Immigration,segregation and social cohesion: is the ‘German model’ fraying at the edges?

In this article, we analyse immigrant integration against the background of German society’s social cohesion. First, we examine the integration process and policies with regard to the integration of first-generation labour migrants into the German ‘national society’ since the 1960s. Even though these ‘guest workers’ were confronted to ethnic and political exclusion owing to the so-called German integration model, they experienced socio-economic integration and, at the local level, some form of political participation. Secondly, we analyse the policies and the integration process of immigrant youth, specifically those of Turkish descent, into contemporary German society, the social cohesion of which is impeded by social exclusion and urban segregation. Our hypothesis is that – in spite of a long-standing refusal to recognise itself as an immigration country – Germany has to some extent incorporated its migrants and achieved an integration consensus, while paradoxically, national integration models in several other Western European countries are currently going through a deep crisis.     

Colonial legacy of ethno-racial inequality in Japan

This essay challenges anti-historicist accounts that sever the link between the colonial past and present, replacing them with a more historically nuanced understanding of Japan’s immigration policies and their relation to ethno-racial inequality. Contrary to the dominant view that transnational immigration is new to Japan, this article shows that Japan already had a history of immigration in the early twentieth century, and this history generated a lasting impact on postwar immigration policies and their integration. While recognizing the impact of structural and individual factors, this essay underscores a path-dependent approach that demonstrates how colonial exclusion led to the formation of a durable structure of inequality against low skilled labor immigrants, and thus how such a colonial legacy has continued to limit the life chances and integration of subsequent immigrants in Japan since the 1980s.     

Integration policy in Singapore: a transnational inclusion approach

A number of models of integration have been developed to highlight the experiences of immigration and integration in the Western world. However, the existing models do not adequately capture the complexities of contemporary international immigration and integration, especially the integration process in the light of migrant transnationalism in Asia. This study examines the models of integration through a case study of Singapore. This paper introduces a new concept ‘transnational inclusion’ to conceptualize Singapore's initiative to embrace its transnational global Singaporeans as well as its transnational immigrants, estimated to make up one-fourth of the total population. The paper shows that a transnational inclusion model of integration can provide better insights into the dynamics of transnationalism and integration in today's complex migration scenario. We point to Singapore's integration approach that regards integrating migrants into the different spheres of the society as a process rather than an end.     

The ‘compliant’, the ‘pacified’ and the ‘rebel’: experiences with Swiss disability insurance

Switzerland’s social policies in the field of disability have been significantly reshaped over the last two decades by reducing the number of allowances awarded and by increasing the recourse to vocational rehabilitation measures. What stances do individuals who experience the implementation of these policies adopt? What kind of tests are they subjected to? How can we explain the posture they adopt – be it ‘compliant’, ‘pacified’ or ‘rebellious’ – when facing the (re)assignations of their identity and professional status? Drawing on interviews conducted with individuals who have recently been involved in programmes set up by Swiss disability insurance, we highlight their uncertainties and concerns relating to their place in society, as well as their reactions to disability insurance’s interventions.     

A Confluence of Interests in Immigration Enforcement: How Politicians,the Media,and Corporations Profit from Immigration Policies Destined to Fail

The concept of an immigration industrial complex draws from previous work on the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex. All three of these complexes point to the ways that the interests of government bureaucracies, corporate elites, and politicians shape laws and policies. This article explains how the undocumented status of migrants provides advantages to at least three groups: (a) media pundits who make their careers railing against ‘illegal aliens’; (b) politicians who use undocumented migrants as scapegoats; and (c) contractors who profit from massive immigration enforcement expenditures. The disenfranchised status of undocumented migrants enhances the ability of each of these groups to benefit from their presence. This confluence of interests explains why Congress has not enacted viable immigration policies that effectively deal with the ‘problem’ of illegal immigration. This is the second in a two‐part series on the immigration industrial complex.     

Narratives from the neighbourhood: The discursive construction of integration problems in talkback radio1

This paper examines how speakers deploy narrative devices in talking about Sudanese refugees. Particularly, we show how narrative constructions form an important basis for the advancement of accounts about integration problems into the local polity. We analyse talkback ‘phone‐in’ calls to a local Adelaide radio station that provide callers an opportunity to give accounts of events and social phenomena that concern them in their local settings. Analysis shows that speakers regularly deployed narrative constructions, first‐hand ‘witnessing’ devices that functioned to legitimate accounts as veridical versions of events, and contrast devices to explicate the moral and behavioural aberrance of Sudanese refugees. The analysis illustrates how these discursive devices function rhetorically in interaction, in ways that differentiate Sudanese refugees as problematic. Through this analysis, we contend that narrative devices precipitate and bolster socio‐political policies that have serious, negative consequences for Sudanese refugees.     

