Public policies have always been concerned with the integration of specific migrant and non-migrant others, as well as with that of society as a whole. What is meant by integration has clearly changed over time and, with it, the precise nature of the policies designed to enact it, at both the individual and the societal level. Despite this shifting conceptual foundation, something called ‘integration’ has been an official policy goal for the last 50 years or more, at least in liberal democracies. As far as the integration of newcomers is concerned, this liberal consensus has begun to change in the last few years. Integration is used much more instrumentally, today, as a fixed and measurable set of requirements for the attainment of certain rights, including citizenship. While some migrants have always been excluded from integration policies, we can now also see a significant rise in the creation of barriers to their equal participation in social systems. In some cases, this even affects citizens who are either identified with specifically targeted migrant others – including black and minority-ethnic groups and national minorities – or who returned to their own country of origin after having lived abroad. The widespread anti-immigrant populism that provoked these developments started before 2014 but has become more pronounced since 2015 and 2016. The tensions that these changes create are exacerbated by the progressive withdrawal of government from practical support for integration over the last decade or so, and the corresponding increase in the role of market forces and the voluntary sector.

We understand integration as a set of normative assumptions, practices, policies and discourses that are always embedded in specific contexts and directed at particular groups or categories of people. Integration is not a universal policy goal in the European Union or its member-states, particularly for migrants with uncertain or temporary status – including those in the asylum system. The context and perceived desirability of migrants’ and minorities’ integration ultimately depends on how they are categorised by the state in which they live. At one extreme, some migrants are obliged to fulfil certain criteria associated with integration in order to renew their visa, be reunited with their family or ultimately naturalise. For others, integration is temporarily suspended – for example until their asylum status has been determined – or simply not considered necessary, given their intended temporary residence or employment in the country. At the other extreme, integration efforts are explicitly criminalised, as in the case of those migrants whose presence in the country is deemed ‘illegal’. Policies have begun to emerge which do not simply exclude groups from the potentially beneficial impact of integration policies, but which have the specific objective of undermining their integration or certain aspects of it.

This undermining of some integration processes is the basis for the conceptualisation of disintegration that is also central to this collection. In English, the word disintegration commonly denotes ‘the process of losing cohesion or strength’ or that of ‘coming to pieces’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2016). Within the social sciences it is thus employed to describe the character or composition of societies (as collectives) but not the actions of, or policies towards individual members (or those formally demarcated as non-members) of these societies. In German debates, the word Desintegration has been used more frequently, both in relation to a supposed coming apart of society and to the exclusion of certain individuals from society. Our use of this term builds on and adds to the work of German migration scholar Vicki Täubig. Studying the way in which the German state has put barriers into place to hinder asylum-seekers from participating in the various social systems, Täubig (2009) speaks of organised disintegration. Disintegration policies and practices do not only overlook settlement but also actively set out to do harm and discourage it, although they are sometimes justified within a broader integration framework. The notion that such harm should be a specific policy goal goes back no further than Theresa May’s October 2013 call to ‘create a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants’ in the UK (Travis 2013). This was an important symbolic statement of intent, reinforced by the UK’s two Immigration Acts of 2014 and 2016 that were brought into legislation while May was Home Secretary. Some policies thus explicitly pursue this goal, others lack such clear intentionality but still contribute to processes of disintegration or the undermining of integration. For example, policies denying asylum-seekers the right to work have long been criticised for undermining their long-term integration, although this has never been the policies’ specific intention.

Yet, even in disintegration-focused policies, integration remains a central goal. Indeed, not only can ‘one and the same social phenomenon have both integrative and disintegrative effects’, as argued by Grimm (2013, cit. in Treibel 2015, p. 46), but also as policy objectives disintegration and integration are inherently connected. For example, the disintegration of some is routinely legitimised with the need to reserve capacities to accommodate and integrate others. That said, integration and disintegration are not a simple binary categorisation but are intertwined in that the logic of one is always present in the other. This connection is sometimes explicit, often implicit but ever present in migrant lives. We use the notation (dis)integration to describe this intertwining.

