Immigration, integration and citizenship: elements of a new political demography

ABSTRACT

A critical review of the state-of-the-art in migration studies. The paper centres on a contrast between established comparative scholarship – elaborating progressive models of immigration, integration and citizenship, that reflect the increasingly diverse, migrant-built societies of the North Atlantic West – and a new generation of work in the last decade, influenced by critical, anti-racist and decolonial theory, that rejects this ‘Eurocentric' liberal democratic global order and self-image. Establishing a bridge between older neo-Weberian approaches to immigration and sovereign nation-state building and newer (or revived) Marxist-Foucauldian accounts, it accents the state-power building effects of bordering, managing and cultivating ‘diverse' national populations, and its ongoing governmental categorisation of citizens and migrants, nationals and aliens, majorities and minorities, as a key feature of neoliberal ‘racial capitalism'. The argument develops in relation to wanted and unwanted migration in advanced liberal democratic economies, “visible” forms of immigration versus ‘middling' forms of everyday cross-border mobility, and the limits of humanitarian arguments for open borders and expansive asylum rights. The paper sketches an alternate politics to the self-legitimating ‘political demography' of liberal democracy, relating the ongoing colonial power of ideas of immigration, integration and citizenship, to the reproduction of massive global inequalities between ‘the West and the Rest’.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• integration
• citizenship
• demography
• migration studies
• governmentality
• racial capitalism
• decolonisation

A SEISMIC SHIFT has taken place in migration studies in recent years. The fault line is essentially generational. A cross-Atlantic and then increasingly global migration studies burgeoned in the optimistic years of globalisation and regional integration after the watershed of 1989. Rooted in a pre-existing North American canon on immigration in history, sociology and political science, a substantial part of this evolving field was centred in comparative institutional, policy and legal studies, and formulated in the progressive language of rights and citizenship that would transform ‘migrants’ into ‘citizens’ (for the full story, see Favell [1999] 2001, 2015). At its core, the study of the linear triad of ‘immigration’, ‘integration’ and ‘citizenship’ internationally was to offer a broadly progressive account of the convergence of liberal democratic immigration politics on more open, inclusive, fluid and multi-ethnic forms, and the potential integratory and redistributory effects worldwide of migration and development (definitive collections include: Jacobson 1997; Joppke 1998a; Koopmans and Statham 2000; Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer 2001; Bloemraad, Korteweg, and Yudakul 2008; Shachar et al. 2017). Much of this work focused on the progressive transformation of nation-state institutions towards increasing inclusion and diversity. At the same time, a sub-set of scholars, sharing the same progressive teleology, but imagining institutions going beyond the nation-state, connected growing international migration to transformative alternatives to the nation-centred societal formations that have dominated Western modernity. These new liberal democratic forms were associated with the idiom of transnationalism, and interlinked notions of universal human rights, post-national membership, mobilities, and cosmopolitanism (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc 1994; Soysal 1994; Jacobson 1996; Pries 2001; Benhabib 2004; Bosniak 2006).

Post 2008, with liberal democracies encountering a sequence of crises, ranging through ever more critical economic, demographic, political and environmental registers, a much darker, critical idiom has returned to the study of international migration and mobilities. While a number of older names, familiar from the established field, still figure highly in critical discussions – for example, Didier Bigo, William Walters, Eleonore Kofman, Brenda Yeoh, Nira Yuval Davis, Saskia Sassen, or Nina Glick Schiller – the new literature has been carried forward by younger and more militant figures, capturing an audience of millennial and post-millenial scholars, who are facing a much bleaker professional environment as well as the end of optimism about the future of liberal democracy. Their literature references, grounded in post-colonial genealogies and critical race theory, are often completely different to the older, instititutional and comparative works (for definitive collections, see: De Genova and Peutz 2010; De Genova 2017; Gonzales and Sigona 2017; Horton and Heyman 2020; the newer literature is very ably synthesised by Mayblin and Turner 2021). The most powerful theoretical sources of this line of thinking can be found in a world-systems inflected Marxist-Foucauldian thought and its feminist and post-colonial variants (Foucault 2003, 2007; Sayad [1996] 2004; Agamben 1998, 2005; Spivak 1999; Chakrabarty 2000; Balibar 2001; Boatcă 2015; Mbembe 2016; Bhambra and Holmwood 2021), and/or a return to (or discovery of) an established critical race theory that burgeoned in the US and UK in the 1980s and 1990s (Hall et al. 1978; Hall [1994] 2017; Hall 2001; Omi and Winant 1986; Gilroy 1993, 2004; Brah 1996; Goldberg 2002, 2009; Hesse 2007; for a synthesis, see Lentin 2020).

The key generational shift is in the attitude towards politics as such. While the older migration studies was sanguine about the capacities of liberal democracy, and comfortable aligning its theories and models of social or political change with ‘impact’ oriented policy agendas and funding in Europe and North America, the newer migration studies is emphatically critical of the politics of liberal democracy, positioning itself in terms of activism outside of conventional politics and against governmental co-option, whether by national government or international institutions. It emphasises the construction of borders both physical and mental, the persistence of racism and massive global inequalities, the selective, extractive, neo-colonial features of liberal democratic states’ ongoing ‘crisis’ management of international population movements, and how law is used to surveil and punish migrants (for example: Walters 2006, 2015; Fassin 2011; Anderson 2013; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Garelli and Tazzioli 2013; Kotef 2015; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019; Bonjour 2020). Distinctively, it also emphasises the genealogy of contemporary political forms in colonial practices and imperial formations of the sometimes distant imperial past (Lake and Reynolds 2012; Mongia 2018; Sharma 2020; Mamdani 2020). Largely innocent of these kinds of concerns, the language and epistemological presuppositions of the older migration studies are seen to be fatally compromised, notably in failing to deal with the historical silence over race in the field (Lentin 2014). Above all, the new wave demands a set of ‘new keywords’ (De Genova and Tazzioli 2016) to capture the decolonial and transformative politics of the present era, emphasising activist engagement and a migrant perspective centred outside the global North. The scholarship in the critical humanities and arts that has accordingly developed – coming powerfully out of transnational history, anthropology, and the cultural theory-driven wings of human geography and international studies – makes little reference, or only disparagingly, to the older literature centred in the older ‘Eurocentric’ political science, policy studies, comparative sociology, law and conventional historical studies.

The older post-national, transnational and mobilities scholars have meanwhile struggled to disassociate their work from the era of ‘global’ neoliberalism in which their thinking thrived, and to which it was intimately connected. They too have substantially disappeared from the references of the younger generation. At the same time a core of ‘empirical’ policy-oriented scholars happy to work on funded governmental agendas – focussing on managing migration and charting pathways to immigrant and refugee settlement and integration – have tended to plough on. These have been substantially bolstered in recent years by the quantification of ‘models’ and ‘indexes’ and ‘toolkits’ of ‘immigrant integration’, ‘mainstreaming’ migration studies into the social sciences as a ‘normal science’ (Ager and Strang 2008; Howard 2009; Koopmans 2013; Vink and Bauböck 2013; Goodman 2015; Helbling et al. 2017; Kalter et al. 2018; Solano and Huddleston 2020; see Scholten and van Breugel 2018). A major synthetic work such as Alba and Foner (2015), which spans the state-of-the-art in historical, quantitative and comparative institutional work across North America and Europe reflects a blithe trans-atlantic convergence on a paradigm of ‘immigrant integration’ with unashamed roots in theories of assimilation and the Chicago School (for a critique, see Reichl, Waldinger, and Soehl 2021). Others have reacted more aggressively to the radical turn of the ‘woke’ generation, taking positivist, neo-conservative positions amidst the new ‘cultural wars’ (a mode of academic work above all pioneered by the Harvard scholar, Robert Putnam; see Putnam 2007). A sub-set of ‘realist’ scholars, who were always sceptical of the post- and trans- nationalism of the 1990s, have emphasised a return to nation-centred positions on limiting immigration, and imposing cultural integration via ‘civic’ secular values and bounded national citizenship, as the only best case scenario for liberal democracies facing massive populist ‘native’ backlash to the rampant ‘neoliberal’ migration and mobilities of an earlier era (Collier 2013; Miller 2016; Kaufmann 2018; Koopmans and Orgad 2020; Joppke 2021).

