Re-Envisioning Immigrant Integration: Toward Multidirectional Conceptual Flows

Abstract

This special issue collects articles, which aim to re-envision integration, dislodging the previously monodirectional conceptual flow sourced in the Global North. Jointly, the articles pursue a critical scholarship contributing to multicentric knowledge production, disrupting binaries of integrated/nonintegrated, inclusion/exclusion, citizen/non-citizen, or indeed self/other. They evidence ambivalent subject positions, neither fully-included nor fully-excluded, and engender forms of belonging to the places immigrants are momentarily located in, albeit without a steadfast position granting them rights. The collected articles also emphasize the various scales of integration, be it wider global or regional flows, as well as more localized, zoomed-in, and ephemeral manners of integration.

Keywords:

• Critical knowledge
• conceptual flows
• Global North
• Global South
• immigrant integration

Introduction

Every new wave of migration has caused questions about integration and social cohesion to rise to the surface of ongoing debates about citizenship, rights, and belonging. Recent events in the Global North, from the European refugee reception crisis of 2015 to the global Black Lives Matter movement since 2013, have informed similar questions, which bring attention to a crisis of solidarity and a broken social contract that are based on the racialization and dehumanization of a presumed “other”. These events strengthen the conclusion that all “models of integration are failing” (Wieviorka, 2014). Diverse reasons for such failure have been accounted for in the literature. It is worth noting here that we consider immigrant integration as a form of neo-colonial knowledge servicing contemporary workings of power (Schinkel, 2017), whereby racialized communities are disciplined, managed, and subjected to different forms of violence (see, Abdelhady et al., 2020; Favell, 2003, 2014; Garcés-Mascareñas & Penninx, 2016; Guiraudon, 2018; Korteweg, 2017; Norocel, 2016; Rytter, 2019; Schinkel, 2017; Triandafyllidou, 2020; Triandafyllidou et al., 2014).

The goal of this Special Issue is to disrupt such power dynamics and neo-colonial knowledge productions by presenting analyses and critiques of integration from contexts that traditionally are not actively included in the analyses of integration. In the following sections, first, we summarize some key elements in the academic debates around integration including recent critiques and outline the main limitations of existing analyses of the concept. Then, we account for some scholarship that focuses explicitly on the Global South, and the ways this body of research offers different understandings of the integration process. An important observation here, is that some characteristics of polities, which may be deemed as facilitating integration (such as porous borders and cultural affinities) or others that may be assumed to hamper it (such as colonial policies of exacerbating ethnic differences, or the lack of national narratives of immigrant integration) do not always lead to such taken-for-granted outcomes. Simultaneously, we refer to analyses that highlight diverse forms of identification and informal mechanisms for communal belonging that take place alongside lines of difference. Finally, we introduce the contributions of this Special Issue to the field by presenting the different scales of analyses that are reflected in the included articles and presenting each article individually.

Immigration integration and its critiques. A monodirectional conceptual flow?

In the Global North context, integration has been assumed to be a positive process whereby those marginalized or excluded can receive equal treatment and access to rights (Wieviorka, 2014). In recent years, however, it has increasingly, if not exclusively, been used with reference to immigrants and their children. From this perspective, some researchers define integration as:

The processes that increase the opportunities of immigrants and their descendants to obtain the valued “stuff” of a society, as well as social acceptance, through participation in major institutions such as the educational and political system and the labor and housing markets. Full integration implies parity of life chances with members of the native majority group and being recognized as a legitimate part of the national community. (Alba & Foner, 2015, p. 5)¹

Such parity and recognition identified by Alba and Foner (2015) involve complex and multifaceted processes and a range of factors, but above all, include the perspectives and experiences of both immigrants and host society. Other researchers have provided valuable engagements with the concept, emphasizing its processual (Spencer & Charsley, 2021), contingent (Skrobanek et al., 2020), multidimensional (Ager & Strang, 2008; Penninx & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2016; Triandafyllidou, 2018), and multidirectional aspects (Cheung & Phillimore 2014, 2017). A large body of literature acknowledges that integration is a complex process and there is no agreed-upon definition of what the process entails. This notwithstanding, we define integration as a set of processes that bring people in a given society together at the legal-political, socio-economic, and cultural-religious levels of interaction (Entzinger, 2000). These processes are impacted by factors that belong to individuals, families and networks, as well as by opportunity structures and policy interventions in said society, and transnational connections (Spencer & Charsley, 2021).