With this notion, we hope to contribute to the debate around the usefulness of integration as an analytical concept. In the eyes of some critical observers, the explicit use of integration as a policy category makes it entirely irredeemable as a tool of analysis (Hess et al. 2015; Favell 2019). Indeed, integration is a politically and emotionally loaded concept, which in its daily usage mostly serves to mark otherness. Those targeted by integration measures are furthermore relegated to a position of passivity, obscuring the historical struggles of migrants for equal rights (Bojadzijev 2008). Although we share this criticism, we do not believe that simply abandoning integration as an analytical concept (and thus leaving its use and definition entirely to policy-makers) is the right answer. First, this would mean to forego a broader debate and institutionalisation of integration (cf. Treibel 2015). From a broader socio-theoretical perspective, integration connotes a problem and process, which society as a whole and all of its members individually must face. From such a perspective, no individual can ever be entirely integrated (Bommes 2013). Second, we argue that a critical and conscientious analysis that always examines integration in explicit relation to its ever-present opposite – disintegration – and vice versa, constitutes a fruitful scholarly undertaking. We also do not agree that all struggles of migrants have been absorbed through the integration paradigm (Bojadzijev 2008), because as stated above, not everyone is supposed to integrate. Rather, we hope that the notion of (dis)integration will help to bring migrant agency back into this debate.

In addition to being inherently connected, integration and disintegration are also highly stratified processes. Although the procedural nature of integration is now increasingly recognised, it is still typically measured in terms of outcomes (eg. Garcés-Mascareñas and Penninx 2016). The contributions to this volume attempt to reverse this approach, emphasising the procedural elements and the dynamic nature of the processes of (dis)integration. A concern with integration and disintegration processes rather than outcomes also highlights the fragility of the distinctions on which the corresponding policies are based. For example, the disintegration of illegalised migrants helps to foster a climate of intolerance and racism which undermines the inclusion of citizens with migration backgrounds. Official state hostility that is focused on certain groups (illegalised migrants) can thereby weaken public support for the integration of those recognised by the same state as rightfully present. A focus on procedures rather than outcomes also helps, highlighting the implicit assumptions behind particular outcomes – for example, that migrants will be employed in certain low-skilled sectors of the labour market simply because that is where migrant workers are already significantly concentrated.

Viewing (dis)integration as a process also draws attention to the variety of actors involved, which leads to our concern with the politics of this process. The politics of (dis)integration provides a conceptual tool with which to analyse the role of numerous actors – including migrants and ethnically defined others, policy-makers, the media, public and private institutions and civil-society associations. A focus on politics means that we seek to reveal processes of negotiation around (dis)integration, taking into account different actors with their various interests, strategies and power positions. It also means that we take a reflexive stance towards our own participation as researchers in these negotiations (Hess 2012), as we seek to define, measure and represent (dis)integration. This perspective highlights how different individual and institutional actors not only take radically different stances on the same issue but also have varying capacities and opportunities to influence outcomes. These power asymmetries reinforce the stratification of (dis)integration processes.

1.1 Situating (Dis)Integration in the Existing Literature

Our concept of (dis)integration overlaps with but is distinct from three related frames of analysis which we build on and contribute to: civic stratification, inclusion/exclusion, and critical citizenship. We consider these in turn. ‘Civic stratification’, highlights the variety of statuses that may be occupied by the foreign-born (Morris 2002), ranging from full citizen to undocumented migrant. With regard to the UK, Lydia Morris has identified 25 distinct packages of rights and restrictions, each associated with a different legal status. She did not include undocumented migrants who, despite becoming the target of disintegration policies in many countries, still retain some fundamental rights. According to Morris (2003), civic stratification allows for the management of certain contradictions that unavoidably arise from government policies. As many of the contributions to this volume show, also the politics of (dis)integration is usually aimed at consolidating conflicts between different policy objectives or between official discourses and actual practice. The key difference is that, whereas civic stratification considers a static picture of differentiated rights as the outcome of official categorisation, (dis)integration analyses the processes through which those rights are acquired or lost. In addition to that, civic stratification is based around a continuum whereas (dis)integration concerns the intertwining of two apparently contradictory processes.

