Integration and intersectionality: boundaries and belonging “from above” and “from below”. Introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT

This introduction bridges the often-separated bodies of research on institutional boundary work in the policy field of “integration” and on migrant minorities’ responses to these boundaries. We engage with the contributions to this Special Issue and demonstrate the relevance of an intersectional analysis in studies on state “integration” policies and the boundaries they draw between communities and on migrant minorities’ strategies to navigate and respond to them. Through engaging with issues of “integration”, boundary-making, and intersectionality, we show how the Special Issue contributes to debates on “integration” and boundary work by presenting analyses of which subjectivities are accepted in “integration” policies’ reproduction of an (imagined) national community and how conditions of national membership do not apply equally to all individuals of migrant origins, nor to all social spaces. We advocate for research that is attentive to the relevant socio-political context, and where possible, responsive to self-identified needs of the affected communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• integration
• boundary work
• belonging
• migrant categories
• Europe

Introduction

The last 20 years or so, several politicians in Western Europe and North America have called for the increased incorporation of migrant groups into the “majority” society. Stemming from a political dissatisfaction with multiculturalism (however defined), leading public figures, such as the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have declared multiculturalism “dead” or somehow malfunctioning and therefore called for increased efforts on the part of minorities to embrace “shared common values and behaviours – such as respect for the rule of law, democracy, equality and tolerance” (Casey 2016, 8). Politicians and policymakers are now calling on some communities to move away from alleged self-segregation and encourage their “integration” in order to, in the words of the Review into Integration commissioned by the British government in 2015, “[reduce] anxiety and prejudice, but also [enable] people to get on better in employment and social mobility” (Casey 2016, 8). Similar justifications for increased “integration” have been put forward in, among others, Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands, as the papers in this collection illustrate. They have the effect of producing a “politics of belonging” (Yuval-Davis 2011) that pitches migrants from specific communities against an allegedly homogenous “majority” society, drawing social, legal and symbolic boundaries between groups living in the same nation-state. “Integration” policies and discourses do not affect all migrant communities equally, however. Research has demonstrated that specific groups, largely Muslims, and black and brown individuals, are represented as not belonging to Western societies and therefore have increasingly become the targets of “integration” (e.g. Kofman 2023; Korteweg 2017). At the same time, individuals belonging to these groups are not uniformly perceived by the state. High-skilled migrants and international students, for example, have typically enjoyed more favourable treatment, compared to lower-skilled workers, being seen as qualifying for belonging, although this does not guarantee protection from everyday prejudice and racism as demonstrated by Yurdakul and Altay (2022) and Hao and Leung (2023) in this issue.

Reflecting individuals’ complex statuses, the articles in this Special Issue engage with critical debates on migrant “integration” (e.g. Dahinden 2016; Grzymala-Kazlowska and Phillimore 2018; Favell 2019) by bringing together discussions around boundary-drawing “from above” and “from below”. The Special Issue makes two specific contributions to this body of research. First, the most critical perspectives on migrant “integration” and categorization focus on state discourses and policies, to the detriment of understanding the lived experiences of those who bear the material and symbolic implications of this boundary work from above. Migrants’ responses and strategies to cope with various formal and informal barriers to participation in society have been the subject of a largely separate literature, which examines integration in various domains of activity, places, and migration circumstances (e.g. Grzymala-Kazlowska and Phillimore 2018), and increasingly, in relation with transnational practices (Erdal 2020). This Special Issue aims to address this problem and pay equal heed to how those at the receiving end engage with dominant categories and integration narratives and how they navigate the specific opportunities and constraints these create in everyday contexts, locally or transnationally.

The second contribution of this collection involves consistently applying an intersectional lens to the analysis of both (1) state “integration” policies and the boundaries they draw between communities and (2) migrant and racialized minorities’ strategies to navigate and respond to them. Much research that studies how groups of migrant origins are constructed and affected by “integration” policies does not emphasize sufficiently the differential impacts of these policies on individuals depending on their intersectional social locations. In other words, they tend to prioritize one dimension in their analysis of the implications of integration policies on groups, be it gender (e.g. Ballarino and Panichella 2018), generation (e.g. Chimienti et al. 2019), or national origin (e.g. Hammond 2013), without rigorously accounting for the rich heterogeneity that characterizes any such group. Drawing on intersectionality-oriented migration research (e.g. Korteweg and Triadafilopoulos 2013; Bastia 2014; Bonjour and Duyvendak 2018; Fischer, Achermann, and Dahinden 2020), we argue that an intersectional lens gives researchers the opportunity to better understand which subjectivities are accepted in integration policies’ reproduction of an (imagined) national community and how conditions of national membership do not apply equally to all individuals of migrant origins, nor to all social spaces. The Special Issue’s articles illustrate how social and legal boundaries (re)produced “from above” in migration and “integration” policies and discourses create notions of belonging that differ in their relative inclusiveness depending on intersectional constructions of people’s subjectivity along the lines of gender, class, religion, ethnicity, and related categories. Furthermore, an intersectional lens enables research presented in this collection to highlight the differential approaches adopted by migrant and racialized minority groups to engage with and navigate “from below” the social boundaries reproduced by state policies and discourses. To challenge homogenizing accounts of minority groups, the articles detail individuals’ differential resources to negotiate boundaries between majority and minority residents depending on their intersectional social locations. In sum, this Special Issue analyses: first, how state “integration” policies and discourses “from above” create and maintain boundaries between a “majority society” and migrants and racialized minorities; and second, how migrants and minorities navigate and strategize around these boundaries in their everyday encounters, contesting, reproducing and/or generating new boundaries “from below”.

