Integration: a tale of two communities

Abstract

UK integration policy has attempted to respond to some of the critiques of the integration framework, and policymakers are pursuing an approach that focusses on the local. This paper examines this response with a particular focus on the city of Bristol. It first sets out the fundamental critiques of the integration paradigm and connects these to more general concerns in migration research about methodological nationalism and scholarly engagement with policy making. It notes different responses to these critiques including a turn to place-based approaches. It describes the history of integration policy as a background to understanding contemporary policy and observes the overlooked importance of community. The paper then describes the ESRC Everyday Integration project and the city and neighbourhood context of Bristol before moving to discuss the findings from the project’s fieldwork. We find that ‘community’ was a very important reference point when our interviewees discussed what integration means. Talking about integration helps turns neighbourhoods into ‘communities’, but it also foregrounds ‘national communities’. Integration discourse elides these two meanings of ‘community’, and locates connections between race and class in the challenge of problematic cultures.

Keywords:

• Integration
• community
• Bristol
• policy
• race

Introduction

Research and policy on ‘integration’¹ has been thoroughly critiqued. The critiques have had particular traction in the UK where seventy years of post-colonial migration have been politically entangled with anti-racist analysis and struggles. Irrespective of academic researchers, national level integration policy steams ahead but nevertheless there have been efforts to respond to criticisms. More particularly, the critical insight that integration promotes and imposes a fantasy of a homogeneous national and implicitly White society, has encouraged British policymakers to pursue an approach that focusses on the local.

This paper puts this move in its historical context and, drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2021 under the ESRC funded Everyday Integration research project, explores how ‘integration’ is deployed by people living in Bristol in 2021, thereby seeking to begin to parse out the work that integration discourse and its focus on the local does. The Everyday Integration project set out to take a bottom-up view of everyday integration practices. While not explicitly invoked, place, understood as nexus – or ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey 2005) of landscape/neighbourhood, social relations, and everyday life—was central to its work.

This paper does not seek to salvage ‘integration’ but rather, recognising that the term is regularly used by everyday actors, explores how focussing on a particular place helps us understand the work done by discourses of integration. Through attending to how people understand and utilise ‘integration’ in daily life, it finds that integration draws on and elides ideas of community that are racialised and classed at the same time as not naming race and class.

This paper first sets out the critiques of the integration paradigm and notes different responses to these critiques including a turn to place-based approaches. It describes the history of integration policy and observes the importance of community. The paper then describes the Everyday Integration project and the city and neighbourhood context of Bristol before moving to discuss the findings from the project’s fieldwork. We find that talking about integration helps turns neighbourhoods into ‘communities’, but it also foregrounds ‘national communities’, thereby introducing implicitly racialised categorisations for Others but not directly for the ‘host community’. Integration discourse elides these two meanings of ‘community’, neighbourhood and ethnic/national, and there is an interesting acknowledgment of connections between race and class via this language. However, these connections are located in the challenge of problematic cultures, with White middle-class people and areas regarded as irrelevant to integration, and White working-class people and areas deemed potentially not integrated, either because there are few Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) residents, or because people living there do not access city amenities.

Integration: critiques and methodological nationalism

Integration is one of many terms – adaptation, acceptance, incorporation, inclusion, interculturalism and others (Favell 2003) – that describe policy and practices claimed to facilitate migrants settling into a ‘host society’. Each of these terms has its history and connotations, and their variety reflects the political and conceptual contestation that these processes and policies have attracted. However, they all usually seek to distinguish themselves from the assimilation paradigm’s aim to make newcomers to a ‘host state’ as similar as possible to ‘natives’. In the UK the assimilation ideal informed policies followed by Conservative and Labour governments throughout the 1960s and 70s but has now been roundly rejected (Feldman 2011; O’Toole 2021).

Many are sceptical about the difference between integration and assimilation, arguing that it is effectively old wine in new wineskins (Favell 2019; Modood 2007). Partly in response there have been strong efforts to refine analyses and approaches. It is now de rigeur to talk about integration as a ‘two-way’ or ‘multi-way’ process involving adaptations by migrants and receiving societies alike. The models describing integration processes have become increasingly complex. They can involve ‘domains’ of foundations, facilitators, social connections, means and markers (Ager and Strang 2008) or of structural, social, cultural, civic and political, identity (Spencer and Charsley 2021); ‘dimensions’ which may be structural, cultural, social, identificational (Heckmann 2006), or legal political, socio-economic and cultural religious (Penninx and Garcés-Mascareñas 2016).

Nevertheless, the critiques of integration fundamentals keep coming, and centre round, firstly its vague definition, secondly, the slippage between categories of practice/policy and categories of analysis, and thirdly the challenge of ‘methodological nationalism’. All these critiques point to how integration is unavoidably racialised and yet, for all its two- and multi-way rhetoric, largely avoids attending to racism, shifting responsibility for integrating on to racialised individuals or groups.