In this, (dis)integration has much in common with the established analysis of differential inclusion/exclusion (e.g. Portes and Zhou 1993; Castles 1995), particularly in its concern with the specifics of precarity. Analysis of precarity tends to focus on its socio-economic aspects (Standing 2014) but there is a clear overlap with precarity of legal status. This may extend to any individual whose legal status is not fully secure, an ever larger group given recent changes in legislation in many liberal democracies to remove nationality. (Dis)integration on the basis of legal and/or economic precarity also affects groups that Ngai (2004) characterised as ‘alien citizens’. These hold formal citizenship status but because at least one of their parents was born elsewhere are nonetheless perceived and treated as ‘permanently foreign and unassimilable to the nation’ (ibid., p. 8). More-recent research has specifically focused on the complex relationship between exclusion and inclusion (eg. Andrijasevic 2009; Ataç and Rosenberger 2013). Such work often challenges the assumption that inclusion is the opposite of exclusion, highlighting the differential ways in which they operate and particularly how one may even be directly produced by the other (Dua 2007). For example, the disproportionate inclusion of migrant workers in particular sections of the labour market – such as domestic or night work – may make their exclusion from various other domains of social and everyday life more likely.

Current research in this area highlights the barriers faced by many migrants to their achievement of any kind of equal access to the benefits that come with living in wealthier countries. This results in significant disadvantage and inequality, even for those whose integration is officially supported by state institutions. Policies which effectively bring the state’s border onto the state’s territory reinforce legal precariousness and further undermine integration efforts and processes. Since this territorialisation of national borders relies on various forms of ‘everyday bordering’ (Yuval-Davis et al. 2018), the unequal effects of such policies go far beyond the people and situations they explicitly target. Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2013) ‘Border as Method’ approach connects this proliferation of practices of border control within society to the dynamic of inclusion/exclusion. By focussing on the reproduction of forms of inclusion and exclusion that transcend national borders and their control, this analysis already points at the broader connections between integration and disintegration processes, which this collection sets out to expand on. Like inclusion/exclusion, (dis)integration considers the complex interrelations between apparently contradictory processes, in relation to certain individuals or groups, but also society as a whole.

Apart from top-down attempts to control or ‘manage’ migration and the effects it has on receiving societies, (dis)integration always also involves migrant-led efforts and processes. In this respect, our analysis of the politics of (dis)integration has much in common with critical citizenship studies, the third area of work which we draw from and aim to contribute to. The notion of ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008) captures the agency of migrants, especially those with precarious or no status. This allows a better engagement with processes of negotiation which are not necessarily state-led. In a similar vein, we speak of ‘acts of integration’ to recognise efforts that are made by migrants with uncertain status to achieve equality of access or inclusion. In some cases, these acts of integration are recognised or even required by state institutions. In others, recognition and solidarity comes from NGOs, migrant support groups and/or individual citizens.

As already noted above, this book makes use of a terminology which, in German, unlike in English academic and public debates, has been quite common. Besides the more recent use by migration scholars, there has been an ongoing debate among German sociologists about ‘social disintegration’. Wilhelm Heitmeyer, in fact, coined this notion in his studies of racist and xenophobic violence. He found that social disintegration, understood as an increasing lack of social cohesion, paired with increasing experiences of individual exclusion, furthered tendencies towards violent behaviour and conflict (Heitmeyer 1994). Similar to our endeavour, Heitmeyer makes a link between individual and collective (dis)integration processes, underlining that experiences of disintegration are not a problem experienced by a few individuals but a phenomenon of mainstream society and its institutions (Ibid.).

In this book, however, we look at the relationship between integration and disintegration at both the individual and the collective level from a slightly different angle, by highlighting instances where the disintegration of certain individuals is not just a side-effect of broader societal changes (globalisation, individualisation, etc.) but is produced by law, policy and/or everyday practice. Moreover, we do not suppose that a certain ‘disintegration’ of society can be avoided altogether but, rather, see such developments as a fundamental characteristic of functionally differentiated societies (Nassehi 1999).