Despite the positive foundation of the concept, and especially with regards to state policies that would bring about equal opportunities and access to rights, Schinkel (2018, p. 3) warns that the concept predominantly refers to “a state of being of an individual” instead of “a system of state”. When referring to individuals, the focus has become whether a person singled out as an immigrant or group is/are integrated, placing the onus of integration onto the individual immigrants themselves, instead of states that should work to facilitate the process. Such focus also assumes a unidirectional process, whereby the immigrants are expected to purposefully move from less to more integration (Spencer & Charsley, 2021). Measuring the extent to which an individual immigrant or a group of immigrants is/are integrated takes place using set measures of outcomes, such as socio-economic attainment or labor market status (see for example, Crul et al., 2012, Hadjar & Scharf, 2019; Laurijssen & Glorieux, 2015; Mood, 2018; Salikutluk, 2016). These measurements are caried out by comparing an immigrant group to natives, other immigrant groups or to earlier generations sharing the same national origins. This often comes at the expense of understanding the subjective experiences of immigrants and their children of their own integration in their respective societies (Abdelhady & Lutz, 2022; Triandafyllidou, 2018). Concomitantly, the interest on integration outcomes also yields a discussion on the factors that can affect integration negatively such as racism (Cheung & Phillimore, 2014), and lack of initiatives that facilitate integration (Schneider & Crul, 2010).

Integration issues have been politicized in political debates in Europe and North America in recent years. One outcome of such politicization is “restricting the extent to which integration can be understood as a two-way process of mutual adaptation” (Grzymala-Kazlowska & Phillimore, 2018, p. 188). In light of the shortcomings of integration debates in Europe, some researchers such as Schinkel (2018) and Rytter (2019) suggest doing away with the concept of integration altogether. This notwithstanding, a number of analysts emphasize the need to further refine and operationalize the concept. Among the noteworthy critical inquiries to date, we choose to focus on three special issues that approach the topic of immigrant integration from different angles, but with a decidedly Global North focus.

The first special issue focuses on the various national models at work across Europe and conclude that cross-national similarities in immigrant integration are informed by the structural context of Western European societies (all industrial democracies) and less so by the particularities of such national models themselves (Loch, 2014). Following a theoretical critique of the concept of integration (Wieviorka, 2014), the special issue compares the ideal-typical constructions to the social realities of immigrant integration in classic cases such as France, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, and some more recent destinations such as Italy, Sweden, and Czechia. The topic is introduced by a meticulous listing of the threefold challenges that national integration models face: residential segregation and urban unrest; increasing radical right populism; and European integration (Loch, 2014). Then a theoretical critique of the concept evidences how discourses about immigrant integration are increasingly related to ideas of national homogeneity within the host society that are advocated by political forces on the right of the political spectrum. Against this background the conclusion is that all “models of integration are failing” (Wieviorka, 2014). The various national integration models are then discussed, focusing on both the “color-blind republican model” in France (Barou, 2014) and the multiculturalist model acknowledging ethic and racial minorities in the United Kingdom (Meer & Modood, 2014), as well as the mixed models of multicultural and social policies in the Netherlands (Entzinger, 2014) and Sweden (Borevi, 2014). Particular attention is then paid to cases representing countries previously sources of emigration such as Italy (Allievi, 2014), as well as Czechia (Kušniráková, 2014).

