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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: PIMS - Polity Immigration and Society series
- Sprache: Englisch
The notion of 'immigrant integration' is used everywhere - by politicians, policy makers, journalists and researchers - as an all-encompassing framework for rebuilding 'unity from diversity' after large-scale immigration. Promising a progressive middle way between backward-looking ideas of assimilation and the alleged fragmentation of multiculturalism, 'integration' has become the default concept for states scrambling to deal with global refugee management and the persistence of racial disadvantage. Yet 'integration' is the continuance of a long-standing colonial development paradigm. It is how majority-white liberal democracies absorb and benefit from mass migration while maintaining a hierarchy of race and nationality - and the global inequalities it sustains. Immigrant integration sits at the heart of the neo-liberal racial capitalism of recent decades, in which tight control of nation-building and bordering selectively enables some citizens to enjoy the mobilities of a globally integrating world, as other populations are left behind and locked out. Subjecting research and policy on immigrant integration to theoretical scrutiny, The Integration Nation offers a fundamental rethink of a core concept in migration, ethnic and racial studies in the light of the challenge posed by decolonial theory and movements.
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Seitenzahl: 410
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Thanks and Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Integration as a Paradigm
Integration research as ‘normal science’
Towards a new political demography
Integration and citizenship
Mobilities and diversity
2 Integration and Assimilation
Assimilation in US immigration research
Integration or assimilation?
The modernist development paradigm
Immigration/integration nations in the transatlantic imperium
3 Integration and Multiculturalism
Integration as the middle way
The republican philosophy of integration
Models of integration
Muscular liberalism and after
4 Integration and Race
Integration and desegregation
Technologies of integration
Integration as the production of race/ethnicity
The black box of whiteness
5 Integration and Transnationalism
Transnationalism and integration
Migration and development
Bordering
Citizenship, the birthright lottery and global inequalities
6 Integration and Decolonization
Coloniality and decolonization
Open borders: towards de-nationalization and decolonization?
Urban and local de-nationalization
Global and planetary integration: COVID-19 and after
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Immigration & Society series
Carl L. Bankston III,
Immigrant Networks and Social Capital
Stephanie A. Bohon & Meghan Conley,
Immigration and Population
Caroline B. Brettell,
Gender and Migration
Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser, & Eveline Reisenauer,
Transnational Migration
Adrian Favell,
The Integration Nation
Eric Fong & Brent Berry,
Immigration and the City
Roberto G. Gonzales, Nando Sigona, Martha C. Franco, & Anna Papoutsi,
Undocumented Migration
Christian Joppke,
Citizenship and Immigration
Grace Kao, Elizabeth Vaquera, & Kimberly Goyette,
Education and Immigration
Nazli Kibria, Cara Bowman, & Megan O’Leary,
Race and Immigration
Peter Kivisto,
Religion and Immigration
Cecilia Menjívar, Leisy J. Abrego, & Leah C. Schmalzbauer,
Immigrant Families
Ruth Milkman,
Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat
Ronald L. Mize & Grace Peña Delgado,
Latino Immigrants in the United States
Philip Q. Yang,
Asian Immigration to the United States
Min Zhou & Carl L. Bankston III,
The Rise of the New Second Generation
The Integration Nation
Immigration and Colonial Power in Liberal Democracies
Adrian Favell
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Adrian Favell 2022
The right of Adrian Favell to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4939-9
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Dedication
For Molly
Thanks and Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Polity Press, particularly my editor Jonathan Skerrett, for the invitation to write this book, returning me to my core interest in immigrant integration and nationalism in the light of the new waves of critical and activist work on migration in recent years. It has been an exemplary editorial and production experience.
As always, it is impossible to thank everyone who has helped me think through and articulate these ideas, but I owe a special word of gratitude to friends and colleagues at the University of Leeds, particularly Bobby Sayyid and Ipek Demir for their attentive and encouraging reading of the manuscript; to Tesfalem Yemane and Kheira Arrouche for the brilliant work they are doing; to Li Sun for our work on China; and to members of the Leeds Migration Research Network, the Bauman Institute and the Northern Exposure project, especially Roxana Barbulescu, Albert Varela, Andrew Wallace, Paul Bagguley and Yasmin Hussain. I am grateful always for my precious connection to the Centre d’études européennes et de politique comparée at Sciences Po, Paris, and its fabulous équipe. Final work on the manuscript was completed as a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2021–2022.