A temporal lens on the ‘migrant’ helps us see how this works. The word is used both for new arrivals and for long-term residents, including naturalized citizens and their descendants. The provision of opportunities for support to recent arrivals who experience language, everyday practices and rights and obligations as very different from those to which they are accustomed is in theory a laudable aim. However, importantly, in the case of contemporary migration the challenges are often not only about lack of familiarity but also domination and power, relations typically institutionalised by immigration status.

This latter is key to understanding the experiences of new arrivals but is often overlooked even by those promoting ‘integration from day one’ (Scholten and Kaşli 2019). Integration is taken as particularly relevant for people with long term residence, but often their needs are quite different from new arrivals. Familiarization accomplished, the distinction between ‘migrant’ and ‘ethnic minority’ blurs. Indeed, research finds that in these cases there are substantial differences between migrants of a European (for which read White) and ‘non-European’ origin on structural, cultural and social dimensions of integration (Heath and Schneider 2021). A temporal lens reveals that failing to distinguish the differing requirements of new arrivals and long-term residents can result in integration policy failing to attend to race and class and their interactions with immigration status.

The singling out of (racialised) migrants and their descendants by integration policy and the focus on their behaviour rather than the (racist) structures and attitudes of the host society has led to powerful arguments that academic researchers should abandon the concept of integration completely (Rytter 2019). Korteweg (2017) argues that integration discourse distracts from the ways in which migrants already are full members of ‘host’ societies and, relatedly, that it takes attention away from the social, political and economic issues faced by that society. This develops a more general complaint about integration, that it assumes a harmonious (and homogenous) society into which ‘migrants’ are incorporated, reiterating and reproducing the common sense, policy, and nevertheless deeply political imaginary of the nation state inhabited by natives/citizens who are confronted by migrant difference.

While ostensibly aiming for social harmony, in practice then ‘integration’ reinforces divisions and positions certain people (migrants/racialised minorities) as outside of the nation. Integration exemplifies efforts to make a certain kind of (national) citizen, a citizen who is classed, racialised, gendered, etc. even as it is purported that they are a ‘translucent modern individual’ (Favell 2019). Schinkel (2018) characterises mainstream integration research as exemplifying ‘neo-colonial knowledge production’, while Favell (2019) argues that ‘academic researchers working with the national integration paradigm are straightforwardly handmaidens to a political process; their research…is obviously a form of bio-politics’.

The traction that these critiques have outside of academia depends in part on histories of state building, citizenship and ethnicity, and on recent immigration history. In Sweden, for example, integration has been an explicit focus of immigration policy since the 1998 Regeringens Proposition 1997/98 16 titled: Sweden, the future and diversity – from immigrant policy to integration policy. There continues to be widespread support for ‘integration’ as a policy and analytical framework. It continues to be largely framed in terms of practical issues for new arrivals. However, there is also an aim to instigate ‘basic common values’, and while in 1975 the country explicitly rejected assimilation in favour of multiculturalism, as far as values are concerned ‘common’ clearly means Swedish.

In contrast, in the UK, where debates about race, colonialism and migration are far more entangled than in Sweden, ‘integration’ policies have been subject to considerable criticism from academics and activists. It also connects to a wider and long running debate within migration scholarship about methodological nationalism – the conflation of the nation state with society and the naturalisation of the nation state as a container of social processes that predetermines the ‘migrant’ as an object of sociological enquiry and overlooks the productive nature of the nation state form (Anderson 2019; Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002).

However, while national borders are undoubtedly crucial to identifying the original subject of integration policy (bearing in mind the temporal point above), the national is not the only scale at which integration is governed. The European Union seeks to engage with national integration policy, albeit to a lesser extent than its engagement with immigration policy. In November 2004, the EU Conference of Specialised Ministers responsible for integration agreed on Eleven Common Basic Principles for Immigrant Integration Policy (CBP) as a first step towards a European framework for immigrant integration and to be a point of reference for the implementation and evaluation of current and future integration policies.

Notably point seven of the CBP document asserted that ‘integration is a process that takes place primarily at the local level’ (Council of the European Union 2004) foreshadowing an emphasis on the multilevel governance of integration which has become increasingly important; that is, its dispersal across various levels of government, both ‘up’ to the regional and, in Europe, the European Union, and ‘down’ to the local authority or city (Scholten and Penninx 2016). This can be reflected in nested scales with interactions between local, national and regional, and central co-ordination by the national or regional, but also involves horizontal peer to peer networks such as city networks, which develop both within states (see for example https://www.cnigreece.gr/en/about-cni/ and https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/project/inclusive-cities/) and between states (e.g. https://integratingcities.eu/). These are not necessarily independent of national and regional efforts, and bodies such as the European Commission’s Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) fund these kinds of local initiatives.