In the face of these fractures, migration studies has never been so fragmented or uncommunicative across sub-fields, even as it continues to grow and gain mainstream disciplinary recognition. In this paper, I propose a certain pathway through the divisions, in the name of an alternate political demography, that can be read from the encounter of critical migration studies with a part of the 1980s and ‘90s literature in sociology and political science. I argue that a constructive rather than dismissive relationship can be forged, between this older neo-Weberian political sociology of immigration and nation-building, and the newer critical migration studies with its exposure of bordering, the selective and extractive injustices of immigrant and asylum policy, and citizenship as the governmentality of racialised global inequalities in a post-colonial world.

Political demography is rooted in the Hobbesian study of how states make and define populations in order to generate territorial sovereign power: the fundamental bordering processes by which they categorise, distinguish, differentiate, and integrate nationals and foreigners, citizens and aliens, majorities and minorities. My focus here is thus on how affluent and powerful nations in the North Atlantic West continue to conceptually carve out a conventional slice of ‘immigration’ – and its various legal types – from the unsettling flux and diversity of migration and mobilities in a highly globalised world. In the process they both make some forms of migrant unwanted, precarious and ‘illegal’ (as critical scholars emphasise), but also render ‘invisible’ and unproblematic many other manifold forms of movement across borders, that are a feature of a highly globalised planet. This process injects radical inequalities between peoples in the world, whose status is overwhelmingly determined by their national origin (Shachar 2009). In turn, when successfully institutionalised as ‘migration management’ and ‘immigrant integration’, it sustains an international order of sovereign nation-states, whose power is reflected in the index of nationality measured by the value of passports (Mau et al. 2012). Making this the object of study immediately brings a critical edge into the study of populations and spatial movement; instead of adopting uncritically the conventional categories of practice of ‘immigration’, ‘integration’ and ‘citizenship’, as most immigration policy making and much migration research that reflects it, still does. In this way, a significant part of routine migration studies invariably assumes who are the ‘natives’ and who are the ‘immigrants’ who need ‘integrating’, and that given national borders, territories, states and societies and their international hierarchy, are already settled terms, rather than something that needs explaining.

In this argument, I follow the logic of much recent critical migration studies in problematising the universalist pretentions of conventional thinking on immigration anchored in ostensibly ‘progressive’ liberal democratic North American and European experiences with migration and diversity (what is often somewhat misleadingly labelled ‘Eurocentricity’). But it differs in that it questions the emphasis amongst many critical scholars on normatively privileging claims of asylum over ‘economic’ forms of migration, which for all the drama and pathos involved in the former, are still more numerically significant than humanitarian forms (Safi 2020, 15–16). It also brings into critical view dimensions of atypical, ‘higher’ end migrations and mobilities, often overlooked by many critical scholars, who (understandably) tend to focus emotively on the exclusion and suffering of despised ‘migrants’ at the bottom end of the mobilities continuum (Favell, Feldblum, and Smith 2006; Kunz 2016). The numerically much more significant ‘invisible’ mobilities of ‘elite’ and ‘middling’ movers in the bounded, stratified yet porous ‘globalised’ world of the recent past, also reveal analytically much about the sources of nation-state centred demographic power. Thinking through these issues will point reflection back towards more economics-based theories of migration, notably the liberal migration and development thinking heavily discredited in the post-2008 period, but shifting it to accent its more dis-integrative political dimensions.

In a first section, I clear a path to a re-reading of the older literature which will delineate a line of neo-Weberian political sociology that be traced back via various key names to the work of Aristide Zolberg. Read through a critical lens this body of work continues to provide analytical keys to understanding the central formation of ideas of ‘immigration’, ‘integration’ and ‘citizenship’ that anchor the field and its policy derivations. In a second section, taking off from Anne McNevin’s (2019) perplexing observation about the resilience of these standard modes despite decades of critical work at the margins, I fill out how an ongoing focus on middling (or banal, ‘everyday’) migration and mobilities may continue to provide modes of conceiving an alternate de-nationalised governance of international migration – as was a key feature of post-national thinking in the earlier period. The problem here was a lack of emphasis on the potentially radical and transformative dis-integrative effects of fragmenting national governance over populations. Instead, liberal scholars bought into the utopian illusions of rebuilding consensual governance structures at the international and global level: constitutional human rights-based fantasies of United Nations and European Unions, and so on. I go on to raise difficult questions about the overwhelming focus of recent critical work on ‘abject’ forms of forced migration, still framed in these terms, demanding humanitarian responses in terms of asylum and open borders. These responses, while politically sympathetic and often strategically useful, do not address the core problem of global inequalities that lies at the heart of the ‘immigrant integration’ paradigm. Nor do the many ‘interculturalist’ analyses of refugee integration that have burgeoned in the emergency response to the Mediterranean migration ‘crisis’ of 2015–16. In the final section, then, rejecting these consensus-based ‘integration’ debates, I develop a more direct emphasis on dis-integrative politics at the heart of the conceptual struggle against the nation-centred international order of political demography. Focusing on the unstable basis of global inequalities and unequal membership linked to citizenship as nationality, may still point forward to a conflict-based reconception of rights claims and actions by those that do move and the often immobile stakeholders they represent: what I argue would be a properly politicised sociology of international migration and (im)mobilities, as suggested in distinct ways, for example, by the literature on citizenship acts, and on the autonomy of migration.

A brief conclusion summarises and restates key elements of the new political demography presented. A critical migration studies must make central what a ‘normal science’ of immigration and integration takes as given and unquestioned: the formation and sustaining of ongoing, governable national populations from the flux of mobilities and global diversities, as the core governmental operation of modernity and modernisation.

Something old, something new: towards a new political demography

Given its disconnect, the new activist and decolonial scholarship – what I am loosely terming ‘critical migration studies’ – poses a stark challenge to any notional ‘establishment’ of migration studies, however conceived. While this will always be contested, it would seem defensible to think of an ‘establishment’ in Europe in terms of the centrality of the IMISCOE organisation, or in North America by the canon of authors, studied by generations of sociologists, political scientists, historians and others, reflected in text book views of the field (see the analysis of the field and its leading authors presented by Levy, Pisarevskaya, and Scholten 2020; or textbooks such as de Haas, Castles, and Miller 2019; Gold and Nawyn 2019; Zapata-Barrero et al. 2022). Migration studies in the 1990s, it is well known, rose out of an emphasis on new forms of migration, mobilities and (super)diversity in the global era that were not so detectable in the existing literatures on race and ethnicity (King 1993, 2002; Koser and Lutz 1998; Vertovec 2007; Collyer and Samers 2017). In part the angry correctives presented by authors such as Lentin (2014) and Alexander (2018) reflect the difficulty of now conceptualising race, ethnicity and migration in one single coherent international framework – something on which decolonial perspectives certainly offer fresh possibilities, while also still being highly Anglo-centric in their emphasis (see also discussions in Favell 2001, 2022; Back et al. Forthcoming).