This introductory article aims to bridge the often-separated bodies of research on institutional boundary work in the policy field of “integration”, and on migrant minorities’ responses to these boundaries. In the following sections, we position the Special Issue in broader debates around migrant “integration” and boundary work with reference to the contributions included in this volume. We first focus on the boundary work done in migration policies that creates fictitious categories of belonging to the recipient society and thus establishes institutional narratives about who can be eligible for belonging and who can be legitimately excluded. We then clarify how this boundary work, which creates categories of more and less desirable migrants, has implications for migrants’ expected “integration” by identifying who the legitimate target of “integration” is. We argue that an intersectional lens is needed to fully understand these categories’ implications for right allocation and social desirability. While institutional boundary work justifies narratives and practices delineating a community and reifying its morality, migrants and racialized minorities who are cast as undesirable to that community are not passive objects of boundary work. Thus, in the latter part of the article, we present how migrants navigate the specific opportunities and constraints dominant migrant categories and integration narratives create in everyday contexts, locally or transnationally. Focusing on both individual-level factors and on the “context of reception” (Portes and Rumbaut 2006) in the society of settlement, we illustrate how state narratives and legislative and administrative acts that foster and legitimize migrant categories (i.e. state’s boundary work) affect individuals’ responses in different ways, depending on their intersectional social locations. Specifically, we highlight how individuals, who are ascribed belonging to a group because of institutional boundary work, are unequally able to navigate, strategize, and possibly contest and renegotiate these boundaries, and reveal how state boundary work may generate boundary work “from below”.

“Integration” policies as boundary work “from above”

In the past decades, Western European societies have witnessed demographic changes brought about by immigration.¹ As of 2021, 5.3 per cent of the EU population was born outside the Union (Eurostat 2022) and most EU countries have both new and long-standing communities of migrant origins, well into the third generation. This demographic reality has elicited policy responses that often go under the banner of “integration” and range from pragmatic measures to facilitate migrants’ participation in the settlement society to programmes stressing the need for migrants to assimilate into what is assumed to be a single majority culture (Phillimore 2012). The latter approaches have been objects to well-deserved criticism. Authors such as Favell (2019), Schinkel (2017), and Dahinden (2016), among others, have questioned the analytical value of concepts such as “immigrant integration”, reminding us that differences are constitutive of the social fabric of societies. Favell (2019, 2) puts this well, as a question of “integration of whom into what?”, thereby unpicking a core assumption of “integration” perspectives, i.e. that there is an existing entity (a society, bounded by a nation-state) into which migrant and minority groups integrate.

The articles in this collection largely sympathize with these critiques and challenge the assumed existence of a singular, homogeneous “majority” of which “alien” communities are expected to become part. Notwithstanding the important normative critiques mentioned above, “integration” policies continue to play a central role in defining how migrants and their descendants settle and adapt to the new country of residence. Given the persistence of this approach in the social world, but in line with critical research on “integration”, the articles in this Special Issue take “integration” discourses and policies as units of analysis and move away from the focus of integration outcomes. In different ways, the contributions instead examine how these discourses and policies are expressions of boundary-making and boundary-defining processes which outline pathways to membership in specific communities and reflect different political projects of belonging (see Yuval-Davis 2011). In this sense, “integration” policies are seen as forms of “organised politics”, i.e. public rhetoric, legislative, and administrative acts that politicians and state officials employ to foster and legitimize social categorization (Jenkins 1994). By this, we mean that public narratives, policies, and laws on “integration” carry specific definitions of the problem of “integration” and of its constituency group. They frame a specific representation of the relationship between the state and minorities that is authoritative and seen as legitimate in the public domain because it comes from institutions. Organized politics are therefore part of a spectrum of formal sites and processes where the boundaries of a political community are defined “from above”: where it begins and ends, who populates it, which of their concerns are to be included and which are to be excluded. They are tangible reflections of specific understandings of how a society works or should work, how citizens and the state relate to each other, and what is valued in a society (Scuzzarello 2010). As such, state actors engaging in public rhetoric and policy- and law-making, take part in boundary work, i.e. the process of creating hegemonic narratives that differentiate a collective from others by drawing on an imagined sense of shared belonging within their subgroup, while at the same time silencing intra-group differences (Jenkins 1996; see also Lamont 2000).

Boundary work “from above” and migrant categories

Boundary work “from above” is a key organizing mechanism in “constructing, maintaining and controlling social and political order” (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019, 5). Through migration policies, states can marginalize migrants and racialized minorities by producing categories which define the boundaries between those who belong to the nation and those who do not: citizens and aliens; more or less “deserving” migrants. As shown by recent research in migration studies (e.g. Robertson 2019; Crawley and Skleparis 2018; Collyer and de Haas 2012), policies and public narratives about migration more generally produce rigid social categories that construct and constitute migrant groups as low/high skilled, voluntary/involuntary, documented/undocumented, outsiders/insiders, consistently ignoring that mobile individuals move into and out of categories over time. Categories reinforce narratives positioning some migrants as highly desirable and less problematic to “integrate” compared to others and create a hierarchy of desirability and acceptability among migrants (McDowell 2009). Such characterizations of desirable/undesirable differences are based on static, a-historical, and homogenous understandings of culture and cultural differences and on assumptions that all members of a cultural group are equally committed to that culture. They silence intra-group contestations and negotiations by women, young, and others who do not conform to dominant and publicly accepted notions of a group’s identity and culture (Anthias 2013).

