Elective affinities between racism and immigrant integration policies: a dialogue between two studies carried out across the European Union and Spain

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we problematise the relationship between racism and immigrant integration policies. First, we approach racism from its geopolitical/institutional/governmental logic and contextualise the emergence of integration policies across the European Union. Then, we put into dialogue the fieldwork materials of our research projects, analysing intersections between the EU and Spanish integration policy frameworks. Despite the inclusive and proactive rhetoric often expressed by integration policies, we illustrate the existence of an ‘elective affinity’ between racism and integration by focusing on: (1) the construction of migrants as a problematic ‘object’ of governmental intervention; (2) the reduction of racism to an individual pathology and the underestimation of its institutional/structural dimensions; (3) the reproduction of epistemic racism through the discourse on European (and national) values.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigrant integration
• racism
• racialisation
• European Union
• Spain
• Andalusia

Acknowledgments

We thank Rosa Navarro Mesa, Melisa Argañaraz, Alberto Arribas Lozano and Marcus Guy Erridge for helping us with the translation.

Disclosure statement

We report no potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1. Although racism not only impacts immigrants, we focus on this connection according to our research experience.

2. For example, although related measures were already existing, France started to officially use the term ‘integration’ in 1984, the Netherlands in 1996 (Gil 2010) and Germany in 2005 (Bendel 2014).

3. However, integration is addressed only to ‘legally residing third-country nationals’ and excludes undocumented migrants.

4. A specific configuration of the Council of the EU, made up of the Justice and Home Affairs national ministers.

5. At least until the elections of 2018, when a right-wing coalition replaced the forty-year winning majority of the Socialist Party.

6. To ensure anonymity, we have randomly altered the interview dates, the interviewees’ gender and other personal identifiers.

7. Published by the European Commission and the think tank ‘Migration Policy Group’ (MPG), it was developed in several technical seminars with experts, national administrators and NGOs. It contained best practices for the implementation of the CBPs and was followed by a second (2007) and a third (2010) edition.

8. However, the harshness of this critique is not representative of the prevailing discourse among European NGO. We have chosen to quote it because of its efficacious wording and experience of the interviewee.

9. As Abu-Lughod (2002) points out, Muslim women are often thought of as passive hostages of a backward and patriarchal culture, constantly in need of Western ‘salvation’.

10. A more contemporary anecdote: during the fieldwork in Brussels, the limited number of non-white EU civil servants was striking. However, racialised people working in the service sector (inside EU institutions) were over-represented.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant agreement ERC-2016-COG-725402; research project POLITICS: The politics of anti-racism in Europe and Latin America: knowledge production, political decision-making and collective struggles]; University of Granada under Plan Propio de Investigación [Programme 6A]; European Commission under the Marie Curie 7th Framework Programme [ref.: 612617. GOVDIV project ‘Multilevel Governance of Cultural Diversity in a comparative perspective: EU-Latin America’].