Migrant Women’s Transnationalism: Family Patterns and Policies

Whereas current policies on migration and integration are beginning to recognise family reunion as one of the most legitimate reasons for acceptance by a host society, they in most cases still do not account for the growing trend of feminisation of migration, and even rarely do they address specific migrants’ needs. As currently constituted, the integration bills envision a one‐way process that places migrants into a position where they cannot question, but only accept and fulfil the predetermined requirements of integration plans. But who are the women that migrate, what influence do their transnational experiences have on their families, and how do migration policies envision the reality of increasing transnationalism? This paper focuses on biographical interviews with migrant women in Slovenia as a valuable method to question current integration measurements, applied here to explore female migrants’ experiences in transnational family life and social networks. A gender sensitive approach is applied that critically evaluates the specificities of family reunification policies, which define women migrants as dependent family members. We discuss life trajectories of women migrants, focusing the debate on their own experiences in and with family life. This new empirical material is used to theorise gaps in contemporary migration research. Women migrants’ own reflections of transnational family ties show a great variety of experiences and their narratives are a unique window into motivational, political, as well as legal dimensions of migration.     

Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation–state building,migration and the social sciences

Methodological nationalism is understood as the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world. We distinguish three modes of methodological nationalism that have characterized mainstream social science, and then show how these have influenced research on migration. We discover parallels between nationalist thinking and the conceptualization of migration in postwar social sciences. In a historical tour d’horizon, we show that this mainstream concept has developed in close interaction with nation–state building processes in the West and the role that immigration and integration policies have played within them. The shift towards a study of ‘transnational communities’— the last phase in this process — was more a consequence of an epistemic move away from methodological nationalism than of the appearance of new objects of observation. The article concludes by recommending new concepts for analysis that, on the one hand, are not coloured by methodological nationalism and, on the other hand, go beyond the fluidism of much contemporary social theory.     

Crime,citizenship and community: neoliberal communitarian images of governmentality

This article discusses the emergence, in the field of crime and safety, of a formula of government that can be called neoliberal communitarianism. This is a paradoxical governmental strategy that combines a focus on ‘individual responsibility’, ‘community’ and a ‘selectively tough state’. The discussion is based on the Foucaultian triangle of strategy, political programmes and techniques. The substance of this application consists of a discussion of recent Dutch political programmes and techniques in crime and safety policies. The discussion includes the local case of Rotterdam, a city at times regarded as a ‘policy laboratory’. Specifically, the role that notions of citizenship and community play in crime and safety policies is analysed. We hereby point at two different manifestations of responsibilization – repressive responsibilization and facilitative responsibilization – aimed at two governmentally differentiated populations. In addition, we describe how neoliberal communitarianism entails the selective exclusion of subjects imagined as ‘high risk’. Because the government of crime tells us much about the government of ‘society’, neoliberal communitarianism is a useful concept to grasp contemporary changes in government in the Netherlands and in other European countries.     

Managing the National Status Group: Immigration Policy in Germany

This article challenges the established convention in immigration policy scholarship of treating economic utility and identity maintenance as logically distinct concerns. Drawing on work by Weber, Wallerstein and Bourdieu, we argue that concerns about economic utility and identity maintenance interact in the immigration policies of Western liberal democratic states, leading to policies designed to build and maintain middle‐class national status groups. Using the example of contemporary immigration policy in Germany, we illustrate how this impulse to build the middle‐class status group affects immigrant inclusion/exclusion in nuanced ways at both the group and individual levels, along class/status, ethnic and gender lines. We conclude by considering the policy implications of growing and shaping populations according to middle‐class ideals, particularly for the statistical monitoring of immigrant populations for integration benchmarking purposes.     

Migration Policies and Political Cultures in Europe: A Changing Trend

This paper discusses the relationships between the migratory policies of the EU countries with more experience of immigration and their national political cultures. It focuses on France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It then looks at Italy, a relatively new country of immigration, which, with 3,000,000 legal immigrants, has become the fourth country of immigration in Europe and the first in the Mediterranean basin. In its final part it highlights the incipient process of ‘communitarisation’ of the immigration policies of EU countries in the last decade. This process, which has already entailed a significant convergence of their migratory policies, is expected to continue after the recent enlargement of the European Union.     