Categories are also important in terms of the allocation of rights and material resources and ultimately, shape migrants’ and minorities’ opportunities and life chances in the society of residence because they create hierarchies of belonging that justify the marginalization of certain groups (see e.g. Scuzzarello and Carlson 2019; Korteweg 2017; Kofman, Saharso, and Vacchelli 2015; Korteweg and Triadafilopoulos 2013). Depending on how migrant groups are defined, they will be endowed with different rights and degrees of membership (Moret, Andrikopoulos, and Dahinden 2021) and some will be seen as legitimate targets of specific “integration” policies. Thus, individuals entering a country on a skilled visa often face different, if any, “integration” requirements as the category of “skilled migrant” is taken to indicate one’s alleged ability to become part of the recipient society. In the UK, because of the English language and employment requirements for obtaining a visa, skilled migrants have already “achieved” aspects of integration, defined by the 2018 Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper as the ability to “learn to speak and understand our language and values and seek opportunities to mix and become part of our communities” (HM Government 2018, 11). In the Netherlands, we see a similar pattern. Up until January 2022, non-EU high-skilled migrants to the Netherlands were exempt from civic integration and language exams (inburgeringsexamen) and have no “integration duties”. Migrants falling under other categories, such as marriage migrants, are subject to fines if they fail to complete the integration exams within three years. In other national contexts, marriage migrants (predominantly female) quickly become subjects of state’s scrutiny as the marriage’s legitimacy and quality are questioned upon entry and migrants’ reproductive labour is monitored, as discussed in this Issue by Kofman’s analysis of family migration policies (2023). As potential bearers of children who might not necessarily be given the “proper” national upbringing (Block 2021), migrant spouses become the target of “integration” policies aiming at fostering “good” and “appropriate” motherhood and breaking up presumed segregation (Haapajärvi 2022). In the Finnish context, the example of the Kaampila neighbourhood house presented by Haapajärvi’s article in this Issue (2022) is a case in point. The “integration” policy of which the neighbourhood houses are part, target out-of-work, economically deprived migrant women and construct these women as not “integrated” because they are not in employment. To ameliorate this, houses such as the one in Kaampila become sites where “integration” can be taught through “belonging work” – practising specific (and uniform) ways of homemaking and mothering. These examples illustrate how migrant categories indicate the relative potential of migrants’ belonging and need of “integration” depending on which intersectional social positionings are considered desirable (e.g. class and nationality). Those who fall outside “desirable” migrant categories, such as out of employment migrant women, are positioned at the margins of the recipient society and are evaluated based on their potential to adopt liberal-democratic norms and practices and, in most European contexts, participate in the labour market.

Intersectionality and migrant categories

The creation of rigid social categories derives from the difficulties that migration and “integration” policies have with addressing the intersectional constructs affecting migrants’ and ethnic minorities’ opportunities to settle and belong. Simply put, “intersectionality” is a theoretical and analytic approach with an explicit feminist and anti-racist epistemology that sees subjectivities and social hierarchies to be constructed at the intersection of multiple, interconnected differences, including gender, class, race, ethnicity, and religion (Crenshaw 1991; Yuval-Davis 2006). It further highlights how the interplay between intersectional social locations is affected by the spatial and temporal power geometries within which an individual is located (Bastia et al. 2022). As an analytic lens, intersectionality allows us to examine people’s articulation of subjectivity in relation to the way that state institutions translate and define that subjectivity in a specific field of policymaking (Korteweg and Triadafilopoulos 2013). Further, it enables researchers to identify hierarchies constructed in social and institutional practices and to reveal the role that state policy norms, discourses, and practices play in perpetuating or counteracting inequalities, as argued by Cleton and Meier in their contribution to this Special Issue on the analytical relevance of intersectionality in migration governance research (2023). An intersectional analysis highlights how state and other institutional actors engage in boundary work that cannot be analyzed as the production of simple dichotomies. Migrants’ acceptability, desirability, and potential belonging to the recipient society are constructed at the intersections of gender, race, class, perceived cultural, and religious proximity, alongside being informed by neoliberal market logics. For instance, high-skilled migrants, while often not formally subjects of “integration” requirements, can in some social spaces still face prejudice and discrimination that affect negatively their pursuits to belong to the new country and their ambitions for a “good life” (Waldinger 2017). As illustrated by Yurdakul and Altay (2022), middle- and upper-middle-class mothers of Turkish background and their children encounter everyday stigma and discrimination in Germany, despite their human and financial capital. Their ethnicity and faith position them as “Turks” and “Muslim women” and in the lower ranks of German society.