Thanks are also due to many other scholars along the way, in particular in the writing of this book: to Bridget Anderson, Christina Barwick, Michaela Benson, Elizabeth Bernstein, Gurminder Bhambra, Hassan Bousetta, Rogers Brubaker, Claire Colomb, Maurice Crul, Juan Díez Medrano, Thomas Faist, Glenda Garelli, Jan Grzymski, Virginie Guiraudon, Zhonghua Guo, James Hampshire, Rubén Hernández León, Simon Hix, Jim Hollifield, Hussein Kassim, Michael Keith, Omar Khan, Dimitry Kochenov, Eleonor Kofman, Sarah Kunz, Jean-Michel Lafleur, Michèle Lamont, Patrick Le Galès, Frans Lelie, Peggy Levitt, Gracia Liu-Farrer, Kesi Mahendran, William Marotti, Marco Martiniello, Rahsaan Maxwell, Anne McNevin, Tariq Modood, Kalypso Nikolaidis, Varun Oberoi, Bhikhu Parekh, Karen Phalet, Parvati Raghuram, Ettore Recchi, Mirna Safi, Mike Savage, Willem Schinkel, Peter Scholten, Hagen Schulz-Forberg, Ayelet Shachar, Patrick Simon, John Solomos, Yasemin Soysal, Kristin Surak, Marc Swyngedouw, Milada Vachudova, Sivamohan Valluvan, Steve Vertovec, Tomasso Vitale, Anja Weiss, Dan Wincott, Gökçe Yurdakul and Ricard Zapata-Barrero.
It was Ralph Grillo, a long time ago, who first suggested I write a book like this. Comments on some of my earlier work by Nina Glick Schiller and Saskia Sassen also inspired me. I was extremely grateful for the close readings given at a late stage by Dirk Jacobs, Jon Fox and Molly Geidel. Big thanks to Paul Statham, Nando Sigona, Raj Patel, Janine Dahinden, Giacomo Orsini and Umut Korkut, and to Marta Kindler and Pawel Kaczmarczyk, for opportunities to fully develop the ideas presented here; and to Roger Waldinger, whose work and support have been such an inspiration over many years.
Introduction
The opening scene of Gillo Pontecorvo’s film La Bataille d’Alger (1966). The Colonel Mathieu joins his soldiers in a room where they have a captive Algerian man who has been tortured. They have dressed him as a French soldier and are going to take him to the casbah where he will reveal to them where the leader of the Algerian Liberation Front is hiding. Mathieu tells them to give him a French soldier’s hat. The soldier next to the Algerian smiles broadly and shoves the hat on his head.
‘Intégration!!’, the soldier laughs . . .
[To the soldier] ‘Fais-pas l’idiot!’ [Don’t be an idiot!], says the Colonel.
The Algerian starts crying, then suddenly desperate, runs towards the window, wailing . . .
‘NON!!! . . .’
The soldiers grab him, tell him to stay calm, or they’ll start on him again. They push him towards the door.
The notion of ‘immigrant integration’ is found everywhere as a progressive concept – among students, scholars, research funders, policy makers, politicians, journalists, lawyers, social workers and many others concerned with how societies should respond to international migration and include new members on fair and equal terms. ‘Integration’ is widely accepted as the most encompassing term to refer to both the process and end state by which highly globalized societies imagine they will restore unity and cohesion after large-scale immigration and the diversity it brings. In Western Europe, where the term has been most elaborated, it has largely eclipsed discussions of multiculturalism and is seen as a more progressive goal than assimilation. It appears to have more sociological scope and weight than close synonyms such as social cohesion, inclusion, incorporation or participation. Indeed, integration has a kind of aura as a default concept in forward-looking thinking about the consequences of migration and the diversification of society. It is used at once to signal the necessary adaptation of diverse cultures to dominant western norms and as an idealized image of intercultural dialogue that will be transformative on both sides. And despite its pervasive and often confusing range of use, there are surprisingly few sustained discussions of its conceptual roots and theoretical implications, although frequent attempts are made by scholars to propose ideal-type ‘models’ or ‘indicators’ of integration.
The invocation of intégration in the shocking first scene from Pontecorvo’s La Bataille d’Alger, recounted above, should underline how integration is and always was a fundamentally colonial term. As I will argue, it is embedded in a modernist development paradigm which assumes both a trajectory towards a certain kind of individualist citizenship and the dominant relation of ‘the West to the Rest’. At heart, it is concerned with the rearguard perpetuation of ongoing nation-state building on the western model in an otherwise globalizing world: of re-fashioning a sovereign, bounded social order from conflict and diversity as a form of modern progress. This is the power of the ‘integration nation’. As shrinking metropolitan nation-states came to terms with the end of empire, and the absorption of populations inherited as their post-colonial legacy of global domination, they turned to the idea of ‘integration’ as a means of re-imagining their ongoing civilizational mission in the face of global diversity. So when progressive scholars and policy makers ingenuously propose integration as the reasonable middle way between conservative cultural conformism and radical celebrations of cultural hybridity and diaspora, they are buying into and reproducing a colonial world view that is also deeply nationalist in its implications.