For all the critique from certain academics then, integration policies and practice are ever more entrenched. How then to proceed? In the case of migration studies, Dahinden has argued for place-based approaches, that take specific places and neighbourhoods as the units of research (Dahinden 2016) and several of integration’s toughest critics have argued that a place-based approach might generate more rigorous and less state-orientated analyses of migration/integration (Schinkel 2018). This potentially shifts the noun that ‘integrated’ is attached to, from individuals and groups to cities or neighbourhoods.

One might also investigate integration as a ‘discursive practice’ and examine the socio-political work that ‘integration’ is doing, that is analyse what integration and integration discourse do rather than what integration is (Anderson 2019; Korteweg 2017; Lentin 2015). This paper brings together these approaches to consider developments in UK integration policy, but rather than look at whether these policies are ‘successful’ (whatever that might mean) at a local level it examines how ‘integration’ is understood and deployed by people living in particular neighbourhoods in Bristol in 2021.

Integration from the national to communities

The integration of migrants has been a long-standing UK policy objective that has often proved contentious, particularly in its relation to immigration policies. The National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants (CCI) was established in 1965 to ‘promote and co-ordinate on a national basis efforts directed towards the integration of Commonwealth immigrants into the community’ (National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants: Minutes and Papers 1964–1968) and involved a wide range of experts on its advisory panels.

The Government’s position, that integration was necessary to ‘manage the co-existence of different races as they came together in British cities in unprecedented ways’, connected successful integration to limiting numbers of new entrants (Feldman 2011, 286). When the CCI was replaced by the Community Relations Commission (CRC) in 1968, this was following the passage of the landmark Race Relations Act, the first legislation regarding race discrimination to be introduced in the UK. However, it also followed the CCI’s conflict with the Government over the passing of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act (Peppard 1987). Thus, the relation between integration and ‘race relations’/anti-racism policies, on the one hand, and immigration policies, on the other, proved a point of tension early in the former’s institutionalisation.

The CRC’s task was to ‘encourage the establishment of, and to assist others to take steps to secure the establishment of, harmonious community relations and to co-ordinate on a national basis the measures adopted for that purpose by others’ (Race Relations Act 1968 25 3(a)). The CRC was given powers to advise Local Authorities and other local actors on ‘community relations’. Thus, in this period the policy shifted from aiming to assimilate immigrants into the singular national community (the CCI’s remit), to the idea of plural communities integrating into a national society (the CRC’s remit). Notably, the UK’s ‘race relations model of integration’ was, from the outset, heavily focussed on (prospective) long-term residents rather than new arrivals. Responses to the needs of the latter (which might broadly fall under the rubric of ‘integration’) tended to be met in an ad hoc way by local governments (Broadhead and Spencer 2020).

In the early 2000s, the Labour Government, which had a strongly communitarian bent, began to promote a substantive citizenship that went beyond legal status to signify shared membership , and this in turn became associated with integration policy and ‘cohesive communities’ (O’Toole 2021):

Integration, in this context, is not about culture or lifestyle. It is about values. It is about integrating at the point of shared, common unifying British values. It isn’t about what defines us as people, but as citizens, the rights and duties that go with being a member of our society. (Tony Blair 2006, cited O’Toole 2021)

The relation between the legal ‘us’ of British citizens, and the social ‘us’ of members of British society, was exposed as potentially deeply contested but importantly, recalling Favell’s ‘translucent modern individual’, this division did not straightforwardly cut across ‘migrants’ and citizens, nor across racialized differences. The 2002 white paper Secure Borders, Safe Haven was concerned with immigration and naturalisation yet also explicitly compared the ‘citizenship deficit’ of white working-class people with that of migrants:

Too many of our citizens are excluded from meaningful participation in society. This is true of those in white working-class communities whose alienation from the political process, along with their physical living conditions and standards of living, leaves them feeling excluded from the increased wealth and improved quality of life which they see around them. In the same way, those who have entered this country and joined friends, family or ethnic groupings may find themselves experiencing relative economic disadvantage and sometimes overt racism. (Home Office 2002, 10)

The bundling together of integration, inclusion and citizenship broadened the reach of integration policy beyond the Home Office. While the Home Office has responsibility for immigration and naturalisation (i.e. the formal process of citizenship acquisition that marks acceptance into the legal ‘us’), integration and citizenship as participation and membership of the social ‘us’ do not fall straightforwardly into this remit. In March 2018 it was the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government (MHCLG) that published the Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper for consultation. The focus was on how to build ‘integrated communities’ defined as:

communities where people, whatever their background, live, work, learn and socialise together, based on shared rights, responsibilities and opportunities. Communities where many religions, cultures and opinions are celebrated, underpinned by a shared set of British values that champion tolerance, freedom and equality of opportunity. A society in which everyone is a potential friend. (Ministry of Communities and Housing and Local Government 2018, 10)

The responses to this consultation together with an Integrated Communities Action Plan (ICAP) were published in February 2019. In the same year and using the same integration definition, the Home Office published the third edition of its Indicators of Integration framework to guide interventions at local and national level. It was authored by three Home Office civil servants from the Migration and Border Analysis Unit, and four academics from different universities, with contributions from a further three academics and drawing on scholarly work, including Bourdieu (1986), Putnam (2000) and Ager and Strang (2004).