1.2 The Three Central Contributions of this Volume

As a whole, this book thus explicitly sets out to analyse a wide range of aspects of the politics of (dis)integration, the longer-term trends which produced them and their likely future implications. It thereby makes three important contributions to the literature discussed above. First, it explores how integration is framed in terms of limited capacity, thus requiring accompanying measures of disintegration. Second, it highlights how individuals engage in ‘acts of integration’, which range from adapting to the constraints of disintegration measures to migrant activism and solidarity with identified others. Third, it shows that the (dis)integration of some is inherently connected to the (dis)integration of society as a whole.

1.2.1 The Limited Capacity Argument

Several contributions in this volume show that integration policies and discourses often build on the assumption that not everyone can be integrated because the resources, facilities or simply public acceptance that is necessary for the integration of newcomers is limited. In other words, the successful integration of some is linked to the disintegration of others. The limited capacity argument rests on the notion of society as a container or finite space and it is often but not necessarily linked with ethno-nationalist conceptions of belonging. It furthermore entails calls for a limitation of (certain kinds of) immigration and a selection of who may stay and integrate and who may not.

Against the background of supposedly limited integration capacities, decision-makers take an interest in selecting only those persons for the ‘integration track’, who are ‘likely to stay’ (Samuk and Hinger in this volume), ‘who really need it’ (Hinger and Schweitzer, in this volume) and/ or ‘who really deserve it’ because of their supposed economic utility (Desille, in this volume). Such selection criteria are, however, not only difficult to implement but also in themselves contradictory. What Sébastien Chauvin and Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas (2014) have observed with regard to deservingness frames mobilised in negotiations of migrant (il)legality, also holds true for negotiations of (dis)integration – they are characterised by several tensions: e.g. between claims based on vulnerability versus civic performance, universal versus particular claims, and economic versus cultural deservingness. While a differentiation based on deservingness frames does not correspond to legal statuses, it may affect both informal and formal practices of (dis)integration (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2014). For example, Sophie Hinger shows in her chapter in this volume that asylum applicants in Germany, even though they formally share the same legal status, are increasingly differentiated upon arrival and registration according to their supposed need for protection. This early selection then translates into differential access to various social systems. In a similar vein, undocumented migrants do not only participate in informal, clandestine ways in the social systems of their host societies, but their participation often actually becomes part of an official pathway towards more recognition (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012).

Precisely because states create possibilities for immigrants with insecure residence status to prove their deservingness, they also try to prevent immigrants from becoming ‘too integrated’ or too deserving (ibid, 2014, p. 422) and thus implement a range of disintegration measures. These may be general measures, such as the enforcement of internal border controls. The chapter by Reinhard Schweitzer for example demonstrates how measures are taken to render the access to welfare institutions more difficult for undocumented migrants. Again, such measures are routinely justified with a limited capacity argument, that is, the supposed need to protect the welfare state against (undeserving) immigrants. Disintegration measures may also target a specific group such as proclaimed ‘bogus refugees’. In the German case cited above, those asylum claimants deemed ‘undeserving’, are excluded from accessing the labour market and from participating in language and integration courses; in some cases, they are even spatially set apart until the end of their asylum procedure (Hinger, in this volume). Another example presented in this volume by Sahizer Samuk is the undermining of some immigrants’ equal participation in social systems by framing their stay as ‘temporary’. Temporary labour migrants are supposed to contribute to their host countries’ economies but their efforts are not necessarily rewarded with more rights and possibilities to stay in the long term, as Samuk shows. We consider the creation of such barriers to integration as intentional disintegration.

In addition to prompting the adoption of (intentional) disintegration measures for some, and thus turning integration into a privilege, the limited capacity argument also helps to transform integration into a duty for others. This means that integration is increasingly framed as an individual responsibility – with a strong focus on successful labour-market integration and independence from social benefits. This can be considered part of a broader neoliberal conception of individuals being responsible for their own sustenance, paired with diminishing state intervention and public budgets. It also reflects the influence of the idea of ‘workfare’ – namely, that social benefits are made dependant on continuous training and contributions to society in the form of voluntary or low-paid work – which has penetrated public welfare systems in many countries. While these developments affect many of those who are unemployed or considered not sufficiently integrated into the labour market, they affect immigrants in particular and, more specifically, persons without a secure residence status. These people’s access to legal security and thus social and political rights is often made dependent on their economic performance. This becomes apparent, for example, in debates on whether persons with insecure residence status, who have a job or are engaged in a training, should be protected from deportation. Even the protection of recognised refugees is increasingly linked with their economic performance (Hinger, in this volume). Those who quickly learn the language and succeed in sustaining themselves are rewarded with faster access to legal security and more rights, for example to decide where they want to live within the country. In addition, those who choose professions where their labour is the most needed (i.e. they engage in an apprenticeship instead of enrolling at university) are rewarded with more security, as they are protected from deportation throughout their job training.