As a work in political theory, The Integration Nation sketches the core component of what may be thought of as a political demography of liberal democracy (see also Weiner and Teitelbaum 2001 and Goldstone, Kaufmann and Duffy Toft 2011 for contrasting uses of this term). That is, how modern advanced nation-states classify and enumerate populations which are inherently mobile and diverse into ‘legible’ legal and institutional distinctions: of ‘citizens’ and ‘migrants’, ‘nationals’ and ‘aliens’, ‘majorities’ and ‘minorities’. They do this in order to constitute their own pastoral and governmental powers, and thereby sustain a global order of territorialized and bordered national populations founded on massive inequalities between nations and their members (Milanovic 2005; Shachar 2009) – inequalities that still substantially reflect the racialized cultural hierarchies of colonialism and empire (Boatcă 2015). At the heart of this construction lies what can be thought of as the linear conception of population movement, in which a select few designated but heavily symbolic ‘immigrants’ from poorer countries pass along a process of migration, border entry, settlement, integration and (hence) the attainment of full moral and political citizenship in an affluent modern western society, as proof of the cohesive and developmental powers of a socially ‘diverse’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘sovereign’ modern nation-state ‘society’. Along the way, the differentiation at work here ensures others are excluded or marginalized by the selective trajectory imagined in the image of the successful ‘immigrant’. Meanwhile, as we will see, the heavy imposition of ‘integration’ as the unique symbolic burden of disadvantaged ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘immigrants’ also enables the elites of these same societies to increasingly float free of the same obligations as global free movers.
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.
1Integration as a Paradigm
International migration is frequently cited as one of the key ‘global challenges’ facing the planet. Along 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’ and what they are supposedly integrating into. This becomes inevitable if the thinking is to go beyond an empty science of arbitrarily constructed social statistics conflating categories of policy practice and categories of 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’ view of the state that has been a cornerstone of international relations for centuries (Shachar 2020). That this view of sovereignty has been variably effective and imperfect as a source of state power in history (Krasner 1995) does not vitiate its role as a normative foundation of the ongoing nationhood of liberal democracies. It is the view of society literally as a box, with hard bordered lines corresponding to territory differentiating it from the world, inside which there is an individualized, named population of citizens, distinct from the rest of the world. How successfully this society is contained and maintains this distinction defines its legitimated power as a nation-state. The people as nationals constitute this container: they are distinct from all other populations in the world, and they are the totality of this society. If it is a liberal democracy, the state is also thought to be made up of and by these people: the collective power held by the state is the expression of their sovereign voice, precisely as a ‘people’. This is the famous book cover image of Leviathan from Thomas Hobbes. The ideal type of sovereignty here may of course fail empirically to eliminate all the anomalies and noise in the actual population as it is defined; but, as an ideal type, it works in the same way as the unquestioned notion of ‘democracy’ as a source of legitimated political power, whatever the imperfections in the participative process.
Classically, in demography, the principal way this contained, bordered population can change is through births and deaths. These, of course, the state counts and tracks, marking births and deaths with (named) registration. The national society is made up of the output, as it were, of this population. Population typically grows with modernization, although this has been changing with declining fertility in some of the most advanced societies. Outside of this, the only other way a population can change is through migration. People can leave and emigrate (although it is rare to move away and lose your citizenship). Or people can join: what is called ‘immigration’. In many countries in the world, immigration is now a more significant factor of population change than births and (minus) deaths. With the question of migration, demography becomes political. If the world might be said to contain multitudes, whose mobility and diversity are potentially infinite, how the advanced nation-state-society captures, contains, de-complexifies and processes what it allows in – as immigration – becomes key to its ongoing power and self-reproduction.