In turn, the second special issue takes its point of departure in the “ongoing migration ‘crisis’” to “stimulate theoretical and research advancement beyond the normative integration paradigm” (Grzymala-Kazlowska & Phillimore, 2018, p. 179). Stressing that integration does not take place in monolithic communities, that set of articles underscores superdiversity in European cities as an important defining contextual factor shaping integration experiences and outcomes, such as Glasgow (Strang et al., 2018), Lisbon (Buhr, 2018), and London (Ryan, 2018; Wessendorf, 2018). Other contributions examine immigrant communities and their complex relationships in their super-diverse surroundings, such as the processes of developing a social network in the early years after migrants’ arrival in the UK (Phillimore et al., 2018); the importance of “social anchoring” of the Polish migrants in the UK (Grzymala-Kazlowska, 2018); or conversely, the way in which levels of social and political integration shape the encounters of Moroccan-origin families with their country of origin (Wagner 2018). In addition, Wessendorf (2018) examines the crucial role that legal status and cultural capital, which includes skills and competences, play in shaping the trajectories after migration. Diversity in legal status is an aspect also explored by Meissner (2018), whereby she concludes that the tension between the state’s goals to steer and regulate migration and the objective to steer adaptations in super-diverse contexts has a positive influence on integration. Despite focusing on the role of superdiversity and accounting for transnational connections as an aspect impacting such superdiversity and informing integration experiences, the focus continues to be integration in European contexts.

The third special issue approaches the topic of immigrant integration from a more explicitly migration research point of view and presents ways to reconceptualize the concept in light of its critiques (Saharso, 2019). The symposium finds its point of departure in Schinkel’s (2017) “provocation piece”, which puts forward a threefold argument. First, it imputes immigration research a general lack of a conceptual engagement with sociological conceptions of “society”. Second, it accuses assessments of immigrant integration for being a form of neocolonial knowledge servicing contemporary workings of power. And third, it argues for a conceptual effort beyond notions of “immigrant integration” and “society” (Schinkel, 2018). Schinkel’s stance finds support among other contributors. Tellingly, Favell critiques mainstream approaches of immigrant integration both within academia and policy making for entrenched methodological nationalism and puts forward a set of twelve propositions aimed at moving the agenda “into the heartland of applied comparative empirical work” (Favell, 2019, p. 1). In turn, Meissner agrees that immigrant integration is a divisive concept “that errs too consistently on the side of harm to be a useful project for research or policy” (Meissner, 2019, p. 1). She disagrees however with regarding superdiversity as “the continuation of immigrant integration by other means” (Schinkel, 2018, p. 10), and argues for the concept’s usefulness in contributing to “a polyphonic but responsible migration and diversity studies” (Meissner, 2019, p. 7). This notwithstanding, the concept of immigrant integration is defended by several contributors to the symposium (Hadj Abdou, 2019; Klarenbeek, 2019; Penninx, 2019). Among them, Penninx points out ways of developing and applying non-normative analytical concepts by underlying its non-linear and processual aspect, such as in “the process of becoming an accepted part of society” (Penninx & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2016, p. 11). In turn, Hadj Abdou argues for pursuing a critical approach, one that understands the concepts as a governance technique, and elevates class and race as key elements to understanding its workings. Furthermore, she encourages looking at subnational settings as a means to unsettle commonly held ideas about immigrant integration and the migrant “other” (Hadj Abdou, 2019).

In sum, the discussions and debates around integration acknowledge the relative utility of the concept but underscore the limitations and somewhat problematic ways it has been applied in various contexts. The special issues that we have presented in this section represent some of the most comprehensive engagements with the concept and the ways the discussions have progressed over time. Notwithstanding calls for abandoning the concept altogether, the debates have scrutinized the concept in hopes to refine the discourse and analytical applications. While theoretically and analytically useful, these critical approaches to integration are couched in the analysis of discourses, experiences, and policies in the Global North, and therefore continue to re-produce the same power dynamics they aim to critique. Consequently, the present Special Issue extends this critique of integration by bringing together analyses of different contexts that are largely overlooked in integration debates as means to a more comprehensive approach to integration dynamics.