While the life chances of persons with an insecure residence status are especially affected by the neoliberal take on integration, also some citizens increasingly have to prove their deservingness, this concerns especially those who are living on social welfare and share certain characteristics with migrant others. Tina Magazzini, in her chapter, shows how, in Italy, for example, policy-makers frame the socio-economic deprivation of a significant part of the country’s Roma population as a cultural or behavioural problem, thereby obscuring discriminatory patterns and the lack of institutional support granted to Roma. An understanding of integration as an individual duty and not as one that requires an effort on behalf of state institutions, may effectively lead to disintegration. Moreover, it implies that the blame for distributive inequalities or unequal participation is put on the individual, who is perceived and presented as ‘unwilling’ or ‘unable to integrate’. This also comes to the fore Mateusz Karolak’s study of return-migrants in this volume. Karolak shows how Polish citizens struggle to re-integrate into the labour market of their home country at a level that fits their qualifications, after having lived and worked in the UK.

At first sight, and in the context of a broader trend of diminishing public welfare spending, the conception of integration as a duty seems inclusive in the sense that it is applied to both citizens and non-citizens, to the established as well as to newcomers. However, the idea of integration as a duty has not replaced discrimination on the basis of legal status and/or ethnicity. The case of Jewish immigrants in Israel, presented in this book by Amandine Desille, is another case in point. Whereas all Jews may immigrate to Israel and are entitled to citizenship, their prescribed integration paths and access to rights depend on their perceived economic deservingness which, in turn, is linked to their ethnicity and/or country of origin. Seen as part of the politics of (dis)integration, the limited capacity argument provides one important link between the integration of some and the disintegration of others. On the one hand, it implies that those who can have to manage on their own; on the other hand, it means that some are not even given a chance to participate equally because, it is argued, the integration capacities have to be spared for those who really need (or really deserve) it.

1.2.2 Acts of Integration and Solidarity

The second major contribution of this collection is to highlight the central involvement of individuals who are themselves the focus of any form of integration in its enactment. Despite the significant role of individuals that is inherent in the obligations put on individuals, considered above, there is still a tendency to frame this obligation in terms that deny any agency. Since these are demands made of migrants, in a way that cannot be demanded of citizens, migrants are placed in the role of guardians of good citizenship. This suggests that integration is something that is ‘done to’ individuals. Yet the history of public policies to shape integration highlights how difficult it is to consciously shape a process as dynamic and complex as the progressive and relatively equal involvement of newcomers in a collective. Integration is a process in which those newcomers are actively involved, either as willing participants or to actively contest its normative assumptions. This active and often critical involvement is entirely constitutive of what integration actually is. The most that policy approaches can do is to shape or incentivise certain elements of that engagement. We explore how the engagement and activism of individuals shapes the integration process.

These forms of engagement and activism should be understood as acts of integration along the lines of the literature on ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008). We draw on Isin and Nielsen’s pioneering reorientation of the study of citizenship to encompass forms of civic behaviour, democratic participation and protest by non-citizens. The authors demonstrate that civic behaviour is common to those who are denied the privilege of citizenship. The increasingly common policy framing of integration as a privilege creates a similar group who are denied the benefits of integration yet who, nonetheless, actively engage in acts of integration and therefore help to constitute the integration process.

