Abstract
Critical migration studies are rife with research on how nation-states exert power by excluding potential migrants, but less attention is paid to the ways in which migrants are brought in (or, depending on your scholarly tradition, integrated/assimilated/incorporated). Immigrant integration, the preferred term in contemporary social science, has become the default aim of nation-states for migrants and the default metric by which social scientists measure success. However, less is known about the concept’s historical and political origins. In his ambitious and thought-provoking book, The Integration Nation, Adrian Favell fills this gap by dissecting immigrant integration and ultimately identifying the inherent coloniality of this seemingly benign notion.
Focusing on the United States and Western Europe (the “North Atlantic West,” as the author calls it), Favell takes a critical lens to immigrant integration as a paradigm and questions its value and use as a pervasive migration studies concept. Favell’s aim in the first two chapters is to deconstruct “integration,” arguing that the concept, as is uncritically accepted by scholars and policymakers alike, is fundamentally flawed as it follows a linear and normative view of migration. This view assumes that with time, if they fulfill certain criteria (albeit of varying difficulty, becoming White is a more arduous process for some than others), immigrants will become fully integrated and equal members of the “host” society. However, Favell argues, this perpetuates a global hierarchy of nationalities and reinforces existing power structures. In these chapters, Favell traces the concept’s rhetorical and political rise, using various historical discussions of policy from the United States and Western Europe. In Chapter 2, Favell convincingly argues the ways in which the American ethos (with its emphasis on racial and ethnic differentiation) spread throughout the liberal democracies of the West, thus making the United States the prototypical “integration nation.”
In the chapters that follow, Favell moves to a reflection of the usage of integration. In Chapter 3, Favell lays out an impressive history of how varying integration policies across the nations of the North Atlantic West were borne out of different historical and political contexts. However, the author argues, these nations share the same inherent logic of integration, even if the modes of integration differ. Next, in Chapter 4, Favell brings in insights from critical race theory in his discussion of the racialized nation, and the ways in which this is manifest in various nation-state contexts. In the final chapters, Favell ultimately concludes that, despite the particular national context, the “integration nation” abounds and is a reification of a capitalist, colonial order.
As Favell notes, the critical lens he takes to immigrant integration is not entirely novel; his perspective is reflective of a central logic in critical migration studies linking capitalism, colonialism, and immigrant policies. Favell contributes to this work, however, by showing that mainstream researchers who employ the integration paradigm endorse and overlook the racialized, nationalist processes underlying the making of the integrated, “modern, civilized, fulfilled and successful individual” (p. 47). Thus, Favell brings to the fore the definitional dilemmas of immigrant integration, and in doing so, calls into question its value in the future of social science.
Favell’s central thesis is clearly stated and argued. Still, The Integration Nation is not without its limitations. Favell emphasizes the colonial backdrop of immigrant integration and distinguishes between the emergence of the integration state in settler colonial states (such as the United States) or former colonial states (such as the United Kingdom or France). However, within the former colonial states, I assert Favell does not adequately discuss how the frameworks of “integration” cannot be the same for past colonial subjects and other “outsiders.” Favell argues that integration, as we know it now, emerged from these nations having to transform their colonial enterprise as they “transitioned to an idea of territorially confined post-colonial nationhood” (p. 70). However, the legacies of colonial plunder in the “sending” context means that the process of integration far precedes stepping foot into the “host” nation. As Frantz Fanon (1967), who is explicitly mentioned by Favell, once wrote:
Every colonized people. . .finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards (P. 18).
Thus, the colonizer works to make the colonized a true “integrated” member of the empire in a dehumanizing, deeply racialized way, even within the original borders of the colonized nation. The work of integration spanning generations fundamentally shapes the movement a former colonial subject conducts to enter the postcolonial nation, making their comparison to others moot. The decolonization of integration cannot ignore the distinct impacts of integration on the colonial subject.
Furthermore, as expected in a book as slim as The Integration Nation, there are discussions that felt cursory throughout the book; most notably, the colonial nature of how religion, gender, and their intersection are markers of differentiation and lack of integration. In particular, Favell highlights the difficulty of the integration of Islam (particularly for the perceived oppressed Muslim woman). In many receiving contexts, Islam is labeled as a backward political pathos, and thus incompatible with the new “civilized” nation-state. However, it is in the rejection of Islam that it is forced into the parameters of the nation, spurring anticolonial anger that is manifested in radical political practice. This idea, which strengthens Favell’s central thesis, is underexplored. However, despite these limitations, this book makes an important contribution to the academic and public debates on immigration and is recommended reading for scholars of migration, students, and policymakers. For students in particular, the new political demography Favell outlines is a beneficial counterpoint to much of mainstream migration studies and may spur new modes of thinking and future lines of research.
Two seemingly simple questions guide Favell: who are immigrants and who is integrated? Through his exploration of these questions and the ambiguity of their answers, Favell offers a compelling critique of the concept of “immigrant integration” and the policies and research it generates. As sociologists engage with questions of migration, Favell reminds us there is no path forward with the seemingly positivist concept of “integration” and asserts there is no alternative to dismantling it. What will emerge in its space, however, is yet to be determined.