Shifting the gaze to the Global South: dislodging integration monism

The main aim of this Special Issue is to extend the debates on integration by bringing together analyses of and from the Global South, and set them in dialogue with existing academic debates that center on the Global North. While we agree that the binarism in designating vast regions of the world as Global North/South may be deemed problematic, we hold that the designation Global South is fruitful when used in reference to contexts that have been traditionally excluded from knowledge production in general, and debates around integration in specific. The case studies included in this Special Issue are positioned differently in terms of their economic and political power globally, but they are not necessarily contexts that theoretical and empirical analyses of integration address, at least traditionally.² Despite growing awareness of the positionality of knowledge production, much of the analyses of immigration in general are programmatically concerned with the Global North context.³

Growing attention to the role played by the context of immigration has highlighted the gap in our understandings of the Global South, and recent studies have shifted the focus to South-South migration as an area of investigation. Despite the fact that an increasing number of countries in all regions of the world have become destinations for international migrants (de Haas et al., 2020), only recently have academic analyses undertook the task of analyzing processes of immigrant integration and incorporation that result from this form of migration. For example, Chang (2020) brings attention to gender systems that shape immigrant integration in Taiwan and South Korea. In turn, Crush and Chikanda (2020) highlight the importance of diasporas in understanding South-South migration dynamics. Much of the literature on South-South migration, however, is policy-oriented, focusing on the relationship between migration and development (see, Crush & Chikanda, 2020; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2015; Hujo & Piper, 2007; Ratha & Shaw, 2007). Consequently, the understanding of integration in contexts outside the Global North is limited at best, and oftentimes is relegated to the peripheries of theorizing the field.

While noting the importance of South-South migration in understanding the relationship between immigration and development, our Special Issue offers further contributions to migration studies by complicating our understanding and critique of integration at the social, cultural, and political levels. Existing analyses point to the complexity of South-South migration along a number of dimensions. In some regions of the Global South, neighboring nation states share cultural, linguistic, and cultural affinities, and national borders are a legacy of colonialism, and consequently diffuse. While relatively porous borders and strong cultural and linguistic affinities may be understood as facilitating integration of immigrants within the Global South, a number of scholars have challenged such conventional wisdom. On the one hand, porous borders can be considered a threat that facilitates undesirable movement of people, weapons, and criminal activities (see for example, Ehmer & Kothari, 2021; Obah-Akpowoghaha et al., 2020). On the other hand, shared cultural and linguistic affinities may lead people to construct deeper forms of difference. Adida (2011) examines the experiences of Nigerian Yorubas and Hausas immigrants in West Africa and demonstrates that cultural similarities between immigrants and host communities can exacerbate boundaries instead of facilitating integration, which results in culturally similar groups facing greater forms of exclusion than culturally dissimilar ones. Historical legacies, and especially those enacted by colonial powers may also provide deep-rooted lines of difference that impede integration. In turn, Leichtman (2015) accounts for the role of colonial powers in accentuating lines of otherness among immigrants and hosts in her study of the Lebanese diaspora in Senegal. She argues that French colonial administrators carried out anti-Lebanese campaigns to prevent the spread of pan-Islamism, pan-Arabism, and anticolonial sentiments. As such, porous borders, cultural similarities, and colonial legacies can be factors that challenge the integration of immigrants in many contexts of the Global South.

Despite the various factors that challenge conventional wisdoms when conceiving immigrant integration in the Global South, analyses of diverse contexts can also contribute to our understanding of different forms of integration extending the understanding of the process beyond socioeconomic status and parity with natives. Returning briefly to the study of Leichtman (2015) on the Lebanese in Senegal, the author shows that, despite anti-Lebanese sentiments and discourses, Lebanese immigrants negotiated their integration and made a case for recognition as a Senegalese ethnic group. At the same time, the community constructed a cosmopolitan and secular identity that is distinct within both Senegal and Lebanon. Dissimilar to Leichtman’s, Adida’s analysis mentioned above, highlights the role of informal processes of political and institutional incorporation that shape the integration of different ethnic groups of Nigerians in West Africa. As such, both these studies present accounts of integration that go beyond formal socioeconomic attainment to highlight that integration can take place along existing lines of difference.