State discourses and migrant categories, as highlighted by Kofman (2023) and Cleton and Meier (2023), often single out particular migrants and racialized minorities as following “backwards” and patriarchal understandings of gender roles and family relations, illustrating the complex intersections of gender, race, and religion. Gender relations and sexuality are crucial for defining the boundaries between national societies and migrants and their descendants because women, who parent the next generation, are seen as key to the successful integration of entire communities (Korteweg and Triadafilopoulos 2013; Korteweg 2017). In this context, “integration” policies disproportionately depict some religious groups – especially Muslims – as having gender relations that are problematic in liberal societies, whilst constructing Westerners as democratic and feminist (see e.g. Fischer and Dahinden 2017; Kofman, Saharso, and Vacchelli 2015). Drawing on stereotypical assumptions about Islamic gender identities as fixed and at odds with Western values, politicians and policymakers in Europe and North America depict Muslim women and their daughters as potential victims of gendered oppressions by the hands of their male relatives. “Integration” policies and narratives therefore aim to pull them out of their alleged social isolation and address their “inability” to become part of the wider community (see e.g. Korteweg and Triadafilopoulos 2013). Arab or Muslim men instead, as discussed in Huizinga’s article (2022), are stigmatized as dangerous Others, pitched against Western society, and objects of “integration” standards (i.e. learning the language and entering employment) that they cannot live up to because of poor-quality language courses and structural marginalization. Similarly, “integration” policies devised to “save” migrant women, fail to embed gender inequalities against women in a wider context of ethnic discrimination, inequality, and segregation, and miss on the temporal and spatial variability of inequality in combination with specific intra-group relations and practices (Cederberg 2013). Furthermore, these policies rely on essentialist understandings of culture and disregard the multiple ways in which people of migrant heritage negotiate and reframe their collective identity. Institutions’ lack of understanding of intersectional dynamics and inequalities metaphorically puts individuals of migrant origins in racialized and gendered straightjackets that position them as outsiders expected to settle and “integrate”. As poignantly argued by Korteweg (2017), this misses, first, that not all mobile people are settling, and many are in fact moving through. Second, it disregards intra-group differences along the lines of generation, class, or gender (among others) in modalities and opportunities to engage with a hegemonic group while also concealing the similarities between members of migrant communities and those of a hegemonic group. This illustrates the importance of an intersectional lens because “these homogenizations on the immigrant side of the boundary drawn by integration discourses prevent the analysis of differences within the groups as well as the similarities between groups thus created” (Korteweg 2017, 434).

To conclude, existing analyses of state discourses and policies offer useful insight into boundary work “from above” and their material and symbolic implications. Furthermore, an intersectional analysis of migration and “integration” policies throws into stark relief how boundary drawing “from above” differentially impacts individuals depending on their intersectional social positions that shape and organize resource distribution, power relations, and norms. Therefore this state-led process arguably impacts on the life chances of migrants and racialized individuals. What is often side-lined from discussion, however, is the voices of those who bear the weight of boundary work “from above” (but see Fischer 2020). In the following, we discuss how people of migrant heritage navigate and strategize around boundaries drawn “from above”, emphasizing their differential ability to do so depending on their intersecting social locations.

Individual responses and boundary work “from below’

We argue that the analysis of migrants’ and minorities’ perspectives and strategies in response to dominant discourses and governmental policies is as important as the study of state’s boundary work, and they cannot be fully understood in isolation from each other. Examining individuals’ responses, and how these are compounded by their intersectional social locations, complements the view “from above” by showing how existing discourses and categories matter “on the ground” (Cranston 2017) but also how new categories and hierarchies emerge “from below”. The contributions to the Special Issue thus convincingly show how individuals are not simply recipients but also producers of categorization and protagonists of boundary work. Their reactions to “integration” directives and pressures, the simplistic and stigmatizing representations these often perpetuate, and the marginalization or rejection they entrench may lead to the reinforcement of existing discourses, as well as to new forms of categorization and exclusion “from below”. Following Lamont and Mizrachi (2012), we thus see the analysis of migrants’ and minorities’ everyday responses and practices as indispensable for fully understanding how group boundaries are challenged, maintained, drawn or redrawn.

Factors shaping migrants’ and minorities’ responses

Migrants’ and minorities’ responses to integration policies, discourses and categorization vary widely, depending on a series of factors. Without aiming to be exhaustive, the articles in this Special Issue point to two main aspects that combine to produce different responses at the micro-level: (1) individuals’ legal and social locations, which problematizes approaches that foreground one specific characteristic, favouring an intersectional lens and (2) the wider horizon of incorporation, which includes what is traditionally known as the “context of reception” (Portes and Rumbaut 2006) but extends beyond this locally and transnationally, to encompass the complex social and material worlds individuals of migrant background inhabit, which orient their everyday lives, choices, and aspirations in significant ways.

To start with individual-level factors, the previous sections have already highlighted how individuals of migrant background are differently situated in terms of gender, sexuality, generation, socio-economic or legal status, amongst others. The advent of “super-diversity” approaches (Vertovec 2007) has made it increasingly difficult to ignore the variety of experiences, statuses, and fractures these factors generate within migrant or minority populations. Despite often treating and stigmatizing them collectively as members of particular ethnic or religious “groups”, dominant discourses and policies clearly affect individuals in vastly different ways. They are also countered with different tools and resources, some of them mobilized to draw distinctions between migrants themselves and other in-group or minority members of different gender, generation, and/or religious affiliation. An intersectional approach is therefore crucial not only for examining top-down “integration” perspectives but also their everyday implications and bottom-up responses to them.