The sheer expansion of writing across migration and ethnic and racial studies on non-European and non-North American cases and locations has been the other vital sideways shift in the field. Older scholarship has arguably found it difficult to keep up in conceptual terms. There are obvious epistemological, anti-orientalist, and potentially decolonising effects at stake in discussing, for instance, how Asian migrations in the context of fast evolving Asian political economies changes the basic paradigm of ‘Western’ immigration studies (Xiang and Lindquist 2014; Liu-Farrer and Yeoh 2018), something in fact prefigured in the ‘management’ of Asian migrations in earlier era of nineteenth century colonial globalisation (McKeown 2008); how fast urbanising migrations in China – the biggest single population movement ever – must transform stable distinctions of internal and international migration (King and Skeldon 2010; Sun 2019; see also Fan 2008); how the ongoing fragmentation of African states and forced migrations caused, pose questions of migration as population displacement outside of the advanced developed world (Koser and Martin 2011; Betts 2013; see also Mamdani 2020 on colonial antecedents); or how the post-colonial formations of race and indigeneity in Latin America complicate North Atlantic notions of race and immigrant diversity (Grosfoguel, Maldonado-Torres, and Saldivar 2005; Lamont et al. 2016; see also Rosemblatt 2018). The resolutely longue durée historical vision of decolonial scholarship also emphasises one vital presentist error in the supposedly ‘unprecedented’ mobile and transformative effects of post-war migrations to Europe and its subsequent, globalisation-era, ‘age of migration’ (Bhambra 2021; critiquing de Haas, Castles, and Miller 2019). It was extractive and settler colonialism of Europeans in all parts of an imperial, Empire-built world prior to the twentieth century that most dramatically re-populated the planet; yet we still have difficulties seeing these ‘white, colonial, settler’ migrations as (perverse and destructive) forms of ‘immigration’ and ‘integration’ (Kunz 2022).

Decolonial scholarship will no doubt continue to add potentially shattering historical analyses of how the contemporary politics of neoliberal globalisation are rooted in long term colonial and imperial practices and technologies. That said, there is little doubt, if our interest is how power works in the contemporary world – of how forms of governmentality, domination, exclusion and exploitation anchor a world ordered by racial hierarchy and massive global inequalities despite such academic critique – that we must also continue to focus on the ongoing evolution and reproduction of formations of modernity – and the modernisation development theory still articulated – at its dominant, so-called ‘Eurocentric’ heart. The frequently loose use of this term in fact obscures an understanding of what is in fact most necessary in the analysis of neo-colonial globalisation and its aftermath: that ‘Empire’ in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has shifted and been unquestionably centred in the North Atlantic, with its heart in the United States of America during this period (Hardt and Negri 2000; Mann 2005; De Grazia 2006; Go 2012). The uncomfortably ‘post-colonial’ European states, in decline and wrestling with the demographic consequences of their empire adventures of the nineteenth century and before, are in fact struggling to align their vision of immigration, diversity and a ‘multi-ethnic’ future with North America as its leading model (Favell 2022; see Bell 2020 for its historical antecedents). It is also true that the majority of the most influential critical scholars of the new generation – as well as their canonical references, for all the focus on the global South – continue to be educated and work in elite Ivy League or equivalent institutions in the US, or, if not, in the most obvious satellite countries, Canada and the UK (and, occasionally, Australia), and publish in elite Anglo-American English language presses built on imperial wealth (for example, Duke or Princeton University Press). Decolonial or not, we are almost always critics writing from the heart of the Death Star.

This is not to cast aside the substance of the new critical migration studies scholarship – and related critical race theory – that has arisen (or returned) so powerfully recently in the academic institutions of the global North (or more accurately: the ‘North Atlantic West’), essentially as a self-critique of ‘Eurocentric’ liberal democratic power, in its contemporary neo-colonial mode. Rather, what I want to propose here, instead of the dismissive disconnect found on both sides of the older and newer literatures, is a more constructive synthesis of older and newer modes of thinking, that will reconceive the broad interdisciplinary space of migration (and mobilities) studies critically as the study of ‘political demography’. There are a couple of existing programmatic uses of this term – not necessarily attractive in their political and theoretical positioning (compare Weiner and Teitelbaum 2001; Goldstone, Kaufmann, and Duffy Toft 2011) – but here the lineage of my thinking is clearly in the dominantly Marxist-Foucauldian vein of critical migration studies, while revisiting what has been the most powerful theoretical nexus on immigration and the state in the older political sociology of ‘immigration’ in liberal democracies, that is, neo-Weberian work on the ‘migration state’ (Hollifield 2004).

A new political sociology on international migration first coalesced in the 1980s in the US (early canonical influences include: Messina 1985; Freeman 1986; Carens 1987; Schain 1988). A key component of this was the analytical framework established in the fringes of political science and international relations by Aristide Zolberg, the director of an important centre of migration studies at the New School in New York (see Zolberg 1983, 1989, 1999). Zolberg was an Africanist, influenced by world systems theory, but a critic of Immanuel Wallerstein from a Weberian perspective (Zolberg 1981). His work on global refugee migration in the 1980s effectively established the political study of refugee migration as the study of violent state formation and fragmentation as a migrant generating process (Zolberg 1983). He was himself a Jewish refugee from World War Two Belgium. His work emphasised the external international influences on national immigration policy: the systemic demands of global capitalism, in paradoxical tension with the maintenance of the global system of Westphalian state sovereignty (Zolberg 1989, 1999). In later years, his history of United States immigration exemplified a disabused view of the myth of American nation-building: of the US, not as a ‘melting pot’ nation built on immigrant ‘ethnic’ diversity, but rather as a state that built its legitimacy and power on the always exclusionary operation of selective criteria of race, religion and ideology (Zolberg 2006; for an analytical development of this line of thought, see FitzGerald and Cook-Martin 2014).

A new comparative international political sociology of immigration – led by Europeanists in the US – would develop out of this nexus of ideas in the 1990s. A fully institutionalised refugee studies, more anchored in anthropology, development and area studies, would also evolve in parallel from Zolberg’s ideas. On immigration, the two main branches concerned the varieties of political economy of immigration in Europe, and the varieties of nationhood and citizenship. The parallel work of James Hollifield (1992) and Rogers Brubaker (1992) are the most obvious foundational figures building on Zolberg's legacy. Hollifield’s work on the ‘liberal paradox’ emphasised the tension over inclusive rights of migration with the sovereign imperatives of border drawing state sovereignty; Brubaker’s work on ‘citizenship as social closure’ emphasised how the functional and symbolic properties of nation-building, even in inclusive mode, necessarily locked other ‘alien’ populations out of citizenship as equal membership. The tensions over immigration control (sovereignty) and national inclusion (citizenship) became the twin axes of understanding international migration within a nation-state centred framework. These were adroitly synthesised in the late 1990s in the work of Christian Joppke (1998b), one of several scholars who shifted into migration studies from the study of social movements. Joppke’s articulate and opinionated work over the next two decades – via key field shaping interventions also on multiculturalism, civic integration and liberal nationalism – has done more anything to set the agenda of conventional mainstream migration studies in the North Atlantic context on the three way nexus of immigration, integration and citizenship.

This analytical agenda can and has been read by many as a normative justification of liberal democratic forms, that with certain authors in this line became increasingly ‘muscular’ in its approach to prescribing ‘civic nationalism’ (Joppke 2010). However, the essentially disabused neo-Weberian view of nation-state building, visible in Zolberg, Hollifield and Brubaker, as the operation of (‘legitimate’) violence and trade offs of economy and sovereign control, retains its core conceptual power in explaining the durability of nation-state forms during, through and after neoliberal globalisation (for an excellent critically-minded synthesis, see Hampshire 2013; see also Waldinger and Soehl 2013). It remains core to ongoing debates on the ‘migration state’ that may be able to absorb a fully global view on how the post-neoliberal world is governing migration – in Asia, Africa, Latin America, as much as Europe and North America during COVID (Hollifield and Foley 2021; see also FitzGerald 2020; Ellermann 2020). However, the normative, justificatory slide towards liberal nationalism it also sometimes contains – seen in Joppke and others who take up defence of a ‘realist’ view of immigration politics and policy (such as Koopmans, see 2010) – needs to be challenged by other theoretical resources. It is here that elements of critical migration studies and critical race theory may be drawn upon.