ALIEN-NATION: IMMIGRATION,NATIONAL IDENTITY AND TRANSNATIONALISM

This article examines recent anti-immigration initiatives, like California's Proposition 187, in light of the contemporary processes of economic and political reorganization that seem to have undermined the viability of the nation state (i.e. the globalization of the market economy and the end of the cold war). It argues that anti-immigration discourse works on a symbolic level to recuperate a coherent sense of national identity in response to the social and psychic ‘alien-nation’ caused by the global penetration of capitalism. The study compares two similar yet distinctly different moments of mass immigration- Chinese immigration in the late nineteenth century and ‘illegal’ immigration in the late twentieth- to determine (1) why these mass migrations have elicited legal regulation when others have not, and (2) what might be done to disrupt the re-emergence of a paradigm of legislated exclusion in the current case. It concludes by examining the conditions of possibility for collective political action within a mass-mediated public sphere. Specifically, I ask how resistance to the historical paradigm of legislated exclusion might best be mobilized from within a public sphere dominated by visual media that not only personalize the political, but also exacerbate the inequalities of access to public life endemic to liberal democratic political theory.     

Despite the crisis: The resilience of intercultural nationalism in Catalonia

Interculturalism provides the core framework for immigration‐related policies in Catalonia, while remaining deeply intertwined with Catalan nationalism. We first identify ‘intercultural nationalism’ as the core doctrine through which Catalan nationalist discourse has been articulated in relation to immigration. We trace interculturalism's origins to nationalism in Quebec and argue that, in Catalonia also, regional immigration policies have been constructed in opposition to those of the central state, while attempting to involve immigrants closely in subnational belonging and social cohesion. Second, we investigate whether interculturalism is durable during economic and political crises, arguing that intercultural policies did not change following the economic recession of the 2010s. This harmonises with broader interpretations that de‐emphasise the role of economic factors in ethnic conflicts. In conclusion we note how the continuing resilience of interculturalism in Catalan policies on immigration contrasts sharply with the rise of xenophobia elsewhere.     

Gendered Perspectives on Integration Discourses and Measures

This article focuses on gendered discourses in integration policy and the problems immigrants pose in the reproduction of inequalities in a number of European countries. There has been little consideration of how gender categories operate in relation to broader political discourses around the construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the constitution of national social and political communities and identities. Yet gender issues have become significant in the backlash against multiculturalism and gender and sexual relations have moved to the centre of debates about the necessity to enforce integration, if not assimilation. The first section outlines recent developments in the immigration‐integration nexus in different European states. The second section draws out some of the reasons for the focus on family migration and spouses who are seen as the main importers of the ‘backward’ practices and with ‘doubtful’ parenting practices for future generations of citizens. The third section tackles the shift of current debates about integration of migrant women from the periphery, where they were largely invisible or mere appendages of men, to the centre, where they have acquired in the process a heightened, though not necessarily positive, visibility. Too often, representations of migrant women are based on a homogenised image of uneducated and backward migrants as victims of patriarchal cultures, legitimizing in this way the use of immigration controls to reduce the numbers entering and to tackle broader social issues, as has clearly been the case with forced marriages. Furthermore, the more discourses focus on Muslim women and Islam as inimical to European societies, the more the debate becomes culturalised and marginalises the socio‐economic dimension of integration and the structural inequalities migrants face. Thus pre‐entry tests may have less to do with integration than with a desire to reduce the flow of marriage migrants or to raise their human capital.     

Social exclusion,mobility and access1

Much of the literature on social exclusion ignores its ‘spatial’ or ‘mobility’ related aspects. This paper seeks to rectify this by examining the mobile processes and infrastructures of travel and transport that engender and reinforce social exclusion in contemporary societies. To the extent to which this issue is addressed, it is mainly organized around the notion of ‘access’ to activities, values and goods. This paper examines this discourse in some detail. It is argued that there are many dimensions of such access, that improving access is a complex matter because of the range of human activities that might need to be ‘accessed’, that in order to know what is to be accessed the changing nature of travel and communications requires examination, and that some dimensions of access are only revealed through changes in the infrastructure that ‘uncover’ previously hidden social exclusions. Claims about access and socio‐spatial exclusion routinely make assumptions about what it is to participate effectively in society. We turn this question around, also asking how mobilities of different forms constitute societal values and sets of relations, participation in which may become important for social inclusion. This paper draws upon an extensive range of library, desk and field research to deal with crucial issues relating to the nature of a fair, just and mobile society.     