The empirical literature offers excellent examples of these complex entanglements and processes “from below”, which are best understood through an intersectional approach. Women of migrant background in professional occupations, for instance, are known to mobilize different assets to fight discrimination and claim inclusion, compared to their counterparts with precarious legal and socio-economic status. This is evident in the strategies they develop for social advancement, the identities they express, the spaces they inhabit, or the leisure activities they pursue. As Yurdakul and Altay (2022) discuss in the case of Germany, high-skilled women of Turkish background move into professional circles, express “international” outlooks, and invest in private education to protect their children from discrimination and help them to build successful careers. By contrast, the literature on undocumented and socio-economically precarious migrants and refugees draws attention to the limited spaces and options these have to make themselves at home. Focusing on Latina migrants in Los Angeles, Hondagneu-Sotelo (2017) highlights how gender intersects with legal and economic precariousness to restrict women’s leisure options and orient them towards community gardens, some of the few places where they can find respite from their everyday predicaments, surrounding themselves with familiar plants, people, and activities that help (re)create a sense of “home”. In the Dutch context, Huizinga’s article in this Issue (2022) reveals refugees’ struggles to claim inclusion, and the role of specific public sites and spaces, which allow men this time to meet fellow migrants and revive familiar gendered socialization practices but also interact with native peers. These sites include community hubs, such as migrant enterprises and religious organizations, as well as central town square landmarks, which enable refugees to signal their presence and develop a wider range of connections. Faced with negative representations as “threatening Others”, some, however, avoid spaces where other migrants congregate in their efforts to minimize their visibility and prevent discriminatory experiences, blend in, and/or diffuse forms of social control coming from in-group members (see Saharso et al. 2023). Adopting an intersectional lens in examining micro-level responses to state discourses and categorization is thus essential to prevent the simplistic and homogenizing representations of migrant and minority groups that prevail in boundary-making and integration approaches (Fischer, Achermann, and Dahinden 2020).

In addition to individuals’ characteristics, responses to dominant categories and integration discourses vary depending on one’s horizon of incorporation. The “context of reception” in the society of settlement, crucially defined, according to Portes and Rumbaut (2006), by government policies, institutional conditions, and societal reception, affects migrants unequally, prompting different reactions. Confronted with harsh policies and the threat of deportation, undocumented migrants, for example, have been forced to develop unique strategies to navigate urban spaces, social relationships, labour and housing markets in ways that minimize encounters with authorities and safeguards their residence abroad (Menjívar and Abrego 2012; Bloch and McKay 2016). At the opposite end, favourable policies, such as post-study visas for international students, allow those who meet their criteria to extend their stay and access the job market, as Hao and Leung (2023) show in their research on Chinese graduates in the Netherlands.

The context of reception, however, does not operate in isolation from the context of departure. How migrants strategize and balance their options stretches geographically, as scholars of transnationalism have long emphasized. A telling example, documented in this Special Issue, is favourable attitudes, laws, and policies in sphere of gender and sexuality, which may constitute a powerful incentive for LGBTQ + migrants to make steps to “integrate” abroad, despite concomitant difficulties to access employment, if they anticipate pressures, restrictions, and homophobic treatment on return to their homeland (Hao and Leung 2023). For other migrants, return may remain a back-up option to valorize skills and qualifications obtained abroad, if their career plans fail to materialize there (Lulle, Moroşanu, and King 2022), and some do make this step and take newly acquired skills “back home” (Hagan and Wassink 2016), reaffirming the importance of placing responses to “integration” discourses and challenges in a transnational perspective.

Furthermore, whilst migrants’ lives are importantly shaped by nation-wide laws, policies, and discourses, they unfold in particular localities, with their specific institutional, social, and material environment (Boccagni and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2021). Migrants and their families thus also confront different integration challenges or opportunities depending on their specific place of residence and the people that inhabit them. In recent years, research has looked optimistically towards those who settle in super-diverse areas and engage in more fluid and temporary mobilities, questioning the relevance of traditional “integration” frameworks (Grzymala-Kazlowska and Phillimore 2018). However, although super-diversity is widespread and well documented (Grzymala-Kazlowska and Phillimore 2018; Vertovec 2007; Wessendorf 2014), not all migrants live in super-diverse places. In the Dutch context, Huizinga’s analysis (2022) shows how Syrian male refugees confront a considerably more homogeneous and hostile environment in Northern Netherlands, which increases their visibility and limits their sense of inclusion. Furthermore, even those who settle in super-diverse places are not entirely spared the challenges and pressures of “integration”. Whilst their cities and neighbourhoods may bring significant comfort and protections, “exposure [to the mainstream], even its intrusion’ remain inevitable (Alba and Duyvendak 2019, 111). As Alba and Duyvendak (2019, 111) remind us, dominant values and ways of life permeate even the most diverse places through key institutions such as schools, which may be very mixed demographically and embrace diversity but remain strongly oriented by the history, language, and culture of the majority group. The sense of ease experienced in super-diverse neighbourhoods may also cease when one steps out and confronts public institutions, services, and spaces that appear ethnically unmarked but often reflect the “needs and lifestyles of the ethnocultural mainstream” (Boccagni and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2021, 22; see also Haapajärvi 2022). Interactions in these contexts can therefore trigger feelings of “difference”, exclusion, and at times inferiority amongst migrants and their descendants. Whilst some learn to avoid these spaces and seek recognition elsewhere, such as internationally-oriented circles (Yurdakul and Altay 2022), others, driven by their ambitions for a “good life” (Waldinger 2017) or home-making pursuits (Boccagni and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2021), make steps to access them. This can involve different strategies, from “resignifying” these spaces with familiar objects, music, and social practices from one’s homeland to using them as “bridges” to the native population (Huizinga 2022) and learning the skills, attitudes, and behaviours typically “rewarded” there (Waldinger 2017).