Instead of the state-centered approach to integration that dominates analyses in the Global North, interrogating immigrant integration in the Global South decenters the state and underscores informal and local experiences of joining communities and forging attachments (Landau & Bakewell, 2018). Many countries in the Global South do not see immigrant integration as a desirable outcome of mobility within or from their borders (Abdelhady & Aly 2023). Despite the restrictive regulatory contexts that characterize many countries in the Global South, immigrants’ desire to forge meaningful connections to their surroundings is not precluded. Numerous studies demonstrate the ways immigrants in the Global South establish long-lasting spaces of belonging to local communities in unexpected ways (Bakewell, 2018; Kasbarian, 2023; Handulle, 2022; Landau & Freemantle, 2016). This form of integration that takes place despite state policies that aims to work in the opposite direction, therefore, cannot be understood using the analytical frameworks developed in the Global North as they do not apply neatly to the Global South.

State policies often create conditions of precarity in various ways, and despite immigrants’ attempts to integrate. Such precarity changes trajectories of integration in important analytical directions. Nelson (2018) shows that the growth of the South Asian community in Quito, Ecuador, is an unintended consequence of the government’s policy of Universal Citizenship. At the same time, working class South Asian immigrants in Quito experience social and economic marginalization. Importantly, many of these immigrants do not plan on staying in Ecuador and hope to continue their journey to Central or North America. Their desire to escape their marginalized position through onward migration leaves them prey to clandestine migration networks and dependent on social and economic opportunities in other destinations. In this sense, immigrants do not find themselves integrating into one local context, or caught in transnational spaces between home and host communities, but in “multiple elsewheres” (Mbembe & Nuttall, 2004) occupying plural subject positions in multiple contexts, which confounds the analysis of mono-directional integration. As such, our understanding of immigrant integration should account for the ways it is “exercised and enacted on multiple scales and across multiple sites” (Landau & Bakewell 2018, p. 3). This conclusion is more attainable when the polity in question is decentered from the analysis of integration. While states in the Global South enact policies that sometimes create the conditions of precarity, they simultaneously prohibit the integration of immigrants by enforcing temporality and denying access to rights. Our understanding of integration in such contexts needs to account for multiple social positions that migrants may have and their diverse frames of reference.

For multidirectional conceptual flows

What might integration then mean, if we open for a critical dialogue between the Global North and the Global South? How can the binary Global North/South be productively problematized when approaching the issue of immigrant integration? How do we understand immigrant wellbeing and rights in contexts where citizens have limited access to democratic institutions as in several countries in the Global South? How do we conceive of integration when examining the experiences of immigrants in contexts where they regard their presence as temporary? To answer these questions, this Special Issue gathers studies reflecting diverse geographies, theoretical approaches, and methodologies to the study of immigrant integration. Composed of seven case studies, and based on analyses of quantitative, ethnographic, and archival data, the articles illuminate different aspects of our understanding of integration, and the need for a critical engagement with the concept beyond the Global North.

Critical engagements with immigrant integration as a concept and empirical reality beyond the Global North yields new knowledges about the ways integration takes place in various legal, political, and socio-cultural contexts that are not necessarily confined to the Global South but applicable elsewhere as well. While they continue to be influenced by the existing literature on integration (that is largely based on the analyses of contexts in the Global North), the articles in this Special Issue highlight the importance of postcolonial realities, racialization discourses, temporality, and state restrictions that are vividly illustrated in the contexts analyzed. These processes are equally applicable to case studies located in the Global North, and the insights unveiled here show the potential of providing important contributions to the ongoing debates located in the Global North as well. Moreover, the different articles collected in the present Special Issue problematize the binary Global North/South, which is integral to the kind of dialogue we propose, and which strengthens the analysis of postcolonial processes that are central to the Special Issue.

Beyond including various contexts in the debates about immigrant integration, the set of articles question assumptions about integration that are largely taken for granted when the focus of the debate is the Global North. First and foremost, they challenge the goal of immigrant integration as a desired outcome of migration in many national contexts and the role of state policies as playing a significant role in the process. Additionally, the different analyses disrupt binaries of integrated/not integrated or inclusion/exclusion, citizen/non-citizen and indeed self-other. Instead, they point to ambivalent subject positions that are neither fully included nor fully excluded. Finally, in place of failed integration models and policies, they show that immigrants engender forms of belonging to the places they find themselves in but without the legal position that grants them rights.