Clearly officials from both MCHLG and Home Office have engaged with some academic work and are keen to demonstrate they have a more nuanced understanding of integration than is often posited. In its explication of key principles, the Home Office document states: ‘This framework does not assume the existence of a homogenous society in which a minority group may be “inserted”’ (Home Office 2019, 20 emphasis in original), while the MHCLG asserts: ‘Integration is not assimilation. We want everyone to feel confident and proud of their identity and heritage’ (Ministry of Communities and Housing and Local Government 2018, 10).

The ICAP Ministerial Foreword claims: ‘real integration doesn’t just happen in action plans; it happens in our communities – neighbour to neighbour and day-to-day’. The MHCLG cites the finding from a 2017 survey conducted by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport that ‘81% agree that their local area is a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together’ (Ministry of Communities and Housing and Local Government 2018, 9). Yet nevertheless integration is identified as a local ‘problem’ and contemporary national integration policy is returning to an earlier Community Relations approach with its decidedly local turn.

It is community that is damaged by lack of integration – ‘communities are now divided’ and communities that have the potential to be integrated. The ‘confiction’ (to use Schinkel’s term) of national society inhabited by good citizens seems to have been displaced in the language of integration policy (though not of migration more generally) with a capacious version of community. In the 80-page 2018 Green Paper community/communities is used 408 times and local 251 times. Communities are resident (13), local (16), faith (11) and, of course, integrated (41). Society in contrast appears a total of 37 times, and national 78 times (20 of those in conjunction with local as in ‘local and national’). The Home Office’s Integration Indicators also emphasise communities rather than society though the difference is less marked (62 community/ies; 19 society/ies).

This shift is accompanied by a focus on the local. For example, while in the ICAP document national appears 13 times, e.g. ‘national planning’ or ‘National Citizens Service’, and ‘local’ is used 66 times and more substantively ‘local residents’.

In keeping with this, ICAP announced funding for pilot programmes in five ‘Local Integration Areas’. Local Authorities² in turn focus on communities. For example, in their Bradford for Everyone Strategy: Building Stronger Communities Together 2018-2023, Bradford District Council, one of the hosts of the pilot programmes, identifies as key ‘communities’: young people; women; poorer communities; new communities (Bradford District Council 2018, 13). In their plan Belonging Together: A Conversation about Our Communities and Future, Peterborough City Council’s vision is ‘putting communities at the heart of everything we do’ (Peterborough City Council 2019). Thus, the rather vague unit of practice is community rather than society or nation. The plan for building integrated local communities will have progress monitored by an inter-ministerial group for safe and integrated communities that include: the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government; Home Office; Department for Education; Department for Culture, Media and Sport; Department for Work and Pensions; and Ministry of Justice.

UK national integration policy is also a devolved matter with each of the four UK nations responsible for their own integration strategy. In practice, policies to support newly arrived migrants have developed locally rather than nationally, and this has been recognised and politically supported by central government. There are then emerging two kinds of ‘communities’ from the policy discourse: the migrant communities that are to be integrated into society, and the local communities which are the sites of integration.

Research project and site

Bristol, named as Britain’s Best Place to Live by The Sunday Times in 2017, is a city in the South-West of England. Its relatively young population of approx. 465,000 makes it the tenth largest city in the UK and an economic and cultural hub for the South-West region. Its wealth has roots in its role as a slave port and there is a long history of Black presence in the city. Like other English cities, after the Second World War Bristol was the destination for migrants from formerly colonised countries including the West Indies, Pakistan and India, and later attracted post-colonial migrants and refugees, from the European Union and beyond. By 2016 there were 67,000 non-UK born people (approx. 15% of the population) living in the city. Of these some 15–20,000 are from Poland. There are also between 15,000 and 20,000 residents of a Somali background, including people who are UK born, and people who are EU citizens. Approximately 22% of British citizens in Bristol are not White (Bristol City Council 2021a).