The view I present here contrasts with much of critically oriented migration studies which understandably focuses its fire on the more obvious, spectacular ways in which nation-states assert their power against migrants: wall building, violence and repulsion at borders, surveillance, deportation, legal exclusion and so on (De Genova 2010, 2017). Yet an even greater, distinctively liberal democratic power over migrants lies in the differentiated way some populations continue to be let in, accepted and included – as ‘immigrants’ (see also Joppke 1998c). If migration is anomalous to the view of world population divided exhaustively into stably defined, territorial nation-state containers, integration works to resolve the anomalies inherent in these international population movements. Narrowing down the notion of immigration and who is an immigrant is key to this. It must involve the definitive transference of a person’s status from one jurisdiction to another. When exactly the status change happens is often not entirely clear. It is usually not at the border. Formally, in international statistics on stocks and flows of population, it is after one year of residence – although some temporary residents stay much longer (they may or may not get counted as ‘immigrants’). If there was an overarching authority monitoring the change, residence status would pass exhaustively from one box to another. This is, however, more often not the case, despite international law: with at least two states in play, people may retain their former nationalities and have membership rights or access to resources in other boxes in all kinds of ways – including sometimes multiple residences (Koslowski 2000).
These issues are among many anomalies that create noise in the international system of populations and the national statistics it reflects; blurring the borders, undermining national power. In the terms of James C. Scott (1998), some of these populations have not yet been rendered fully legible to the receiving state. Even more anomalous, though, is the fact that, at any given moment, there are very large numbers of people present in the receiving box – for shorter and longer periods of time – who are not counted as part of that society’s integrated population. These will include ‘illegal’, i.e., undocumented migrants: the most obvious anomaly in the system and the focus of a huge part of the political discussion on immigration (Gonzales et al. 2019). Humanitarian migration, clearly too, is a massive ‘crisis’ for the nation-state to resolve – although it remains a small proportion of the overall permanent migration flows to OECD countries (see Safi 2020: 15–16). Yet alongside these are much larger, less obvious, anomalous populations who are perfectly legal. Though less visible, and perhaps not even thought of as ‘migrants’, they are no less important to affirming the nation-state’s power.
It might help to take one such container box as an example. The United Kingdom has a population of about 66 million, with approximately 6.2 million non-national residents (House of Commons 2020) – and this is not counting its sizeable, but undocumented, irregular population, estimated variably between 150,000 and one million (Walsh 2020). So almost 10 per cent of the population is not British; one in ten persons stably present is not a national. Over half of these non-nationals until recently have been European Union (EU) citizens; many others come from other affluent nations around the world, some from the UK Commonwealth. The state has an intense interest in managing this population, and they are usually counted in the overall population. Yet they are not counted as members (i.e., they are not nationals or citizens), are often not seen as ‘immigrants’ (although they may be) – many are ‘White’ and ‘western’ and not at all disadvantaged – and fall outside many of the issues of integration which typically define who is an immigrant. Normatively, they are not part of any national self-conception – or, officially, the ‘output’ of the nation. By definition, they are foreigners, even if many have been participating in and contributing to everyday British society for years.
In any given year, moreover, a much larger floating population might be present in the society as visitors – tourists or business people, but also students and long-term specialist workers on particular visas, and so on. Let’s call these people ‘free movers’ who come and go, a growing part of a globalized world. In Britain (prior to the COVID pandemic), this figure was given as between 35 and 40 million people annually (ONS 2019) – well over half the numbers for the national population – for short but indefinite periods of time. As noted, by definition, these populations again usually have nothing to do with ‘integration’ issues. At the same time, the state is also intensely interested in this very difficult to document and track population. It wants to maximize economic benefits from them: in many cases, it wants to make access easy and unproblematic, encourage their multiple cross-border ‘mobilities’ in an integrated regional or global economy, connect with them economically in any way it can. Yet it does not wish them to stay and certainly does not allow them any of the usual benefits of club membership of national residents: access to jobs, social protection, a voice in elections and so on – although, confusingly, it may look after them if they get run over in the street. From the point of view of pastorally managing the population – the birth-to-death issues reserved for ‘integrated’ nationals – it is, however, a largely irrelevant population; some other state is looking after them.
This floating population is usually invisible to immigration politics. Yet rendering them invisible is crucial to making legible those who are relevant: the ‘immigrants’. It matters intensely that those others who are to join the container – a very small proportion of the mobile, border-crossing population – can be clearly and decisively distinguished from the larger invisible group, no less than they need to be distinguished from ‘illegal’ or ‘unwanted’ migrants. In Britain, the floating population of ‘free movers’ is in fact around a hundred times larger than that of ‘immigrants’; i.e., among those crossing the border, there is one immigrant for every 100 mobile visitors present. There is only about one new immigrant per year for every 20 non-nationals. And, despite the intensity of debate, asylum seekers remain a small part of annual immigration, at its highest about a tenth (around 35,000 annually).
The skewed and very particular focus of political demography here becomes clear. While other mobile populations have remained largely invisible, the highly contentious British politics of immigration – when not focused on policing borders against the tiny number of irregulars who wash up on its shores – 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.,
