The Integration Nation. Adrian Favell

this – just as allegedly receiving too many immigrants from too distant cultures may cross some notional threshold and cause integration to fail (Putnam 2007). I will pick up this question of whether there are legitimate limits to integration in this sense at a later point – as well as the neoconservative uses to which these arguments have been put. I will also focus on the question of managing diversity, mainly through the state-sanctioned production of knowledge about it, in categories of ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationality’ produced in official national statistical apparatus. These highly variable approaches across advanced liberal democratic states are one of the most visible ways in which states can be seen to impose categorical and normative models of population classification as a form of governance.

      Against this wider backdrop, my focus here is on the problems associated with those forms of mobility and diversity that become governed and managed as ‘immigrant integration’. I will return to the question of an alternative politics to colonialism and neo-liberalism in the closing chapter, but at this point it should be noted that, even in a heavily re-nationalizing world – arguably accelerated by the border closing and state-reinforcing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic – the de-nationalizing effects of mobilities and diversity outside the integration paradigm remain a potentially transformative force.