Despite the city’s relative prosperity, Bristol has 41 neighbourhoods in the most deprived 10% in England (Bristol City Council 2019). Inequality is racialised: those from ethnic minority backgrounds are significantly more likely to be unemployed and Bristol is ranked 341 out of 348 districts in England and Wales for multiple inequalities experienced by ethnic minorities (Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity 2017). However, the three most deprived areas of Bristol, which rank amongst the most deprived 1% in England, include Hartcliffe & Withywood which is 92.8% white British (Bristol City Council 2019).

Bristol has a long history of anti-racist activism, from the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 to the toppling of the Colston statue in 2020. Its history of social protest, stark inequalities of opportunity across place, class and ethnicity and local government efforts to promote it as an ‘inclusive city’, make it an excellent site for exploring how residents understand the politics of integration. The ESRC funded Everyday Integration project was hosted at the University of Bristol and asked: What challenges and opportunities do everyday practices, mobilities and exchanges across and within Bristol pose for integration? It took as its starting point that integration is manifest in the opportunities for ‘meaningful exchange’ between individuals and groups. Unusually for work on integration, international migration was not assumed as the problem that makes integration a necessary solution, and a sustained effort was made to understand integration processes as relevant to everyone.

We were particularly interested in the relation between mobilities and integration, understanding mobilities as including, but not limited to, international and internal migration, i.e. migration into the United Kingdom and movement to and within Bristol. We interviewed long term residents (LTR) and new arrivals (NA), defined as people who had arrived in the city in the last four years. We were also interested in daily mobility within the city and planned ‘mobile methods’, including walking interviews and focus groups on buses, were scheduled to start in early 2020.

Unfortunately, the pandemic intervened, and the kinds of creative methods envisaged were no longer possible. Instead, a combination of survey and semi-structured interviews were deployed.³ The methods were scrutinised and agreed by the departmental ethics committee. This paper draws on the qualitative data comprising 41 semi-structured interviews conducted on Zoom. Following consultation with community partners, we decided to focus on neighbourhoods with very different demographics and reputations: Neighbourhood A is diverse with a young population, nearly 70% of whom were born in England; Neighbourhood B is middle-class and largely White with a high proportion of older residents, over 80% of whom were born in England; Neighbourhood C is working-class and largely White, with a population age lying between Neighbourhood A and Neighbourhood B, and over 95% of residents were born in England.

While it did not use the term ‘place-based’ there were place-based elements to the project. Our interest in opportunities for ‘meaningful exchange’ and everyday interactions required engagement with the kinds of social interaction facilitated by location proximity and unpacking the relation between place and social practices (Stoker 2019). We took a very loose understanding of neighbourhood and did not follow administrative borders as these do not straightforwardly coincide with the lived experience of place. If a potential interviewee felt they lived in neighbourhood ‘A’ then we took that as them living there, irrespective of where they might be fixed administratively. In place-based approaches context is imbricated in methodologies and analysis and the project methodology involved nearly forty ‘community partners’, organisations based at neighbourhood and city level working on a range of issues from entrepreneurship to disability, including, but not restricted to, immigration and asylum. These organisations played multiple roles in the project, from acting as gatekeepers, to giving feedback on data and analysis.

The delayed qualitative fieldwork was conducted in summer 2021, after several lockdowns and over a year of social distancing. At the same time Brexit divisions had left a legacy, both nationally and locally. It is worth noting, that while these divisions might be regarded as highly relevant to integration, they were not framed as such. In the UK in a Changing Report (UKCE), Brexit and Public Opinion (2019), the term ‘integration’ featured only once and that was in relation to the European Union.

Integration: from neighbourhood to community

Integration discourse was very recognisable to our interviewees, none of whom baulked when asked for their ideas about the term. At first sight, the critiques of integration seem replicated in our research findings. Several interviewees conceptualised integration straightforwardly as cultural adaptation on the part of national/culturally different social groups, and acceptance of difference by the majority (assumed White) community. There were strong assimilationist assumptions. ‘I think she became quite well integrated into the British way of life and didn’t want to mix with the other Nepalese students and wanted to meet English people’ (Retired, UK citizen, White woman, Neighbourhood B, LTR).

However, this invocation of the national level, whether British or English, was relatively unusual. Indeed, while local government and civil society work hard to develop an identity of a City of Bristol inhabited by Bristolians, integration had relatively little purchase at the City level either. We had anticipated that looking at integration at the scale of the city might change who are perceived as needing to be integrated, from non-citizens (‘migrants’) to new arrivals more generally, but this was not the case. Invitations to reflect on integration as relating to newcomers to Bristol irrespective of citizenship or migration status were met with disinterest. When asked how they felt about people coming into Bristol for jobs, the response was incomprehension or answers like ‘It’s what it is isn’t it. I’ve got no problem with it’ (Precarious work, UK citizen, Black man, Neighbourhood A, LTR). It was at the neighbourhood level, the ‘community’, that integration was taken to be relevant, both within and between neighbourhoods.

