Abstract
The term “integration” is generally used to refer to the ideal of commonality within diversity. Even though the term “integration” has been used rhetorically in a variety—often contradictory—ways, the discursive shifts in the interpretation of the meaning of immigrant integration generally serve for the same practical purpose, which is to protect national values, cohesion, and security in the face of the cultural and ethnic diversity. This study introduces how the interpretation of immigrant integration on the assimilationist-multicultural axis generates fictitious problems and diverts our attention from the structural problems of inequality, discrimination, and political exclusion of immigrants. The main argument is that the dominant approach to the interpretation of integration neglects to question the socio-economic and political barriers to the immigrant integration which are ideologically reproduced to dominate and exclude immigrants in the recognition order of the host society.
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Notes
- 1.
The social science approaches to the term “integration” is also very diverse and fragmented. Even though the research on integration is being done by a variety of social science disciplines, they are disconnected. Mostly, researchers prefer to aggregate the term “integration” for reasons of simplification. For example, Penninx (2005) introduces a typology of integration and categorizes integration policies in Europe under three headings, namely, legal/political, socio-economic, and cultural-religious integration. Another practice in the literature has been “the construction of integration index scores and rankings of host societies on their “success” in one or more policy sectors or overall” (Ireland 2007, p. 4). Migration Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) is one of the examples among many of these efforts. MIPEX compares the success of European countries at the integration of immigrants with several indicators such as labor market mobility, family reunion, political participation, long-term residence, access to nationality, and anti-discrimination (Niessen and Huddleston 2009).
- 2.
Adrian Favell in his seminal work titled Philosophies of integration: Immigration and the idea of citizenship in France and Britain (1998) also gives an account of the evolution of integration policies and the impact of political debates over the issue of integration on the epistemology of national identity and public philosophy. His historical path dependency approach is similar to mine in the sense that both studies introduce significant historical moments such as economic crisis or a terrorist attack as the trigger that initiates debates on immigration as a fundamental social order problem.
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Goksel, G.U. (2018). Introduction: What Is Integration?. In: Integration of Immigrants and the Theory of Recognition. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65843-8_1
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