Integration: A critical view

Despite its centrality to debates on migration policy, the term 'integration' is rarely scrutinized. Among policy makers it generally stands as a progressive conception of how receiving societies process, benefit from, and are changed by those migration/mobilities they classify as wanted 'im-migration', usually as part of nation-building narratives. It is how a nation-state sees new members of its 'society', with its back turned to (assumed) borders established by 'sovereign' immigration policy and control. This implies a methodological nationalism in all uses of the term, which rests in a functionalist vision of bounded (national) societies producing morally and politically emancipated individual 'citizens'. The chapter lays out the concept in advanced liberal democracies, how it has been used (comparatively), and how it relates to, and encompasses, synonymous terms such as 'assimilation', 'inclusion', 'incorporation', 'participation', and 'acculturation'. The ubiquity of 'integration' and its problematic relations with 'multiculturalism' and 'transnationalism' point to how it reinforces colonial and (usually) racialized views on immigration. It is argued that migration studies may be reconceived as the study of political demography: how a world of territorialized populations, borders, and categories of migration/mobilities, citizens/aliens, and majorities/minorities is sustained to uphold a global system of nation-states founded on massive global inequalities.