The Integration Nation

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 whil…