Among these terms, its competitive relation to ‘assimilation’ and ‘multiculturalism’ requires special attention, as does its problematic relation to ‘race’ (i.e., ‘anti-racism’) and ‘transnationalism’. I will discuss these in later chapters.
Ultimately, the power of integration is as an encompassing paradigm of social thought: intended here in the full sense of the term, as an embedded conceptual framework that determines society and its scientists’ view of normal functioning social reality, both consciously and unconsciously (Kuhn 1962). Its full origins are rarely spelt out: but, as I will show, its roots run back through the emergent West European immigration politics of the 1960s to 1980s, to modernist development theories emanating from the post-war triumph as a global power of the United States, to its high point in the structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons and his ‘theory of successful modernity’ (Alexander 1986). His highbrow American reconstruction of Durkheimian thought was itself grounded in a naturalization in social theory of a Kantian philosophy of the subject. Protagonists and modellers of ‘immigrant integration’ today – even those who seek to use the term as a neutral descriptive concept, or pragmatically at a very local scale – may only be dimly aware of this theoretical genealogy and the colonial modernist ends to which it was put, but they are bound by its implications and history.
Mobilities and diversity
The political demography I am sketching here is grounded in a broader view of global society constituted by a potentially infinite range of human mobilities and diversities, which nationalizing conceptions of population, international migration and integration work to reduce, shape and demarcate into governable statuses, units and groups. In this section, I offer some clarification on my background assumptions on mobility, diversity and society beyond the nation-state, which inform my critique of conventional notions of immigration, integration and citizenship.
Firstly, it is worth noting in passing that the notion of political demography I present might be said to necessarily underpin more conventional understandings of the global system in terms of political economy. That is to say, there is a prior theoretical question of defining sovereign populations and border demarcation before we broach questions of international political economy – international relations, the balance of states and markets, national and international institutions of governance, and so on (see Bashford 2014). In a globalizing world, the normative possibility of sovereign nation-state-societies as more or less stable, bounded ‘population containers’ – the Westphalian system defined by essentially immobile ‘native’ citizenries, which may absorb limited numbers of ‘newcomer’ immigrants – needs to be settled first.
At the same time, there is a prior question to that of political demography: the issue of political ecology. This would concern how a distinctly Anthropocenic ‘modern’ society of ‘human’ individuals and humanly constructed institutions is able to demarcate itself as a separable domain of social and political thought from that of the ‘natural’ world, of ‘objects’ and other beings around and outside it (as famously analysed by Latour 2006). Completing this account, by embedding our critique of the political demography of liberal democracy in an account of its political ecology would, as Latour (2018) suggests, help fill out the fully realized notion of planetary society beyond that of (Anthropocenic) global society. In this book, I leave aside the question of political ecology, except for a brief excursus on the implications of the COVID pandemic in the closing section of the book.
In the geographical literature – where there is a strong influence of political ecology – mobilities are defined in a much broader way to include all kinds of non-human mobile objects, goods, virtual transmissions, cultural artefacts, ideas, flows of production, information, capital, waste and so on (Sheller and Urry 2006). This is all certainly relevant to both political economy and political ecology. However, in advance of a full theoretical account, the specific issue of political demography can be practically limited here to identifiable human mobilities since it still helps clarify an alternative way of looking at migration, travel, border crossings, population movements and cross-border transactions more generally, which is clearly transformative of the standard linear view of immigration, integration and citizenship (see also Cresswell 2006). The alternative view of political demography presented here also relates to the kinopolitics (politics of movement) identified by critical scholars similarly concerned with how states make migration visible and governable (Nail 2015; van Reekum 2019).
Human mobilities effectively may include all kinds of movements by people in time and space: from the shortest trip to a local corner shop to a lifelong transcontinental relocation. What is conventionally designated ‘immigration’ is only a tiny fraction of a continuum of the spatial movements that states seek to govern by classifying and making them legible in various ways. Some, like walking to the shop, are almost entirely invisible to the state and are usually disregarded. Others, like immigration, involve international border crossing and so are highly visible and pertinent to it. Border crossing itself is a broad continuum: from tourism and trade or business visits at one end, through cross-border commuting and family life, to various forms of immigration, asylum seeking and irregular migration at the other. All these forms need governing, although governance can be porous and control a matter, much of the time, of ‘smoke and mirrors’ (Massey, Durand and Malone 2002). At any given border – for example, the most dramatic population divide in the modern world, which lies between San Diego and Tijuana – the daily number of ‘immigrants’ crossing is tiny compared to all such other crossings. The Westphalian conventions of space and territory quickly make most of these crossings invisible politically as the focus narrows on wanted and unwanted ‘migration’. Moreover, a conventional notion of time is also a factor in delimiting those crossings that count as ‘immigration’ – as noted previously, the one year of residence rule in international statistics on flows and stocks. At the same time, other categorical definitions may stretch this: for example, some cases of temporary migration – student migration, guest worker systems, trade in services, indentured labour – are not counted as ‘immigration’ or subject to ‘integration’ until some other formal line is crossed (see also McNevin 2019).
Asylum seeking and refugee migration have long had their own governing logic – anchored in the specific statuses established by post-war international refugee law – although they have been frequently seen to collapse into ‘immigration’ in recent debates (Gibney 2004). Internal and cross-border displacements, and various forms of temporary and indentured labour mobility – often far from the western world as receiving society – further complicate the picture (Koser 2016). Ordinarily, these are not subject to integration thinking.
Refugee settlement in the West, however, clearly has become a central subject for integration thinking, which in the past has been more applicable to the long-term settlement of labour migrants and their families. Refugee migration has become the principal form of immigration in many countries which are otherwise now extremely restrictive on forms of ‘economic’ migration. Integration of refugees is seen to be an imperative and strongly progressive goal – it is sometimes seen as less encumbered by the issues of race and colonialism that characterize post-empire labour migrations (Grzymala-Kaslowska and Phillimore 2017). Yet the concern with refugee integration contradicts the principle of temporary protection and potential future return – the removal of oppressive regimes and the rebuilding of failed states – and in this sense marks a further dissipation of the post-war refugee regime. A whole new wave of integration model building – largely overlooking earlier critiques of linear, implicitly colonial, integration thinking – has followed the crisis responses in Europe and the developed world to recent mass refugee and undocumented migration (Ager and Strang 2008; Donato and Ferris 2020). The migration status of many of the populations attempting to desperately enter Western Europe across the Mediterranean or via border passes in Central Europe is highly unclear (Crawley and Skleparis 2017). The determinate relations of economic and political domination and inequality between receiving and sending societies are lost in the focus on the moral response of the West to obligingly welcome claimants, each on individual grounds (Mayblin 2017). Given these particular aspects, refugee integration may play out differently from post-colonial labour migration or other transnational