Whilst the notion of “integration” has been rightly criticized from multiple perspectives (e.g. Dahinden 2016; Favell 2019), the discussion above cautions against readily dismissing the power of “integration” forces and discourses that circulate in receiving societies and affect migrants and their descendants, the related exclusion and stigmatization these often experience from various majority-oriented spaces and resources, and the strategies some develop to overcome the material and symbolic barriers these pose and create a sense of “home”. The papers in this Special Issue provide a strong reminder that “integration”, although ambiguous and problematic in numerous ways, is not an entirely obsolete concept. By emphasizing its spatial and symbolic coordinates, they echo recent developments in this field, which look beyond the traditional domains and objective indicators of “integration” (e.g. the labour market or education) to highlight its subjective and experiential dimensions (Boccagni and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2021). They also extend these by drawing attention to how aspects of identity often downplayed, such as class, gender, and sexuality, feature in migrants’ struggles to gain acceptance and make themselves at home, sometimes in combination but not necessarily in agreement. A telling example is female and LGBTQ + migrants, whose experiences of greater inclusion and equality from the viewpoint of gender and sexuality norms, relative to home societies, tip the balance in favour of staying abroad, despite labour market disadvantage, racialization, and potential downgrading in social status, as Hao and Leung (2023) aptly demonstrate here.

To summarize, migrants and minorities respond differently to integration discourses and categorization “from above”, depending on both individual and contextual factors. Their complex identities and lives that unfold in specific places but often stretch transnationally require an intersectional transnational approach, sensitive to multiple categories of difference in conjunction with the peculiarities of the localities to which migrants are connected.

Practical and discursive responses to categorization and visions of integration

The actual responses migrants develop to embrace, contest, or modify specific visions of integration and forms of categorization come in many forms. Our Special Issue aims to offer a rounded understanding of migrants’ and minorities’ reactions, by considering both direct engagement with dominant categories and discourses, and more indirect responses, manifested in people’s everyday strategies to pursue their aspirations and build dignified lives within the opportunities and constraints these create.

To start with the latter, existing studies have documented how migrants and minorities develop a variety of practical ways to navigate exclusion, and “make themselves at home” in a particular place, which can range from pursuing ambitious careers and desired lifestyle to more modest goals, such as developing a “sense of stability and predictability” (Boccagni and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2021, 3). Some of these materialize in pragmatic strategies to “assimilate”, such as changing one’s name to avoid stigmatization in the labour market (Bursell 2012) or applying for citizenship to secure one’s status and access certain privileges reserved for nationals (e.g. lower university tuition fees, Godin and Sigona 2022). Other examples of practical strategies can be seen in the case of migrants with precarious legal status, who become versed in navigating urban environments or social relationships in ways that avoid encounters with authorities or disclosure of their identity, which could make them vulnerable to detention, deportation, and possible separation from family (Menjívar and Abrego 2012; Bloch and McKay 2016). Negative representations and hostile policies can also alter individuals’ everyday itinerary and social practices, when certain spaces or activities increase vulnerability to racism and stigmatization. This is particularly salient for those who are visibly different, as Huizinga’s (2022) research on Syrian refugees reveals, reinforcing the need for an intersectional lens in understanding practical responses to stigmatization and exclusion. Menjívar (2022, 1) emphasizes precisely this point, noting that “legal status is simply life altering”, especially when it “intersects with other aspects of inequality, such as race, and ‘racialized legal status’ impacts certain groups more than others, thus amplifying inequalities across immigrant groups”.

Whilst pragmatic responses are common amongst migrants’ and minorities’ strategies to deal with state discourses and policies, individuals often go beyond or combine them with more complex processes of asserting their status and worth, home-making, and belonging. Seen from this perspective, naturalization does not simply mean more rights and access to material resources; it might also be a strategy to (re)claim a sense of belonging to the “dominant” group, as Godin and Sigona (2022) show in the case of EU nationals in post-Brexit UK. Likewise, migrant parents’ investment in private international education may help fend off discrimination and boost their children’s chances to “succeed” in a competitive labour market but also form part of one’s strategies to signal their worth and internationally-oriented mindset (Yurdakul and Altay 2022). Town squares or community gardens may offer important leisure and socialization spaces for undocumented migrants and refugees, whose circumstances (be they material resources, legal status, and gender norms) constrain their access elsewhere (Huizinga 2022; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2017). Yet, they are also transformed through migrants’ activities, who meet fellow migrants there, play familiar music, grow and cook various foods from “home”, becoming a marker of migrants’ presence, and their continued efforts to create a sense of home and belonging (Huizinga 2022; Haapajärvi 2022; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2017). The wider literature also documents how some take further steps, speaking publicly against the injustices they experience, and mobilizing to demand inclusiveness in the place they call “home”. This is, for instance, the case with undocumented Latino youth in the United States, more inclined to engage in public action, compared to their parents’ generation, who often fear and avoid such exposure due to the sanctions it might attract (Abrego 2011). Therefore, as Huizinga’s research (2022) also shows, if some precarious migrants and refugees adapt their day-to-day routines and itinerary to minimize encounters with everyday racism and immigration authorities, others may target precisely those places with high exposure in various ways, as part of their strategies to signal their presence and belonging to the receiving society more generally. By analyzing such nuances and diverging approaches, our Special Issue does not simply document migrants’ and minorities’ strategies to claim inclusion but also draws attention to their considerable variation within and across specific groups or categories defined by ethnicity, age, gender, legal, or socio-economic status, challenging the often homogenizing representations that circulate in political and press discourse.