Neo-Weberian nation state building produces violence and conflict, insiders and outsiders; yet, the normative emphasis of the migration scholarship that followed Joppke was rather to emphasise a search in liberal democracy for rational, consensual, inclusive formulations of post-immigrant society, emphasising maximal diversity and openness: of reconciling economy (open transactions across borders), law (the rights of indivduals), and democracy (the right of peoples to assert democracy over an exclusive, bounded population). Yet the institutions resolving this defend a consensus born of a basic violence. Liberal democracy in this form remains an unstable fusing of Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant – and sometimes, given an eschatology with an historist ‘end of history’, a utopian Hegelianism. Critical migration studies above all, is driven by a historical critique of this violence, identifying its foundations in Eurocentric colonialism. A critical political demography would seek to explain the dominant paradigm of immigration, integration and citizenship in these terms.

As modes of imposing categorical, institutional distinctions to achieve the functional form of the ‘migration state’, the two conventional sides of immigration politics and policy – immigration control and citizenship inclusion – are inevitably bound up with nation-state centred thinking: in other words, ‘methodological nationalism’, as it has been diagnosed since the early 2000s (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). This is where the central dimension of the conventional linear conception of immigration to citizenship – integration – becomes key.¹ Ostensibly focused on society and social interaction rather than legal access or formal status in institutional terms, integration might be conceived as potentially taking place at any scale, from community-level localities to global economy and society. This causes much of the confusion inherent in scholarship that wishes to use the term constructively. Yet, as I have argued in detail elsewhere (Favell 2022), in an increasingly porous, interdependent world of growing diversity and mobilities, in order for nation-centred governance (i.e. ‘sovereignty’) to be restored over immigration controls (bordering) and citizenship (inclusion, through formal status and rights), a normative nation-centred conception of societal integration is always necessary (a point also made by Joppke 2011, drawing on the German social theorist, Niklas Luhmann). Its key work in anchoring immigration politics and policy in a plausible, bounded theory of society, becomes the most important facet in understanding the ongoing legitimated power of liberal democracies over their ‘own’ society and territory – from which their colonial powers of domination, subordination, extraction and exclusion in fact spring. As it has always done in the core Durkheimian tradition of sociology, integration carves coherent, institutionalised societal form out of the noise and chaos of social interaction. It binds, bounds, and individuates – in the face of increasing global complexity, notably the diversification of societies – including in ethno-cultural and racial terms.

Migration and mobilities: unlocking the dominant paradigm

As Anne McNevin (2019) points out in a key recent synoptic assessment of the critical migration studies literature, despite all the theoretical force of the critique outlined above and by many other critical scholars, conventional modes of thinking about ‘immigration’, centred on a nation-building logic of migration and population governance, have proven resilient to all arguments that have attempted to shift it out of its standard space–time coordinates. These are the conventions in which ‘immigration’ is always a definitive move in space across a (national) territorial border, that must have a certain duration and lead on to a meaningful settlement beyond a certain threshold (formally one year), within that political space. In a sense, the breaking down of distinctions between free movement and migration, international and internal (intra-national) migration, migration and mobilities, physical and virtual mobilities, or everyday mobilities and tourism, heralded by population geoographers and mobilities scholars, ought to have made it easier to ‘reboot’ migration studies along critical lines (see also the discussion of these issues in Bauböck 2022). After all, mobilities scholars have always been puzzled, if not scathing, about how conventionally ‘Euclidian’ so much migration studies has remained (see the earlier critiques in Sheller and Urry 2006; Cresswell 2006).

Yet authors trying to change the paradigm have always had to work at the periphery of conventional migration studies. Conradson and Latham’s (2005) proposal to focus on ‘middling migration’, for instance, was one early example that crystallised an idea of how such migration was anchored in transformative urban transnationalism (building on the work of Smith 2001). In another article along these lines (Favell 2007), which builds on the ethnographic study of Eurostars and Eurocities (Favell 2008a), I proposed a rethinking of the paradigm via a focus on European free movement and business-related GATS mobilities, as an empirical leverage for thinking in new ways about migration outside methodological nationalism. The strong programme proposed by Janine Dahinden on ‘demigranticisation’ follows a similar logic (Dahinden 2016). McNevin (2019) in her work underlines as leverage the demigranticisation of the distinction between the spatially mobile and the (supposedly) immobile, and the continuum of solidarities and actions involving (mobile) migrants and minorities and (rooted) indigenous populations (drawing on Sharma and Wright 2008/9).

The (political) point of these authors, though, is that there is a particular power invested in our conventional modes of understanding spatial movement that makes ‘immigration’ so salient as a defining feature of modern times and politics, while all other kinds of migration and mobilities melt into the background as invisible, or at best politically less significant. That power is the power of modern, capitalist nation-building resting on a particular global system of population. The legitimation of this order lies at the heart of the world’s current configuration of power. For a time the political economy of globalisation appeared to point to other formations (see Sassen 2006); and the multiple ‘crises’ of the years since 2008/9 have pointed towards another politics. But it is a fact that a certain conception of immigration, integration and citizenship at the heart of the power formation of contemporary liberal democracies, remains a stable reference point in progressive, forward looking national narratives of the future.

In the conventional Westphalian view of the world, divided into territorial nation-states and power containers – ‘immigration’ – the changing of status and identity from one box to another – is taken to be the crucial population anomaly (Joppke 1998b). ‘Immigration’, though, has to first be differentiated from other mobilities. So recognising and delineating that form of spatial movement in governance and policy terms becomes critical in the operation of rendering all other types of migration/mobility invisible (and unthreatening) – when it is not simply excluded as ‘illegal’. Work in critical migration studies is almost always prioritising theoretically the latter: on the divisions of population that produce ‘legalised’ exclusion and the more visible modes of enforcing borders, precarity of status, repulsion, detainment, deportation, and so on – the violence of the ‘deportation regime’ (De Genova 2010) and ‘necropolitics’ (Mbembe 2016), to phrase it in terms of two of the most discussed examples. Yet in a porous world of movement, in which states have to train their powers in particular ways in order to retain power – the critical view on the disadvantaged needs to be complemented by a parallel focus on the ostensibly unproblematic masses who do move. Those vast numbers of people unproblematically on the move and how they are governed – particularly – defines precisely those much smaller numbers of persons who are moving ‘illegally’, or needing to change category. This analytical point has also been recognised by critical scholars focusing on atypical migrations such as expats or ‘lifestyle’ migrations (Benson and O’Reilly 2009; Kunz 2016).

As suggested by Favell and Dahinden’s formulations, the ‘integration nation’ draws as much power through its porous closure: by the way it manages and extracts benefits from the vast majority of foreigners present – tourists, business travellers, students, service workers, truck drivers, and other everyday categories of non-nationals – despite the border being closed to others. That is, those populations who are not illegal or unwanted but also not taken to be ‘immigrants’ – i.e. those defined as not needing to be integrated, who are not integratable, in fact. In highly globalised societies, this also in fact applies differentially to many nationals too, particularly, elites and the most affluent who are free to come and go as they please, as ‘global individuals’ never needing to prove they are integrated anywhere. So when ‘integration’ is not being projected romantically on the ‘core’, supposedly ‘native’, ‘indigenous’ ‘working class’ or ‘mainstream’ nationals who make up the bedrock of national ‘belonging’ and the legitimated ‘democratic’ power it sustains (as, for example, in the populist works by Guilluy 2014; or Collier 2018), integration is something reserved for particular kinds of sanctioned, disadvantaged ‘immigrants’ who become a symbolic focus of the ongoing ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’ nation-building project (see also Korteweg 2017; Kešić and Duyvendak 2019).