In some cases, acts of integration are restricted, in others they are explicitly criminalised. Sahizer Samuk considers in her chapter a situation where these restrictions are explicit. In the case of temporary workers, all avenues for integration are officially closed off, yet through research in Canada and the UK, Samuk suggests that temporary workers nonetheless take steps to develop elements of longer-term integration. These acts of integration include familiarity with conditions of work, language development and awareness of social and cultural norms, yet rights are limited as access to more genuine integration is an increasingly restricted privilege. In a related investigation, Nina Saharoui investigates the experiences of workers in the care sector in London, Paris and Madrid. Her study includes migrants with limited rights to integration as well as racialised minorities with full access to citizenship. As racism changes form, becoming less overt, both groups face barriers in achieving redress and their equality of treatment continues to be blocked by barriers that, as Saharoui demonstrates, form an evolving type of institutional racism.

It is increasingly common for participation in certain elements of the integration process to be explicitly criminalised, as in the case for illegalised migrants. Reinhard Schweitzer’s chapter considers the ways in which this exclusion is enacted in key institutions which have traditionally been central to supporting integration, health, education and social services. Yet, he shows that acts of integration are widespread and, in some cases, are supported by representatives of the institutions concerned. Despite official restrictions, even illegalised migrants retain certain rights which are central to the wider functioning of society. The institutionalised restrictions of these rights may therefore set up internalised contradictions within these institutions which have to be managed through particular, dedicated sectors. In some cases, institutional actors have a degree of flexibility around obligations to investigate report and act on discoveries of illegalised status.

Acts of integration, performed by those who are typically the subject of integration processes, thus have a corollary in acts of solidarity. Solidarity with those affected by integration measures arises immediately amongst those with similar experiences though it may also encompass those who are not the individual subject of integration processes but have a wider concern for social equality. Schweitzer’s chapter demonstrates how acts of solidarity may arise from individuals within the institutions who have been tasked with implementing much greater hostility. These institutions are fundamental to the liberal welfare state and were established to systematise solidarity, so it is not altogether surprising that they continue to attract individuals with a concern for equality. This highlights an additional barrier that policies of disintegration must inevitably overcome.

Solidarity can also emerge within sub-state and non-state organisations. Sophie Hinger’s chapter considers the tensions between national- and local-level integration policies in Germany. At the national level, there is a clear distinction between ‘genuine refugees’ and others whereas local-level responses to integration have much greater interest in blurring these categorisations in the broader contexts of contribution to urban solidarity. Amongst the explicitly anti-migration politics of contemporary Hungary, Céline Cantat highlights the attempts of state institutions to clearly identify a desirable Hungarian public. This is achieved at least in part through the enactment of highly publicised border policies, the ‘border spectacular’. Within this extremely hostile context, solidarity emerges within civil society collectives. Even though their room for manœuvre is severely constrained, Cantat shows that acts of solidarity also contribute to the normative challenge to official policies of disintegration. This is especially the case in countries like Hungary, where acts of integration are repressed or criminalised and the flexibility that both Hinger and Schweitzer identify within state institutions at the local and national levels is absent.

1.2.3 The (Dis)Integration of Certain Groups or Individuals Is Linked to that of Society as a Whole

As mentioned above, we understand integration and disintegration as two inherently connected processes, even though the policies and practices that help to produce them apparently pursue opposite goals. In addition to that, we also contend that both concepts – and the corresponding efforts, practices, discourses or policies – can (and should) be analysed in relation to individuals as well as collectives. Like integration and disintegration, also the latter (individual – collective) do not constitute a simple dichotomy but are usually intertwined, with a range of institutions and various organisational forms constituting crucial links between the two levels.

The combination of both pairs of concepts results in the two-dimensional framework shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
A table with column headers of collective integration and disintegration. The row headers are individual and collective.

Two-dimensional framework of concepts

Full size image

As already indicated, in its everyday use the term ‘integration’ is usually employed to describe the integration of a particular individual (or group of individuals) into society, but as an analytical concept it can also mean the integration of that same society as a whole (cf. Treibel 2015). In (social) policy language, the latter is usually referred to as social or community ‘cohesion’ or the ‘inclusiveness’ of a society or its institutions. Particularly when related to immigration, this kind of integration is often taken for granted and/or portrayed as being threatened by the arrival of newcomers, especially those accused of being ‘reluctant to integrate themselves’. Much of the existing scholarship on migrant integration has been criticised for the implicit assumption that the society into which individual newcomers are (supposed to be) integrating is itself not only homogenous but also inherently integrated (Imbusch and Heitmeyer 2012). From a systems theoretical perspective, too, which sees modern societies as necessarily consisting of various functionally differentiated sub-systems, the idea of an ‘integrated society’ appears problematic (Nassehi 1999).