Alongside practical strategies, migrants and minorities resort to discursive tools to respond to dominant discourses and forms of categorizations, which may involve different kinds of boundary work not only locally, towards people “here”, but also transnationally, towards people “there”. Boundary work “from above” may thus generate boundary work “from below”. When confronted with negative appraisals and assimilationist pressures, some individuals reinforce existing boundaries, whereas others contest or redraw them in their efforts to redeem their status and assert their belonging, sometimes with negative implications on other marginalized groups or categories (Moroşanu and Fox 2013). Whereas boundary-making strategies “from below” are often viewed as concerning minority-majority relations, the articles in this Issue demonstrate that boundary work occurs in multiple directions, including other minority populations. Minority members’ responses to stigma may therefore involve “stigmatisation of others down and up the social hierarchy” (Witte 2018), leading to the reinforcement or reconfiguration, rather than dismantling of symbolic boundaries (Moroşanu and Fox 2013). This collection provides ample evidence of such tactics, and also goes further by theorizing the “horizontal hostilities” (Huizinga 2022) which may result thereof and adding an intersectional angle to them.

In the German context, for example, Yurdakul and Altay (2022) show how middle- and upper-middle class mothers of Turkish origins mobilize cultural and economic resources to assert broader identities and distance themselves from stereotypical images of “Turks”. By defining themselves as “international” in outlooks, they do not reject their Turkish background but draw clear intra-group boundaries, strongly dissociating themselves from “uneducated” and “unintegrated” Turks, seen to remain anchored in ethnic communities and traditional monocultural practices, implicitly classed as inferior. Furthermore, they seek to fend off discrimination by setting themselves apart from non-Turkish migrants or refugees of “Middle Eastern” or Arab origin. In doing so, they draw boundaries between “good Turks” and “bad Arabs” in ways that illustrate the complex intersections of class, ethnicity, and religion. In a similar vein, Huizinga’s paper (2022) highlights how gender intersects with age and religion in Syrian male refugees’ attempts to blame the negative portrayals they confront in the Netherlands on the culture of “old religious men”. The intersection of gender, religion, and generation is also evident in Saharso et al.'s (2023) study in this Special Issue of pre-marital sex attitudes among young Dutch of migrant origin. Challenging homogenizing representations of migrant and minority groups, the authors show how some young people from religious communities where premarital sex is traditionally not allowed navigate norms around sexual behaviour in ways that enable them to have love relationships while also respecting their parents and faith, whereas others, who are not strongly embedded in their ethnic communities, defy the virginity imperative. Hao and Leung (2023) further demonstrate how boundary work can stretch transnationally, when Chinese graduates in the Netherlands align themselves with the native Dutch, seen to share more progressive attitudes towards gender and sexuality, compared to the patriarchal and heterosexual norms prevailing amongst co-nationals at “home”.

Whilst working to redress migrants’ tarnished identities and elevate their social status, these discursive strategies reinforce or redraw symbolic boundaries towards other marginalized populations, distinguishing explicitly or implicitly between “good” and “bad” migrants, “backward” or “progressive” views and behaviours (also Moroşanu and Fox 2013; Ryan 2010) within and across one’s group in ways that do not neatly follow the ethnic group lines often drawn from above. The “horizontal hostilities” that may emerge in the process vary considerably, illustrating the malleable nature of boundaries, depending on the intersection of factors relevant in specific contexts (age, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, and/or sexuality).

Not all migrants are in a position to counter negative categorization and representations, however. The power of stigmatizing discourses is evident in cases where individuals internalize and reproduce wider representations of their group, aggravating their damaging consequences on themselves and others. Alongside harsh legislation, criminalizing narratives, for example, have been shown to instil profound feelings of inferiority in some migrants, who come to see themselves as not entitled to any rights (Menjívar and Abrego 2012). As Menjívar and Abrego forcefully argue in the case of undocumented migrants, these “become participants in their own devaluation and accept this social order as normal and the consequences in their lives as expected” (2012, 1408). Even when migrants are less vulnerable, negative press and political discourses can result in attitudes of acceptance and resignation on the part of those affected, which suggests the reputation was “deserved” and makes one participant in their nation’s denigration (e.g. Moroşanu and Fox 2013). These troubling outcomes exemplify the symbolic violence perpetrated by media and state discourses and policies (Menjívar and Abrego 2012), and caution that, although migrants and minorities have demonstrated remarkable resilience and resourcefulness in dealing with negative categorization and integration demands, these are not available to all.