In the Global North, immigrant integration has been critiqued due to its imbrication into neo-colonial dynamics, whereby racialized communities are disciplined, managed, and subjected to different forms of violence. While the debates in the Global North are shaped by the arrival of the postcolonial other, the Global South offers a context where similar processes of othering are produced in multiple and more complex ways. For example, across the world, racial imaginations inform decisions on who belongs to the nation-state, but in some contexts such as the Gulf Cooperation Council, they are also enshrined into laws that shape trajectories of immigrant integration. Colonial legacies are given special attention in this Special Issue, as they inform the ethno-racial hierarchies shaping the contexts for immigrant integration. The collected articles shed light on the ways racialization and disciplinary discourses are at play in the Global South, and demonstrate the effects of ethno-racial hierarchies in various postcolonial contexts.

In the first article of this Special Issue, Manuela Boatcă and Fabio Santos (2023) draw attention to the global history of colonialism and enslavement and focus their analysis on the Caribbean as the first region in the Americas to be claimed by European powers, and as the one where decolonization has remained incomplete to this day. The authors call for an understanding of immigrant integration through the creolization of migration studies. Specifically, they juxtapose the precarious position of Haitians in the Greater Caribbean with the short-cut to global mobility available to the ultra-rich who have access to commodified citizenship in the region. Their analysis illustrates how the unequal distribution of mobilities and all concomitant rights are structured through the coloniality of citizenship. The macro historical perspective offered by the authors draws attention to contradictory flows of peoples, rights, and discourses—a contradiction that is only possible to comprehend when moving beyond a monodirectional perspective on integration.

The connection between racialization and integration is taken up directly by Isadora Lins França (2023) in her analysis of integration practices of “LGBTI refugees” in Brazil. The author links the understanding of integration to debates about asylum, gender, and sexualities. The analysis that França provides shows the interconnections between broader international processes, and the localized national responses they produce. Moving beyond discourses of integration, as well as sexual and gendered identities, the ethnographic discussion identifies the ways these discourses are, on the one hand, limited in their ability to understand the experiences of queer immigrants, and, on the other hand, are part and parcel of the processes of racialization experienced by queer immigrants from/in the Global South. If an LGBTI subject position may entail an avenue to integration within existing international and national discourses, França’s analysis points to the concurrent lack of integration brought about by experiences of racialization, and the need to account for multiple forms of inclusion and exclusion that takes place simultaneously. By locating queer immigrant subjectivity within global (North) discourses on sexual identification and the intersections with racialization experiences, França escapes the pitfalls of methodological nationalism, which sometimes plagues migration scholarship.

The disciplining power of the state is most vivid when looking at Morocco, where immigrants face exclusions that are shaped by their ethno-racial positioning. Anitta Kynsilehto (2023) begins the analysis by pointing out that Morocco’s strategies for immigrant integration are either in flux or fully absent. In addition to the formal recognition of immigrants by the state, the author also shows that integration is a practice that is carried out in the everyday life, requiring determination, persistence, and support from the immigrant community, all while remaining subject to policy changes that may occur suddenly. The analysis, therefore, shows that despite the highly precarious position immigrants find themselves in, they persistently integrate to local communities, perhaps against the desire of the state. The articles of França (2023) and Kynsilehto (2023) illustrate the diverse ways the process of othering is articulated and acted upon, which allows us to move away from assumptions of cultural differences as hindering integration (assumptions that are often popularized in the Global North), and focus instead on the underlying power dynamics shaping our understanding of difference. Their analyses of power dynamics are not only relevant to the understanding of immigrant integration per se, but to investigating social, political, and cultural dynamics in the host societies more generally. This approach delivers a “de-migrantization” of research (Dahinden, 2016) as it shifts the analysis to the impact of migration on larger social and political processes.