Bristol is frequently characterised as a city of villages (Mundy and Bray 2016) and our interviewees strongly imagined Bristol as comprised of different ‘communities’ or ‘local areas’.

I think Bristol neighbourhoods, there seems to be quite stark differences in the people that live there. I think that’s one of the things to work on for Bristol. There seems to be such segregation in terms of where different communities live, but… there is just also that neighbourhood spirit which is integration as well and I think Bristol kind of shines in that way. (Precarious work, UK citizen, White woman, Neighbourhood B, LTR)

For most of our interviewees, contrasts between neighbourhoods exemplified that the city was not properly integrated, as was the lack of mobility between neighbourhoods. In contrast to the national perspective, in the city immobility and not mobility was held up as a challenge to integration. Poor integration results in and reflects poor mobility within the city – not enough movement rather than an excess of movement. More than half of our interviewees across all neighbourhoods mentioned lack of public transport, poor bus services and limited routes, so it is reasonable to conclude that infrastructural limitations are a key cause of this lack of integration.

When discussing integration, the neighbourhood became a ‘community’. In his discussion of ‘community’ as a key word, Raymond Williams (1976) describes it as a ‘warm’ word, indicating face-to-face local relationships in contrast with the more formalised and abstract ‘society’ – ‘the foundation of community is supposed to be social values, while capitalist society is based only on economic value’ (Joseph n.d.). Interviewees spoke enthusiastically about their ‘local community’, or ‘community spirit’ and ‘community groups’. They often prefaced community with adjectives like ‘nice’, ‘great’ and ‘wonderful’ and it retained its associations with place and face-to-face engagement.

The warm word ‘community’ is in keeping with central government’s encouragement of ‘a society where everyone is a potential friend’ and obscures the exclusions, conflicts and power relations that are negotiated in our everyday experiences of living and working together. Imagined as authentic and solidaristic, problems can seem to come from outside. And indeed, some interviewees who felt very socially embedded in their local areas, evinced a sense of outsiders/newcomers bringing conflict to their neighbourhood. One interviewee who described herself as the ‘community connector’ noted: ‘Occasionally there’s friction…particularly if you get a certain type move in’ (Retired, UK citizen, White Female, Neighbourhood C, LTR); while someone born and raised in a gentrifying highly diverse area complained of new arrivals: ‘you can tell they’re not local to the area. They really just stick out like a sore thumb’ (Permanent work, UK citizen, Black woman, Neighbourhood A, LTR).

These kinds of comments were often made in the context of describing positive interactions with others in the neighbourhood. One of our interviewees living on the same street where she had been born took pride in the ‘community spirit’ in her neighbourhood, a neighbourhood she felt was often looked down on. She described an environment of long-term residents, where people looked after each other, but there were also ‘bad streets’: ‘I think the only time there’s ever an argument in our street is if somebody that doesn’t live in our street comes in to start trouble’ (Unemployed, UK citizen, White female, Neighbourhood C, LTR). She felt that the closure of local amenities and poor schools had contributed to problems with disruptive young people. The residents of her street were almost all elderly, and she joked that, in her early 30s, she was one of the youngest people round. Her concerns might then have been framed as ones of integration between younger and older residents in the neighbourhood, or between different streets within the neighbourhood. However, she associated integration with racial and ethnic ‘diversity’, and therefore these disruptions were not cast as related to integration.

Integration: from community to race

When asked to reflect on what they understood by integrated communities, interviewees focussed on accommodating difference:

It means establishing links with people from a somewhat different community, I think. People who would normally be separate because of their historic communities that they feel part of. When those people manage to come together with others from a more different group. (Retired, UK citizen, White male, Area B, LTR)

When asked what difference was referring too – we are all different, so what kinds of differences matter in relation to integration? – not a single interviewee mentioned citizenship/immigration status (though two mentioned refugees). The British ‘race relations’ approach to integration appears to have thoroughly permeated everyday integration discourse, and responses heavily focussed on race/ethnicity/culture: ‘It’s a mixture of community spirit, and whether you relate with your neighbourhood and the people who live in it. I think like there’s definitely a racial question as well’ (Precarious worker, UK citizen, White female, Neighbourhood B, LTR). This speaker was unusual in using the term ‘racial’. More usually fuzzy and generic terms were deployed as a means of talking and yet not talking about race, and ‘background’ was particularly common e.g. ‘mixed background’; ‘Christian background’; ‘Yes, immediately I think it’s of people of a different ethnic background moving into a community and becoming part of it’ (Retired, UK citizen, White woman, Neighbourhood B, LTR).