The use and reproduction of these often uncritically accepted concepts traces a paradigm – a constellation of power – in liberal democracies. It is, in other words, how a narrow tranche of wanted or legitimate ‘immigration’ continues to be selected in a world of increasing restriction and inequality of access, and may be more revealing of the nation-state’s legitimating powers, than how it excludes and negates others. This is how integration works and why it is so central to the stability of liberal democracies. In a world of apparently anxious democratic ‘majorities’ and increasing flux, states have been doing all they can to restrict rights-based protections; they have done all they can to disassociate ‘economic’ labour migration from free movement; and they are busily creating new kinds of indentured and even sub-human categories of migrant to keep them clear of citizenship claims (see Xiang and Lindquist 2014; Ruhs 2013). But, particularly as immigration becomes a more significant and necessary factor in population growth than births and deaths, they find they cannot ‘dis-integrate’ as nations from larger systems, without some legitimate resolution of the ‘immigration’ anomaly (hence the emergence of reflections such as Koopmans and Orgad 2020; Joppke 2021).

This is a point about governmentality, of course. Classically the figure of the migrant in archetypal settler ‘immigration’ countries has been the sometimes desperate and poor individual or family on the trajectory of an emancipatory immigrant ‘dream’. Driven by the differentials of nationality and global push–pull economics, their ‘integration’ is notionally marked by how they gain access in progressive steps to the territory, to status and rights, and eventually to the same belonging and economic opportunities enjoyed by ‘native’ nationals, and the extent to which the same path is established for future generations (see a classic analysis such as Alba and Nee 2003). This is an economic migration facilitated by the absorbant capacity of liberal democracies to attract people willing to pursue this difficult path, as well as their ability to encompass and draw upon the global diversity that such movement entailed. The governance of this kind of migration has become increasingly targeted on a kind of neo-colonial extraction: the other side of selection processes rejecting the abject and unchosen, which pick out ‘the best and the brightest’ for the ‘multi-ethnic’ liberal democratic state.

The popularly conceived figure of the migrant, though, in recent years has shifted significantly towards a different image: one that elicits not national pride and admiration for migrant entrepreneurialism, but a mix of pity and indignation. It is often a vision of the abject and desperate, as stories of death and appalling conditions in the countries of origin or at the border are recounted. The narrative is archetypally one of usually racially differentiated migrants trying and frequently failing to cross the line into the affluent West, and mostly now not claiming access on self-motivated or functional economic grounds, but rather as a moral claim to the remnants of a post-war refugee regime designed for a very different form of protection (Gonzales and Chavez 2012; De Genova 2017). Minimally, the ‘integration nation’ still sees ‘genuine’ refugees as legitimate – as subjects ready for integration. Lower end ‘economic migrants’, however, moving of their own volition in supposed absense of demand, have become the ‘unwanted’ in this picture, mirroring the increasingly rarefied realm of selective, exceptional ‘high skilled’ or ‘wanted’ labour migration (see also Crawley and Skleparis 2018). The politics of ‘immigration’ thus now gets pitched between the low threshold rejection on functionalist welfarist (when not openly racist) grounds to those claiming asylum, and high moral humanitarian arguments for open borders and human rights that would offer protection to all the disadvantaged of the world on the basis of asylum – the masses persecuted or colonised by the world system, capitalism, and/or state power itself.

As Mirna Safi (2020) points out, these securitarian and humanitarian discourses mirror each other in their emphasis on always being presented as a political or moral dilemma for the receiving country. Critical migration studies finds itself somewhat in a quandary in the face of these politics. While rejecting the dominant system, it can get caught in a surenchère of the logic of asylum linked to human rights, which is often now seen that is all that is left of the affluent West’s obligation to Fanon’s (1961) ‘wretched of the Earth’ outside. The humanitarian argument slides into one that implies that all forms of ‘forced-ness’ have to be recognised within asylum by the receiving state (Mayblin 2017). The discussion has to become ever more encompassing about the non-economic claim to protection being asserted by asylum seekers, who may well fail to meet the strictly individualised political test of persecution that has been the defining feature of the post-war refugee system. The claim thus lies in the victimhood of ‘migrants’ – by ‘colonisation’, the global system, or capitalism itself – and their protection by human rights, rather than in their potential agency, mobilisation or claims making. All kinds of displacements – due to gendered oppression, environmental degradation, or economic hardship – have to be framed as forms of persecution requiring protection, in order to maintain the argument.

The recent response by migration scholars to the UK’s attempt to remove asylum claims for anyone that arrives on the territory illegally, led by Lucy Mayblin, was a case in point. This eloquent statement, signed by hundreds of scholars, felt the need to stress the absolute abject desperation of any and all such asylum seekers, and to deny that any of them were propelled by ‘economic’ self-motivation. A kind of purity test is assigned to the putatively abject ‘black and brown bodies’ that have been racially produced by an exploitative, exclusionary colonial system (The Independent 2021). The moral point here in favour of expansive open borders and all inclusionary human rights protection is clear; the right of asylum can also be claimed as a kind of direct reparation to those that have moved away from global capitalist violence (Souter 2022) – ‘expulsions’ as Saskia Sassen (2014) calls it in her later, more sharply critical, work. But, despite the claim in the letter that ‘experts’ reject any economic grounding to asylum seeking, it is not a line that is easy to maintain for all those moving through asylum seeker channels, given the drivers of ongoing population movements and the immobility they leave in their wake.

The uncomfortable fact is that (economic and human capital) selection processes are also at work in asylum seeking. At very least, asylum seekers are selected by youth and health. Moreover, the capitalised nature of borders and mobility systems, means that those that do move generally do so because they have certain resources to act – economic, human, or social capital (i.e. networks). Political oppression in fact typicially also selects for education – it is often the middle class, more educated, more ‘Westernised’ and more politicised, who are those most likely to be expelled or thrown into exile. The awkward fact here is to look back then at those who do not move – or cannot. The elderly, family members, and many of those who have no voice or have not been able to exercise political resistance: there is a kind of left behind population ‘immobilised’ by their co-nationals’ asylum mobility, no less vulnerable to the general capitalist and colonial system, but without the capacity or ability to physically claim asylum as their co-nationals have. Echoing at once Agamben, Bourdieu and Spivak, not only is it true that the truly subaltern cannot speak, but also that they cannot move (see also Favell 2021).

The claims of migrants from the global South need a stronger foundation than just the West’s humanitarian charity – whether a begrudging or even maximally hospitable recognition of human rights. Something in fact needs to be seized – or forced from the other side. This in fact is harder to highlight if the analytical focus of ‘bordering’ is only about the denial of rights and agency of non-nationals, rather than thinking about the possibilities in which non-nationals are able to assert rights or status through economic or political action, and/or functional inclusion.

Critical race theory typically refers to this ‘invisible’ capacity as ‘whiteness’, and the non-capacity as racialisation (i.e. of ‘black and brown bodies’). This might suggest that we should be moving (normatively) towards an implied all ‘white’ zero (post-race?) migration (i.e. free movement) regime, where all borders and restrictions would be down, and anyone could move. The brutal impossibility of this gives an understandably sharp focus to the critique of actual existing liberal democracy, particularly in the light of the urgency and drama of recent ‘crises’ in the global population system. The narrative of the Mediterranean crisis is thus easiest to read as the confirmation of such ‘Eurocentricity’ – and it certainly was such a moment in the ongoing ‘bordering’ of the global North and South (see, i.e. De Genova 2016). At the same time the dynamics of its frontiers, even in Europe at its most miserly or oppressive, have always been about the differential closing and opening of borders (Favell and Hansen 2002).