A culture of whiteness: How integration failed in cities,suburbs, and small towns

As America's neighborhoods have become more racially diverse in the last half century, are these shared spaces fulfilling the “promise of integration”? In this study, I review the literature on desegregation as it occurs in urban, suburban, and rural places, illuminating how a culture of whiteness works in each of these types of places to reproduce racial domination. The literature on multiethnic urban areas demonstrates how a culture of whiteness reframes gentrification as ‘revitalization’ and nostalgia, which result in social control and cultural displacement of non-white residents. In suburban places, I draw out the ways a culture of whiteness is expressed as ‘niceness’ and ‘governmentality’, resulting in symbolic exclusion and forced assimilation of people of color. Finally, in rural places, a culture of whiteness uses narratives of ‘pollution’ and ‘parasitism’ to understand often low-income migrants of color, which renders them invisible and reproduces their structural disadvantage in the community. Revealing the subtle and obscure mechanisms through which a culture of whiteness reproduces racial domination in diverse places ultimately provides the key to their undoing and opens the door to the promise of integration.     

A critique of integration

The term ‘integration’ is a category used both in political discourse and in sociological analysis. In political discourse, in the public debate, it has become a magic word which accompanies repression when a political power is unable to deal with major difficulties, particularly in poor neighbourhoods. The so-called ‘models of integration’ are all failing, whether in the United Kingdom after the terrorist attacks of 2005, in the Netherlands after the murder of Theo Van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn, or in France after the riots of 2005. In political and social life, integration is far from able to account for realities or to implement public policies successfully. From a sociological perspective, integration is connected with approaches which are centred on society or the social system, much more than with those that deal with the subjectivity of individuals and their capacity for personal or collective action. This means that integration belongs much more to traditional sociological thinking than to the new contemporary sociological imagination.     

What is Integration? A Comparative View from Immigrants and Municipal Policy

The ongoing project of citizenship construction in societies receiving international immigration demands a perspective that takes into account the interests, views and needs of all socio-demographic groups, including those of newcomers as potential new citizens. We interviewed representatives of 16 immigrant associations operating in the Spanish autonomous community of Galicia, reviewed immigration policy in 13 Spanish (Galician) municipalities, and interviewed 20 municipal government staff members who put these into practice. With this research, we aim to explore the perspectives of immigrants with respect to their own integration and to examine how these compare with local policies designed to facilitate these processes. By comparing the immigrant representatives' perceptions with local policy discourses and practice, our study reveals how local integration practice is not only inconsistent with its own policy discourse but also fails to consider and include immigrants' own understandings of what integration means and how it can be achieved.     

“Luring Overseas Trained Doctors to Australia: Issues of Training,Regulating and Trading”

Australia is at a crossroads. Its long history of relying on overseas trained medical practitioners and the last decade’s changes, in terms of the introduction of policies to recruit large numbers of temporary doctors, both require examination. Not only is Australia alone in its overt policy initiatives but it also fails to be aware of the consequences for some sending countries. Australia has not entered into the spirit of international attempts to ameliorate the potential effects of developing‐to‐developed country medical migration and trade. This paper will provide an overview of the current international situation regarding supply and demand, major ethical issues, Australia’s immigration policies and regulatory framework and the situation with respect to the labour market integration of overseas trained doctors (OTDs). It will be argued that Australia ‘lures’ with little concern for the consequences for source countries.     

Body,dress and cultural exclusion: Experiences of Pakistani women in ‘global’ Hong Kong

Underneath a veneer of racial harmony and acceptance, racial discrimination is widespread at many different levels of life in Hong Kong, the so-called ‘global city’. For decades, some minority communities have lived with subtle but institutionalized and cultural discrimination permeating their existence. In recent years, social exclusion has been one of the important themes in policy debates in Hong Kong. It is increasingly recognized that there is a close relation between ‘ethnicity’ and ‘social exclusion’. According to our research on the life situation of the South Asian minority in Hong Kong, experiences of exclusion are common. This paper focuses on investigating dress as a form of cultural exclusion among Pakistani women in Hong Kong and how mainstream society constrains the bodies of its members through dress.