies investing these situations so described with a distinctive, encompassing, national territorial scale and border-drawing functionality that is not automatically attached to terms like ‘inclusion’ or ‘participation’. Moreover, while the narrower term ‘incorporation’ tends (like integration) to be linked to an accomplishment of bounded citizen membership, ‘acculturation’ could certainly be conceived as referring to something not strictly bounded and national in scale: such as acculturation into White Anglo-Protestant norms or a dominant Judeo-Christian culture (etc.). Integration has emerged as the pre-eminent concept, not only, as I will show, through sidelining other politically questionable terms at various junctures but also by swallowing up more precise or less comprehensive