Background ‘softens’ race and this is reflected in the language of the Green Paper, where the word most commonly following ‘different’ is ‘background’: ‘different background/s’ occurs 42 times; ‘different community/ies', 11 times. Throughout the government documents discussed in previous sections, terms such as ‘different cultures’ and ‘demographic shifts’ suggest racialised minorities entering into a previously homogenous (White and Christian) neighbourhood e.g.: ‘we agree that building an understanding of different cultures and faiths helps support integration’. In both policy and academic work it has been argued that the shift from methodological nationalism to the ethnic lens, or from migrants to ethnic minorities, is facilitated by the concept of integration (Çaglar and Glick-Schiller 2018). This is confirmed by our interviewee data.

Interviews also expose that this conceptualisation of integration and shift to the ethnic lens continues to be compatible with (methodological) nationalism. While Williams, writing in 1936, emphasises immediacy and locality in his discussion of the keyword ‘community’, in contemporary UK its application to ‘ethnic minorities’ presaged by ‘community relations councils’ is now thoroughly embedded. The nation was still very much present for our interviewees, but it is migrants’ and racialised others’ national communities, ‘the Somali community’, ‘the Pakistani community’ etc… rather than the national society of the receiving state, that is foregrounded.

This was not about the ‘potentially simultaneous membership of societies “here” and “there”’ (Erdal 2020) of transnationalism and migration, but racialisation, again reflecting the fact that the subject of integration was not imagined as a new arrival but a long-established resident. The national elides migration and race, accommodating both citizenship (‘nationality’) and membership by descent and culture (belonging to the nation). A ‘member of the Somali community’ may hold Somali citizenship, but they may also be a Black UK-born British citizen, i.e. a member of the community by (racialised) descent. The ambivalence of the nationalising adjective seamlessly connects ethnicity and immigration and effectively turns these British citizens into ‘migrants’. These nationalised communities can also be regionally grouped together via racialised groupings such as ‘Eastern European’, ‘Asian’, ‘African’ and ‘Caribbean’, all regularly deployed by our interviewees.

The terminology of X-national community means that integration discourse does not explicitly reify a homogenous national host community, but still frames membership as a national and cultural/racial matter. It brings in nationalist assumptions via the back door through the association of certain racialised groups with a common national homeland. It also, of course, ignores important distinctions between members of ‘national communities’. In the case of asylum seekers and refugees, these distinctions, whether of ethnicity, religion, sexuality or politics, may be the very reason that have caused individuals to leave their country of origin in the first place.

Race, community and the neighbourhood

Thus, everyday integration discourse, like national policy discourse, deploys two senses of community, one related to neighbourhood, the other to a country of origin/descent. The single term ‘community’ enables both to be brought together and also captures the associations that some neighbourhoods have with particular nationalised groups. It is notable that in local government policy documents, segregation is often posited as the opposite of integration – too strong an association of one (non-White) national/racialised community with one neighbourhood could indicate segregation and lack of integration. One interviewee complained about being told where to live because, while he was White, it would be appropriate for his ‘Pakistani’ wife: ‘When we got here, somebody who was well meaning said "There’s a community you could go and live. There’s a nice community area", and it was like you were already being told where you should go and live’ (Precarious worker, UK citizen, White male, Neighbourhood B, NA).

Different neighbourhoods were often described as more or less integrated, and those that were integrated were almost always in local authority wards with the relatively high proportions of BME residents. ‘If you look at central Bristol as maybe Easton, Montpelier, St Pauls, St Judes, St Philips, New Town, Kingsdown, Stokes Croft, those sorts of inner-city local areas are very integrated I would say. Outskirts not so much’ (Precarious work, UK citizen, Black man, Neighbourhood A, LTR). All the areas mentioned with the exception of Kingsdown are in Lawrence Hill, Easton and Ashley Wards with particularly high concentrations of BME people (Bristol City Council 2021b).

Conversely, the homogeneity of white, prosperous areas was acknowledged by their residents, but not felt to be a problem. Integration was considered not particularly relevant to White residents of middle-class areas who felt able to say, ‘I’ve obviously observed rather than been part of it [integration] because we are in quite a white community’ (Retired, UK citizen, White woman, Neighbourhood B, LTR).

While White middle-class areas were largely given Shinkel’s ‘free pass’ in terms of integration, this was often not the case for working-class areas, where perceived racialised homogeneity was read as problematic:

it’s really difficult – because they’re not integrated in themselves. Someone from Hartcliffe, if they moved to Southmead would find it difficult. I’m just talking about English, white people. They would find it difficult because the Southmead people wouldn’t necessarily accept the Hartcliffe people…. but the fact that they’ve come from a different end of Bristol, they would just be out of sorts. It wouldn’t be an easy adjustment to make for these people. It’s to do with schools, families. (Permanent worker, UK citizen, Black woman, Neighbourhood B, LTR)

At the same time as differentiating between race and class, integration and attention to the neighbourhood scale facilitated a discursive grouping of working-class and racialised groups. This white interviewee believed Bristol was an integrated city but said of his own prosperous area:

I don’t think we have a sort of council estate type community as part of the area. And we certainly don’t have obvious Asian communities or Irish or any sort of other obvious group. I don’t think I’m aware of them in this part of Bristol. (Retired, UK citizen, White male, Neighbourhood B, LTR)

I’ve found different areas, very different to each other, but sometimes quite like a ghetto, so in a certain area you only have Somali. In a certain area you have mostly East Europe. In Staple Hill maybe I have more British people, Bristolian, but very… and quite like disadvantaged. I mean a bit like lower class. So, this is not… in these areas maybe the integration it didn’t work very well because they are a bit… they keep themselves separated. (Permanent work, Italian citizen, White woman, Neighbourhood A, NA)

The areas that are labelled white working-class ‘communities’ can be seen as sharing some of the backward elements of national communities – supportive perhaps but inward looking and often ‘traditional’. Like some national communities, white working-class neighbourhoods could be isolated, not only by limited transport infrastructure but also by psychological factors: ‘It’s about five minutes in the car but mentally it’s a long way away’ (Retired, UK citizen, White Female, Neighbourhood C, LTR). They too can be subject to the integration gaze which can represent them as racist and not moving with the times.

Thus while integration has been criticised for invisibilising racism, in the context of white working-class ‘communities’ racism can be identified as part of the culture to be expunged by improved integration. Integration is a means of talking about community and race, but it is also a way of talking about class. In its everyday usage it can connect race, class and neighbourhood: ‘I would have thought it [integration] was just ethnicity but now I don’t. I just see it as a different – it’s like working-class, under-class. It’s not – it’s where you’ve been held away and you think you don’t belong somewhere, and you turn your back on it’ (Precarious worker, UK citizen, White male, Area B, LTR). ‘Well in London there are pockets of ethnic groups, aren’t there, in London? And people do stick together and the rich stick together and the poor are forced to stay together’ (Retired, UK citizen, White Male, Area B LTR).

In contemporary British discourse on migration these kinds of connections and commonalities are rarely explicit (though they were made in the 2002 White Paper Secure Borders, Safe Haven). While the connection is taken as one of deficient culture, the banal acceptance that tolerance of cultural difference is the solution to integration of different ‘national communities’ is less easy to resort to when this includes marginalised white communities. Tolerating difference is not the same as tolerating economic inequality.

Place-based integration research: way out or dead end?

A place-based approach means attending to the work of discursive practice. It does not resolve the question of what ‘really’ constitutes integration either in terms of how it is recognised or what integration policies aim to achieve, but it can help us appreciate the work being done by ‘integration’ discourse in everyday life. Whether or not integration policy achieves its goals, the idea(l) of integration, embedded as it is, has become part of everyday social relations and builds on (and shifts) longstanding ideas of community. In policy and practice it is part of the armoury of talking and not-talking about race and racism, as the ‘migrant’ quietly shifts to the ‘ethnic minority’. While academic work, and to some extent UK policy, has sought to shed assimilationist assumptions, these continue to be voiced in everyday integration, despite the emphasis on community.

Attention to how people understand the term ‘integration’ in relation to their lived experiences helps unpick some of the complex and contradictory work that is being done by ideas of ‘community’, and that includes the management of heavily racialised assumptions. (White) British communities are foregrounded in ‘place-based communities’ and ethnicised/racialised communities are foregrounded in ‘national communities’. Critiques of methodological nationalism need to pay more attention to the naturalisation of (migrant) communities that introduce assumptions about nationally homogenous societies through migrants rather than emplaced and localised host communities. A place-based approach can connect race, migration and class to material and shared conditions of housing, infrastructure and access to amenities, and this is sometimes implicit in integration discourse, but highly culturalised. While British integration policy aims for ‘A society in which everyone is a potential friend' (Ministry of Communities and Housing and Local Government 2018), making these place-based connections can build neighbourhoods in which everyone is a potential ally, which is a far more interesting proposition.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the PI, Prof Jon Fox, and fellow Co-investigators, Prof Therese O’Toole and Professor David Manley, and, particularly Dr Natalie Hyacinth, who conducted the interviews under very difficult COVID circumstances.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the ESRC under grant [number ES/S009582/1].

Notes

1 For ease of reading, I have foregone the quotation marks around ‘integration’ for the rest of this paper.

2 The complexity of ‘local’ is reflected in this system of government. There are five different kinds of ‘local authorities’ in England: county councils; district councils; unitary authorities; metropolitan districts; London boroughs. These in turn are divided into two tiers.

3 The survey investigated the impact of COVID19 and the lockdown on experiences of economic, social, civic, spatial and digital integration. A report on its findings can be found here https://everydayintegration.org.uk/outputs.