This openness despite closure was always a key driving puzzle in the older political sociology literature (Joppke 1998c; Guiraudon 1998). It was accounted for usually in terms of the power of human rights allowing ongoing family reunification and the continued maintenance of some kind of asylum recognition; as well as forces that push towards regularisation of long term irregular economic migrants, despite a usually very hostile public democratic stance on immigration. Earlier variants of liberal or even anarchist-accented accounts of the ‘loss of control’ over the bordering powers over migration – the decline of the nation-state thesis – have looked increasingly implausible as the decades of crises have worn on (see, for example, Portes 1998). At the same time, liberal nationalists, who were generally sceptical about globalist arguments to begin with, fell back on constitutionalism, and a modernising Kantian idealisation of national citizenship to account for political change (Joppke 2005; 2017). It is notable that Joppke, whose work has been so central to defining the immigration, integration and citizenship paradigm has, despite his earlier hostility essentially converged with Soysal’s (1994) adoption of John Meyer’s modernisation thesis: that the rights of personhood at the (isomorphic) national level make right – and might. The other side of this optimistic tale is functionality in terms of how nation-states have reconciled their obligations with increasing emphasis on human capital based selectivity, fit for the neoliberal ‘competition state’ (Joppke 2021). This is, of course, how it becomes ‘wanted’ or ‘legitimate’ ‘good’ immigration, while others (the bad ‘migrants’) are excluded (Anderson 2013).

Going beyond narratives of victimhood, then, the most persuasive current theories defending asylum seeker status and protection, as well as rightly stressing the economic capacity of affluent states to easily receive more, do put an accent on the economic capabilities of asylum seekers (despite their political status) to further justify expansive claims (i.e. Hansen 2021). Undoubtedly it is the case, that the human capital of such migrants can be activated and beneficial – whether in the context of displacement, or in the receiving context of refugee settlement. At the other end of the political spectrum to Hansen, Betts and Collier’s (2017) arguments about the economic inclusion of displaced migrants align with a kind of neoliberal incorporation – seeking to derive positive liberal gains from externalising ‘integration’. But even a more ostensibly radical focus on the receiving context such as Peo Hansen’s, also does not address the immobility of left behind populations. Hansen’s ‘modern migration theory’, for instance, is one of the most sophisticated accounts yet of how an Keynesian style MMT economic theory can be seen to have hugely beneficial effects on receiving communities whose economic and demographic capacity for absorbing and incorporating new migrant populations far exceeds their political and cultural capacities. It reveals starkly where the problem lies – in terms of democratic political reception, and its residual assumptions of cultural thresholds and so on. But in the end, the theory disappoints in not addressing those populations not able to move, nor the potentially dis-integrative effects of migrations that might disturb the existing global hierarchy (Favell 2021).

In the latest contribution to her core development of the birthright lottery argument, Ayelet Shachar (2020) also ultimately emphasises the value of refuge and transformation into (Western) citizenship. She proposes an externalisation of refuge – which does begin to engage with transnational effects on the sending environments. But there is still a sense here of always having to justify things from the receiving Western nation-state perspective – of their accommodation, and our adaptation to their needs in a mutual way. The discussion again only highlights our political modes of inclusion, not an accent on conflict and its contestation, that might change the relation of the West to the Rest as such.

A similar tendency runs through the idealised, more policy oriented versions of the pro-asylum seeker discussions that have abounded since the European ‘refugee crisis’. These often step over the line into progressive advocacy and policy prescription – going beyond Hansen’s strictly economic focus, to start to address the cultural and political dynamics of adaptation in the receiving context (in the UK, see for example, Grzymala-Kaslowska and Phillimore 2018; Ndofor-Tah et al. 2019; for an international summary, see Donato and Ferris 2020). Integration policy and practice has been recycled in the guise of ‘interculturalism’, notably, reaffirming integration by shifting scales to local contexts, and emphasising intercultural adaptation, and even its compatibility with elements of transnationalism (Erdal and Oeppen 2013; Zapata-Barrero 2019). Such scenarios inevitably void the immigrant integration scenario of its coercion and often violent asymmetry. They also do a disservice to the radical potentiality of the original literature on transnationalism, which was focused precisely on what happened outside of the integratory forces at work asymettrically in the receiving context (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc 1994; Faist 2000). Rather, local integration and happy intercultural narratives work to affirm the broader ‘progressive’ narrative of contemporary nation-states asserting their confident ability to encompass ‘multi-ethnic’ diversity. It is the ongoing expression of nationalist modernity – and at its most powerful, not when expressing mean hostility, and exclusion or overt violence (which point back towards older, less secure, forms of nation-building), but rather in its celebratory, inclusive ‘global’ face. It is, in other words, the archetypal vision in which diversity is internalised by the ‘integration nation’ under a tightly-narrowed system carved from the migration-mobilities continuum.

This is, of course, the face of the nation-state we see on its best behaviour at the selective (and exclusive) multi-ethnic citizenship ceremony, the culmination of the successful path of integration. These images of achieved naturalisation of chosen migrants are often advanced to demonstrate the largesse of the advanced modern liberal democratic state, moving towards its post-race, inclusive destiny. Yet as its puts precious value on Western nationality – and its exclusivity – it negates all those who have been left out and left behind from this golden path. The problem underlying this is the same that has befallen some of the critical approaches to asylum seeking: the idea that the injustice of migration is solved by having as many people as possible achieve membership of the hallowed Western club. Yet enlarging this circle of select ‘star’ immigrants celebrated by the nation – even by a wide margin, even maximally, even welcoming the world’s huddled masses as much as humanly possible – will not change the fundamental order of inequalities it anchors, nor lead to a transformative politics.

Open borders and dis-integrative politics

In a telling critique at the heart of their Migration Studies and Colonialism, Mayblin and Turner (2021, 103–107) in fact round on the questionable optimism of the open borders argument as a mechanism for solving the basic dilemma outlined above: that moving (some) migrants from one jurisdiction to a higher one does not solve global inequalities. Offering sanctuary and much easier access to Western citizenship, however massive in scale the migration, will not simply reverse the historical legacy of colonialism and Empire. Without a devaluation of the receiving nationality, and a decentering of our view from the Western perspective of citizenship in the North Atlantic West, open borders may indeed worsen historically sedimented inequalities. The global inequalities literature may be right that mass migration from the global South to its golden North West would be the single biggest redistibutory measure that could be imagined (Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009). It may be hoped that mass, uncontrolled migration would change the balance of selfish calculations about trade relations and power asymettries made by Western countries as long as they have rigorous international borders in place. Yet with others left behind or immobile, the selective, extractive, skewed and inevitably partial redistribution that follows South–North migration currently is likely to remain unequal in its effects, short of other political disturbances enabling ‘the wretched of the Earth’ (Fanon 1961) to seize back more of what is being taken from them. This issue was seen in neoliberal terms as to what extent open borders might translate into a broader kind of global ‘integration’, with further redistributory effects. During the 1990s a more optimistic view of the effects on sending countries of South–North migration emerged in terms of remittances of all kinds: of financial, social and cultural benefits flowing back to sending populations in a kind of win-win-win (Levitt 1998). Yet, as has been well noted by de Haas (2012), the mood swing among scholars has, in the last decade or so, discredited the main mechanisms linking migration and development, as they have been seen to further inequalities, polarisation, and (often) corruption in sending states (see also Glick-Schiller and Faist 2010).