To conclude, documenting migrants’ and minorities’ discursive strategies in response to state policies and narratives provides a window into how boundary work “from above” produces boundary work “from below”, amongst its myriad effects. Stigmatizing discourses or integration pressures may be internalized and reproduced by those affected, but also challenged, and sometimes redirected towards other disadvantaged groups, as the papers in this Special Issue well demonstrate. Where present, individuals' distancing strategies do not simply reflect the group lines crudely drawn from above. The rhetorical devices individuals employ in the process partly reassert the salience of ethnicity, religion (and related categories of difference) in boundary drawing, yet they rarely stop there, illustrating the multiple factors that combine to define one’s identity and sense of worth (Wimmer 2013). An intersectional approach is thus crucial for examining both macro- and micro-level processes of categorization and boundary formation.

Conclusions

Critical analyses of migrant integration tend to focus on categorization and boundary work “from above”, i.e. how institutional actors, such as states, policymakers, media, or international bodies, sort people on the move into migrants vs. refugees, high- vs low-skilled, legal vs illegal, drawing boundaries between desirable and less desirable migrants; yet categorization and boundary drawing also happens informally, with important implications on people’s identity and status. This introduction has argued for the need to understand boundary-making processes developed by both state institutions through policies and discourses (i.e. “from above’) and people of migrant origins (i.e. “from below’) in tandem. Reflecting on the findings of the articles included in this Special Issue, we have shown, first, how boundary-drawing intrinsic to “integration” practices and discourses produces categories of belonging, which differentially impacts individuals of migrant backgrounds depending on the intersection of their social locations of gender, class, ethnicity, faith and so forth. Second, we have also presented how individuals respond to dominant “integration” discourses and policies, often engaging in their own boundary work. Reflecting the analytical lens of the contributions to this Special Issue, we have advocated for and demonstrated the use of adopting an intersectional perspective to the analysis of boundaries and belonging in the context of migrant “integration” policies and practices, and of how migrants navigate and respond to them. Intersectionality, we show, is crucial in understanding how social locations work together and interact to produce migrant categories that bestow people with differential rights and that socially construct them as more or less desirable for the “majority” society and therefore more or less able to “integrate”. These categories, which contribute to the boundaries that symbolically include and define some people as desirable, while excluding others, and affect access and distribution of resources (Lamont 2000), impact on migrants’ and minorities’ material realities and distinct social experiences as they navigate a new social context and strive towards a sustainable and satisfactory life. Reading the boundary work done from “above” and “below” through an intersectional lens provides important insights into the challenging conditions for membership that state policies generate for migrants and ethnic minorities, on one side, and migrants’ and ethnic minorities’ efforts to challenge and get round the constraints of state definitions, on the other. Taken together, an intersectional approach problematizes the essentializing representations of migrants and ethnic minorities in state “integration” policies, which are increasingly unsuitable for societies that are factually super-diverse, and whose migrant and minority members often present intersecting motivations and allegiances in their aspirations to achieve upward social mobility.

The intersectional approach to boundaries and belonging opens up new research avenues, which emerge from the research presented in this Special Issue. First, future analysis should extend an intersectional perspective to how “majority” locals respond to and interact with migrants and minorities. To analyze institutional boundary work only from the perspective of migrants and minorities misses out the manifold societal ramifications of (super)diversity for societies of settlement. How and to what degree have the “majority’s” social relations, values, and customs changed, and how have these affected attitudes to migrant minorities amongst differently-positioned majority members? In what circumstances are there similarities in behaviour, values, and norms between those who are labelled “migrant”, and in particular the second- and third-generation, and their “majority” peers? Second, our intersectional approach to integration calls for greater attention to how migrants and racialized minorities balance different aspects of identity and forms of “difference” in their “integration” journeys. To what degree are they able to navigate and strategically draw on their intersecting social locations as they strive towards a sustainable “good” life, however defined? In what ways are they able to mitigate the different forms of discrimination and rejection they experience, and what is sacrificed in the process? How do different social spaces, local and transnational, matter in their expression of social identities and in their life-chances to overcome blocked opportunities to social advancement and establishment of a “good” and “successful” life? We hope the papers included in this Special Issue provide a solid starting point for more systematic inquiries into these pressing questions and contribute to further a research agenda in migration studies true to the original feminist and anti-racist politics of intersectionality. To this end, and to avoid watering down the transformative aims of intersectionality, we contend that intersectionality should not be applied as a catch-all, generic concept to address inequalities (see Bastia et al. 2022). Rather, and in line with the approach adopted in the contributions to this Special Issue, an intersectional analysis of “integration” and boundary work should be attentive to the relevant cultural, political, economic, societal, and/or situational context, and where possible, responsive to the self-identified needs of the affected communities.

Acknowledgements

Most articles in this collection were first presented at the 2020 IMISCOE annual conference at panels organized under the remit of the Standing Committee Gender and Sexuality in Migration Research (GenSeM). GenSeM has also facilitated other scholars to join this project and we are grateful for the support given by this network.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 There is much variation concerning when Western European countries became important destination points. Former colonial powers such as France and the United Kingdom witnessed earlier migration waves than southern European countries like Italy or Greece.