Immigration and integration transform host societies regardless of whether the arrival of the immigrant is desirable, tolerated, or outlawed. In fact, immigration often entails a process of self-reflection and self-definition experienced by the host societies, even when new arrivals are associated with a sense of crisis (see for example, Abdelhady & Malmberg, 2018; Hellström et al., 2020). As a result of “the mixing of disparate elements: citizens, long term residents, new arrivals, transit migrants and others… varied and novel socialities” emerge (Landau & Bakewell, 2018, p. 9). It is therefore understandable that the literature on immigrant integration also often examines intermarriage, which is also the focus of the article by Kikuko Nagayoshi, Sayaka Osanami Törngren, and Hirohisa Takenoshita (2023). Through the analysis of census data from Japan, the authors show that immigrants are integrated into existing hierarchies of gender and socio-economic status. At the same time, immigrants, through bi-national marriages, potentially challenge the existing patterns of hypergamy and homogamy. This article contributes to our understanding of the relationship between intermarriage and integration through highlighting the idea of the two-way integration, how bi-national marriages may maintain or challenge the existing gendered and socio-economic hierarchy embedded in Japanese society. These dynamics enable the understanding of not only immigration and integration, but of host societies themselves.

Intermarriage is also one of the diverse themes analyzed by Rawan Arar (2023), as the author interrogates the nature of integration of Syrian refugees in Jordan, “a country of forced immigrants.” While the challenges of making a home in a foreign country are not unique to Syrian refugees, in the context of Syrian civil war against the al-Assad regime, their trajectories of integration in neighboring Jordan diverge from descriptions in the canonical literature on immigrant integration. On the one hand, Syrians and Jordanians share a language, cultural similarities, religious practices, and family ties. On the other hand, Syrians face restrictions on political membership, which influence their experiences of integration and feelings of belonging. Additionally, similarities between the newcomers and their hosts motivate the construction of difference to maintain group boundaries. Similar to analyses of intermarriage provided by Nagayoshi, Osanami Törngren, and Takenoshita (2023), Arar’s interrogation of the construction of difference enables an analysis of the host society itself and not merely the experience of immigrants. In the end, Arar offers an analysis of integration processes that take place through informal dynamics. Unlike analyses that largely focus on the experience of voluntary migrants in Global North contexts, this analysis illuminates the understanding of the experience of forced migrants who have limited access to socioeconomic and political rights in their host country.

The inclination of political leaders and business owners to exploit immigrant workers (even when they are from neighboring countries), or impose inhumane work conditions in many countries in the Global South further complicates trajectories for integration. In their article, Wayne Palmer and Nicola Piper (2023) focus on the question of immigrant workers’ rights and the ability to access these rights in Indonesia. Analyzing labor disputes, the authors highlight the ways Indonesia’s regulatory systems are not conducive to the integration of immigrant workers. Instead, the regulatory system fosters inequality between immigrants and natives, and hampers the ability of the immigrants to integrate into local institutions. By placing immigrant integration at the center of analyzing societies that do not have formalized narratives of immigration and integration, the articles by Kynsilehto (2023), Nagayoshi, Osanami Törngren and Takenoshita (2023), Arar (2023), and Palmer and Piper (2023) all show that analyzing integration (or the lack thereof) is an integral part of understanding societal institutions, relations, and identification.

The lack of formal narratives of integration is equally stark in the final article presented by Gennaro Errichiello (2023), which analyzes the experience of Pakistani professionals in Dubai. As a cosmopolitan city with immigrants as the majority of its inhabitants, Dubai can offer an inclusive arena for integration. At the same time, the temporality of workers’ status leads to a sense of precarity and ephemerality which can weaken belonging. Errichiello’s focus on everyday experiences illustrates the ways immigrants construct quotidian social relations with the host population despite their temporary legal status. For middle class Pakistanis especially, familiarity with laws and customs of the country, religious affinity, and a cosmopolitan attitude also foster a sense of being at home in Dubai. Unlike the preceding articles that highlight an ambivalent status between being integrated and nonintegrated, Errichiello stresses the integrated status despite temporality.

