Provincializing “immigrant integration”: privileged migration to Nairobi and the problem of integration

ABSTRACT

Immigrant integration is a key concern in migration research. Yet, recent critiques argue that “immigrant integration” amounts to a neo-colonial form of governance and that scholarship needs to study the discourse of integration, rather than operationalize integration as analytical tool. Drawing on ethnographic research in Nairobi, this article engages and develops these critiques in two ways. It discusses how the notion “integration” is used as a “category of practice” in relation to privileged migrants, so-called expats, in ways that reflect personal anxieties and aspirations, uneven power relations and structural inequalities. Further, the article suggests “provincializing” integration as a way forward: (re)visiting “integration discourse” from its constitutive objects, others, and silences. This requires placing more centrally the voices of those assumedly in need of integration and examining how integration is formulated, practized and contested also in relation to privileged migration and in the Global South.

KEYWORDS:

• Privileged migration
• integration
• postcolonialism
• immigration
• discourse
• expatriates

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank everyone who shared their stories and views and otherwise enabled this research. The author would also like to thank the editor, anonymous reviewers, Adrian Favell, Aidan Mosselson, and Tariq Jazeel for their generous, insightful and constructive engagement with various drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Rather than delimiting a homogeneous group of migrants, the framing of privileged migration invites attention to the ways in which some movements are shaped by multiple, intersecting and relational dimensions of privilege in the context of broader social inequalities.

2 Translated from German by the author.

3 As the legal and social exclusion of many Somali refugees, ethnically Somali Kenyans, and Kenya’s multi-generational stateless communities shows (Campbell 2005).

4 Mzungu is a Kiswahili term commonly used to signify whiteness.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council under grant number ES/J500185/1.