Open borders have thus taken on an increasingly utopian aspect. Securing human rights for the mobile and immobile may not be enough. There is now nothing more discredited in migration studies than the notion of post-national rights, glimpsed in emergent form by scholars in the 1990s, mapping a fragile global institutionalisation of ‘personhood’ and ‘agency’ beyond the nation-state (Soysal 1994; Jacobson 1996; Benhabib 2004; Bosniak 2006). The national anchoring of the global population system made these arguments a routine object of attack by realists (Joppke 1998c; Koopmans and Statham 1999; Abraham 2015). Yet clearly the contestatory claims to human rights, or a more expansive notion of free movement over borders, continue to matter, outside of the dominant form of exclusive national citizenship as the attainment of subjectivity in the modern world (Anderson, Sharma, and Wright 2011).

The problem with these ‘rights’ as they are conceived is their anchoring in an institutionalist argument which sees them moving towards a completion – an integrated regional or global whole – which is modernising along the Western model. They are attached to inclusion and membership of world’s idealist governance structures: the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the European Union, the OECD, and so on. Those behind are always catching up with those racing far ahead, needing to match ‘our’ attainment and security; rather than seeing such ‘rights’ more as negative freedoms to be different, to assert freedom from and against the powers of the North Atlantic West to transform everybody into a modern subject in its own image. The modern developmentalist drive at the heart of John Meyer’s institutionalist paradigm of globalisation, that lies under much of the post-national argument, is the continuation of a colonial model, building towards human rights and individualist freedom as a potential legal, political order for the world (Meyer 2010). It would be more significant to think of such rights as protection against the (global) state, or signalling areas of humanity that have not yet been penetrated and governed by the state (in the line of Scott 1998). In other words, that rights claims have to be linked to activation and resistance to be effective. Hence, there is potential when migrants brazenly instrumentalise rights, seize entitlements and take away the benefits of Western citizenship, with no wish to accede to or be encompassed by the categorical definitions of western (national) citizenship, membership and ‘belonging’.

We are familiar to some extent with this idea in the older literature on transnationalism (again Basch et al 2004; Faist 2000). Trans-migration was always meant to be trans-formative. Diasporic politics – associated with transnational South Asian and West Indian Caribbean migration/community in Europe (Brah 1994; Gilroy 1993; Sayyid 2000) – and the notion of flexible citizenship (Ong 1999) – with East Asians in the Asia-Pacific – thus emphasised a kind of contentious instrumentalisation of citizenship rights and identity politics, working to decompose and change the world system. Diasporas provided new powers to subordinate populations, for example, expansive rights in sending countries for migrants, facilitating homeland participation, new political influence or ownership (Demir 2022). Political effects of this kind of ‘citizenship’ were also associated with transnational urbanism and de-territorialised mobilisations (Smith and Bakker 2007). Flexible citizenship also emphasised, like much of the transnational literature, the resilience and strategies of family networks across borders, often continents, using rights structures where possible to benefit children or women, making effective often extended family structures. A similar logic has been re-stated in Yossi Harpaz’s work on Citizenship 2:0 (Harpaz 2019) – as dual citizenship has been successfully instrumentalised (see also the earlier work in a neo-Weberian vein by Koslowski 2000). An area of the world where free movement rights have enabled mobilities outside the immigration/integration paradigm – such as the European Union – demonstrates how disadvantaged migrants can indeed have effects that shift the settled international political system and political economy at home and abroad – making diasporic economic and political engagements and cross-national family economies work for them (Favell 2008b). This has been a familiar refrain in some of the transnational studies on the effects of new East-West migration in Europe (Paul 2014; Garapich 2016). The effects of UK Brexit in a transnational European context is proving one case in point. One of the ironies of the mass transformation of mobile EU nationals into UK immigrants, where the UK state has still had to abide by certain legal commitments with the EU, is that potentially nearly 5 million new dual citizens are being produced by the country’s ‘settlement scheme’, with little or no necessary commitment to the UK in socialisation terms. This was perhaps not what those advocating ‘take back control’ had in mind (many, however, remain stymied with only ‘settled status’ accessible). One may hope that those Romanians and Poles in the UK that collect their bonus blue British passport, may continue be a kind of fifth column of Europeanisation despite the current colonial intentions of the UK ‘integration nation’.

Outside of this kind of special case, though, the privileges generalised by Ong and as Harpaz as a kind of instrumental effect of post-national citizenship – fall far short of redistributive decolonising effects – given their strong stratification across only certain highly globalised (or regionalised) transnational populations. There is of course nothing extraordinary when elite, high end global populations – in this case, global middle class Chinese (i.e. Ley 2010) or ‘middling’ CEE nationals (Morosanu 2016) – enjoy the mobile fruits of their ‘flexible citizenship’, when it is indexed by a kind of stratification, that may have both race and nationality dimensions to it, and is clearly grounded in particular socio-economic capabilities (as explored with great subtlety in the work of Jon Fox and associates; see Fox, Morosanu, and Szilassy 2012; Fox and Mogilnicka 2017). Moreover, these kinds of loopholes are forever moving towards closure on the receiving side, with the ever stronger emphasis in Europe on national governance of incipient post-national membership (Barbulescu and Favell 2020). But there is a valid question to be asked about what might have been shifted in global inequalities by regional integration; that is, what has worked in this context to reverse the inherent push–pull migration dynamic that is central to the maintenance of colonial hierarchies. The rise of middling nations and middling populations globally has seen an overall devaluation of Western citizenship at least in terms of the economic position globally of non-Western populations (Kochenov 2019); this is the central point of Milanovic’s work (2011), in terms of say the value or Chinese or Indian nationality in global income ranks. The question is under what conditions may this kind of shift be generalised, or, conversely, when the proliferation of bordering categories and global differentiations still only work to reinforce the implacable power indexed by Western passports?

The point is that nationality – and particularly the access to a Western citizenship that is the linear destiny of a true ‘immigrant’ – should matter less in an individual’s ability to be socially and spatially mobile. Empirically, this can be studied by the focus on intermediate mobilities’ rights and practices, whether physical or mobile. There has been important work beginning to measure this: in terms of access to basic travel, visas, cross-border networks and communication, and so on, usually measured either in legal terms or transaction costs, and the transnational patterns these produce (see Mau 2010; Mau et al. 2012; Recchi et al. 2019; Delhey et al. 2020; Recchi et al. 2021; Deutschmann 2021). Pursuing this from the top down – typically as a kind of legal ‘de-regulation’ and removal of differentials in transaction costs, as in the building of the European Union – is unlikely, though, to progress further in a world now with COVID-19 re-nationalising, and tightening up some of the looseness of globalisation (Favell and Recchi 2020).

The normative case for open borders remains compelling (Carens 2015). But it is at its most powerful when transnational practices are linked (as they are not in the literature spawned by Carens’ work), to a more openly contentious global politics. Here, discussions on ‘migration as decolonization’, as captured notably in the widely discussed work of E. Tendayi Achiume (2019) has re-affirmed the importance of the point of view of South–North migrants asserting disruptive claims through movement. Notably her arguments avoid the problems associated with charitable asylum and sanctuary as the exclusive route to recognition and status for Fanon's wretched masses in the Global South. Rather ‘economic migrants’ are seen as ‘political agents exercising equality rights’, asserting their own ‘sovereign’ claims, due to the inevitable co-dependency of the Global North and its former colonies, the consequence and inescapable legacy of their past colonial domination and extraction. The logic is partly one of reparations, as well as a de facto recognition of the transnational properties of post-colonial space.