As the concept of integration has become ubiquitous in migration research, policy debates, and popular social commentary in the Global North, writing about integration risks being seduced by the siren song of the illusory universality of concepts and frames of analysis (for a similar critique, see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020). Instead of simply transferring to the Global South a concept that was developed largely in Europe, the ambition of this Special Issue is to contribute to the ongoing effort of expanding the critical theorizing on integration, and “to sharpen and update the conceptual scaffolding that is generally employed to examine the intersecting politics of culture, welfare, and migration” (Hellström et al., 2020, p. 2). At the empirical level, guided by the question “integration of whom into what” (Favell, 2019, p. 2), the collected articles approach integration as “a category of practice” (Korteweg, 2017), and move beyond the integration discourse, examining the social, cultural, and political processes that create the categories of integration (Favell, 2019, pp. 2–7). By interrogating such diverse sites as inter-marriages, legal decision-making, sexual identity, and everyday practices alongside state policies and colonial histories, the different entries analyze how the process of labeling immigrants “produces understandings of belonging and membership, as well as particular meanings of rights” (Korteweg, 2017, p. 13). By placing the other (of immigrant integration discourses in the Global North) at the center of our understandings of citizenship and belonging, the different articles in this Special Issue shed light on diverse trajectories for integration, and complex processes of belonging and identification.

Beyond cultural differences, the case studies, which this Special Issue brings together, challenge other aspects of our understanding of integration as well. In the Global North, integration is often understood in relation to state policies. Examining state policies in Jordan, the Caribbean, and Morocco, three contributions expand our understanding of the role played by the state in connection to integration, by highlighting the relevance of colonial legacies, authoritarianism, and inter-state policies (Arar, 2023; Boatcă & Santos, 2023; Kynsilehto, 2023). Additionally, this Special Issue depicts everyday dynamics as part-and-parcel of immigrant integration, by presenting analyses in contexts where official state policies reject integration and emphasize temporariness (Jordan, the UAE of which Dubai is a constitutive emirate, as well as Morocco and Indonesia) (Arar, 2023; Errichiello, 2023; Kynsilehto, 2023; Palmer & Piper, 2023). As many regions and nation states around the world offer few, if any, mechanisms for immigrants to attain citizenship, and often deny basic human rights to their own citizens (for the context of the Middle East, see for example, Abdelhady & Aly, 2023), highlighting the ways many immigrants establish social attachments, demand inclusion, and forge a sense of belonging to their host societies are important aspects of understanding integration in diverse settings. Instead of the focus on official discourses and avenues for immigrant integration common in the Global North, the collected articles highlight the importance of understanding integration as a fluid, strategic process that is often embedded in daily practices of immigrants and citizens alike.

Finally, this Special Issue contributes to filling the gap in our knowledge of migration dynamics in the Global South, by highlighting the interdependence of, and connections between the two parts of the dichotomy Global North/South. The proposed dialogue de-centers the Global North within integration debates, while highlighting the power dynamics shaping the process of knowledge production within migration studies in general. The collection of articles in this Special Issue presents critical scholarship committed to multicentric knowledge production. In this manner, these articles contribute to both the conceptual development of the topic of immigrant integration that several journals have addressed in their Special Issues (see for example, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020; Grzymala-Kazlowska & Phillimore, 2018; Loch, 2014; Saharso, 2019; Schrover & Schinkel 2013), and the wider debate on the direction(s) of migration studies, to which the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, among others, has contributed with several important thematic issues (see, Ataç & Rosenberger, 2019; Amelina et al., 2021).

Notes

1 They argue further that integration dominates discussions about the incorporation of immigrants and their children in Canada and most of Western Europe, based on negative assumptions about assimilation as a concept often dominant in explaining the US context. In their views, the two concepts are comparable (see also, Grzymala-Kazlowska & Phillimore, 2018). For our purposes, it is important to note that much of the discussion around integration continues to be centered around European experiences.

2 There are no agreed upon definitions of the Global South. In the context of migration research, the Global South refers to origin countries with destinations often being in the Global North (predominantly, Europe and North America). We use the designation Global South to refer to contexts that have been excluded from research on integration. Given that the debates, as we outline in the first part of the paper, have focused on Europe and North America, we refer to other contexts of immigration outside of these two regions using the umbrella term Global South. Immigrants from these countries are often assumed to face problems integrating to the host societies of Europe and North America.

3 A recent study by the Overseas Development Institute demonstrates that 90% of research on attitudes towards immigrants and refugees focuses on high-income countries like the US, the UK and Germany, while 85% of the world’s refugees live in low and middle-income countries (Leach & Hargrave, 2020).