If, as Abdelmalek Sayad notes in his seminal work in this respect (Sayad 1994), ‘integration’ were to be seen as in fact beginning in the sending country, it would imply demands that compel the receiving state to recognise all the stakeholders in a particular migration: the children, extended families and communities left behind, and ultimately whole economies that will have claims as a result of the movement that has pulled certain people away. This adds a twist to the liberal globalist view, rooted in neo-classical economics, that the migration relationship is bound up with other economic relations of trade and communication, that imply effects on development, but which increasingly render nationality indifferent as a factor. Where it adds something, of course, is in the fact that the sending side of the equation may also find political leverage in the embedded relations that have hitherto only existed in a colonial (and neo-colonial, neoliberal) form. When moving to the host country to take up residency, not only does the ‘immigrant’ have a claim to post-national rights, recognition and entitlements relative to privileged nationals, but so do all those who are stakeholders in that movement, many of whom who are immobile or left behind by that migration. As these get instrumentalised within transnational migration systems, as is inevitable wherever migration and mobilities are present in an unequal world, there can be political effects on the governance powers of receiving states, that will be perceived as dis-integrative of their nation-building ambitions. As suggested in the original transnationalism literature, the emphasis on disintegration is key, cracking and damaging the national formations and dominant political demography that seeks to contain the overspill economically, politically, and culturally of international migration and mobiities.²

Certainly, the configuration of contemporary nationalist politics globally makes these forms of transnationalism difficult to realise. But there are still examples, even amongst some of the most marginal of South–North migrations. Joris Schapendonk’s ethnographic work (2020) on Afrostars, for instance, portrays mobile young African men in Europe as offering a very different ‘figure’ to the abject migrant of the Mediterranean refugee crisis or deportation regimes of Europe and North America. Despite their heavily marginalised and racialised experiences in mobility in and around Europe, their practices and everyday solutions belie entirely the nationalising discourses of immigration control and integratory settlement that are projected on them by their hosts, as they pass through. They also become the focus of solidaristic actions by host society nationals when they support and enable such ‘subversive’ mobilities.

Transnational soldiarities across different political movements – with the Black Lives Matter and decolonial movement central – have indeed become key to transcending the uncritical governmentality reproduced by ostensibly progressive notions of immigration, integration and citizenship (McNevin 2019). As emphasised also in the recent work by Çağlar and Glick-Schiller (2018), updating the ‘transnational urbanism’ perspective, solidarities can also form in the unlikely space of peripheral urban municipalities. In otherwise less than propitious provincial locations, left out of the networks of global cities, migrant and mobile populations may find common cause with marginalised working populations, as well as local authorities resistant to national centralisation. It is in this kind of register, too, that the conceptual language of both Engin Isin’s ‘citizenship acts’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008) and the ‘autonomy of migration’, sustained by Sandro Mezzadra and others (Mezzadra 2011; De Genova, Garelli, and Tazzioli 2018), provide tools to capture the disintegrative effects of migrants and mobile populations asserting their emergent collective ability as ‘multiplicities’ to organise and move, seizing rights, and using citizenship instrumentally (see especially Tazzioli 2019). This range of critical scholarship is all pointing towards ways in which contemporary systems of migration and mobilities still contribute to the dis-integration of nationalised sovereign power, as embodied in its policing, bordering or integrating ambitions.

There has of course, though, been a sharp reversal, and a powerful re-nationalisation of society, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this being above all else a truly planetary event, a disease not respecting boundaries or the integrity of society and individuals, and with its origins in the unholy dominant political demography and political ecology of global capitalism (Anderson 2020), it has faciltated an unprecedented shutdown of many of the everyday mobilities hitherto outside the range of organised capitalism. With the imperative of border control and a national ‘public health’, much of what was porous about neoliberal capitalism has been re-nationalised. The pristine categories of well governed ‘immigration’ and ‘integration’ remain, of course, with much greater powers over temporary and irregular cross-border movements.

Conclusion: migration studies beyond racial capitalism

Nothing is more familiar in migration studies than the triad of ‘immigration’, ‘integration’, and ‘citizenship’, that sits at the heart of its reflection. Despite its progressive allure, the standard narrative of classical and emergent ‘countries of immigration’ and ‘integration nations’ more or less successfully processing and including new migrants and diversity – as they pass along the shining path from alien arrivals to entry, settlement, and eventually full and equal citizenship – in fact anchors a dominant global order centred in the North Atlantic West, that is built on a steeply racialised hierarchy of global inequalities. What I have sought to do, is show how these conceptions carve out a way of looking at inherently global society, territory and populations, in order to legitimate the founding powers of the ‘open society’ at the national level – liberal democracy as we know it. I have conjoined a certain neo-Weberian understanding of nation-building and its selective, exclusionary, bordering effects, with the spirit of the new critical migration studies, and its exposure of ongoing mechanisms of racialised migration, the cunning of ‘universalistic’ liberal democratic forms, and the smooth continuity of global injustice in even its most progressive formulations of inclusion and diversity. Ultimately, the paradigm of immigration, integration and citizenship is what sustains a global capitalism which, with the contemporary patterning and bordering of international migration and mobilities at its core, can rightly can be described as ‘racial capitalism’ (Bhattacharyya 2018).

Alongside decolonial scholarship, critical migration studies needs to turn its attention to the ongoing reproduction of conventional ideas by policy oriented and institutionally based comparative scholarship that has been resistant to listening to its conceptual and historical critique. In this paper, I offer clues to an alternate political demography that will enable us to again work autonomously in a field that has been significantly corrupted by its policy and political co-optation in mainstream liberal democratic politics. It also offers resources to question the ongoing imperial power of North American ‘progressive’ conceptions of immigration, integration, post-race, ethnicity, and multi-ethnic diversity. This is no longer only a European concern. The ‘integration nation’, via reified integration indexes and the isomorphism of civic national forms, is fast becoming a global benchmark (Favell 2022). Above all, we should be vigilant about the insidious forms of ‘neo-colonial’ knowledge production implicit in dominant mainstream models and their academic technologies (see also Schinkel 2019).

The direction of work in the critical migration studies literature has been vital in unsettling this ‘Eurocentric’ complacency – even as the field has missed opportunities for a full theoretical dialogue between neo-Weberian and Marxist- Foucauldian accounts, something to which I hope I have contributed here. As I have observed, there are difficulties and blindspots in some critical migration theory’s overloaded focus on the most dramatic and obvious forms of oppression invoking exclusion, racialisation or orientalism. I have suggested the continued interest of mundane, mass ‘middling’ and other atypical mobilities for highlighting shifts in the system away from the extreme carceral politics of the deportation regime or necropolitics. But it is also clear the critical emphasis on dis-integrative autonomy, mobilisation, and resistance among migrant and mobile populations, offer thrilling alternatives to more than two decades of often complacent work on the institutionalisation of immigration, integration and citizenship politics by the mainstream. It rejects the progressive formation of a global system in which old and settler nation-states in the North Atlantic West come to terms with, and master, the global challenge of new migrations and diversity – and continue to export these models to the Global East and Global South. We need a migration studies that questions those who still explicitly or implicitly view the world as a solid march of liberal progress to a North American beat, rather than as the site of an alternative politics of resistance and struggle. Viewed through a critical lens, our new migration studies may instead offer the hope that the multiple ‘crises’ of ‘the West’ – and their convergence, confluence and accumulation – may lead this time to a very different political demography and political economy.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the invitation to be a fellow 2021–22 at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, working on a project which fully develops the ideas presented here. See also Favell (2022). The paper was presented at the Wiko Fellows’ Colloquium, at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and at the Journal of Ethnic Migration Studies annual conference. Thanks for comments from participants at these events, to the editors for their feedback, and to Molly Geidel, Sarah Kunz and Glenda Garelli.

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Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002) draw upon my earlier work on ‘integration nations’ (Favell [1999] 2001, 2003) when they discuss integration as a central feature of methodological nationalism. However they do not fully draw out the implication I argue for here and elsewhere (Favell 2022): that a nation-scale conception of ‘integration’ is always the core normative feature of liberal democracies seeking to secure sovereign control over their population and territory in the face of increasing levels of economic interdependence, diversity and mobilities.

2 Here some of the long standing work on political transnationalism (i.e., Østergaard-Nielsen 2003, 2011) is still of key relevance. See also Waldinger (2015) for a more sceptical view.