That said, however, a certain relationship between the integration of individuals and that of society is usually recognised and many grassroots initiatives, as well as research projects focusing on the local level are explicitly trying to build on this conceptual but also practical overlap. Arguably, both an individual’s integration into society, and that of society as a whole, thereby hinge on the same connections and interactions between people (and institutions), which also means that the two cannot be regulated as if they were entirely separate processes (Schweitzer 2017). By building and maintaining social relations with others, individuals thus always also contribute to a (more) integrated collective.

A related argument (e.g. by Brubaker 1992) is that the perception and practices of integration depend on the dominant perception of nationhood. As the contributions to this volume of Magazzini and Desille suggest, this also works the other way around – integration policies that officially target only specific groups or individuals often serve as an arena in which the broader issue of belonging (or not) to the nation is renegotiated. From this perspective, also discourses and everyday practices that rather contribute to, or even aim at, the disintegration of certain foreigners or minorities must be seen as means of nation-building.

With this book, we thus want to highlight that an inherent connection between the individual and the collective level not only exits in relation to integration, but also with regard to what we describe as disintegration policies and practices. These can have a great variety of forms and intended as well as unintended consequences, as several of the contributions to this volume demonstrate. The above-mentioned ‘hostile environment’ approach of the British government towards irregular migrants (Schweitzer, in this volume) is just one example but similar policies or mechanisms also target other categories of people, including temporary migrants (Samuk, in this volume), those who returned to their country of citizenship (Karolak, in this volume) or ethnic/national minorities (Magazzini, in this volume). Notably, such policies are never directed against integration in its collective sense (i.e. against ‘social cohesion’) but do aim – in more or less explicit ways – to circumvent or undermine the integration of certain individuals or groups who are identified as undeserving or unwanted.

We argue that, in analysing such policies and the related processes of (dis)integration, much more attention has to be paid to the issue of how they also (potentially) affect the rest of society. For example, Schweitzer’s contribution to this volume shows that the increasing exclusion of irregular residents from public welfare affects not only the excluded but also the institutions and individuals providing such services and, ultimately, society as a whole, since it requires critical changes in the logic of public service provision more broadly. The fact that immigration control – including the corresponding restrictions in terms of access and rights – is becoming more and more internalised and thus reliant on various local actors such as employers, welfare bureaucrats and private landlords, ultimately undermines the necessary trust that migrant and other disadvantaged communities have in the state and its institutions.

The explicitly negative portrayal of immigrants and/or refugees in public and political discourse thereby also challenges existing networks of solidarity, as Cantat as well as Sarah Nimführ, Laura Otto and Gabriel Samateh discuss in their chapters on the current situation in Hungary and Malta, respectively. Institutionalised racism and everyday discrimination, including in the workplace – which is the focus of Nina Sahraoui’s chapter in this book – are also phenomena that can be related to policies and discourses that target certain migrant others. The (negative) effects of such policies and/or related practices are thereby often particularly visible at the local level, as both Hinger and Desille show in their contributions to this volume.

Our aim in this regard is to not only highlight the various links and contradictions between integration and disintegration but also the far-reaching consequences that these can have at both the individual and the collective level. The widespread effects of the politics of (dis)integration also explain the significant diversity of the contributions to this volume (in terms of methodology as well as geographical and analytical focus), which the remainder of this introduction will briefly consider, before introducing each chapter in detail.

1.3 (Dis)Integration across Scales and Contexts: The Chapters in this Volume

In this book we were interested in the relationship between integration and disintegration at three different scales, in a variety of different empirical contexts. The tools of qualitative research rather than survey methodologies are most appropriate for this purpose, but even within the range of qualitative approaches there is considerable methodological diversity, from ethnography to structured interviews with key informants. This mix of approaches is one of the strengths of this edited volume and justified by the variety of scales in play. First, the micro scale, considers impacts on and the role of individuals in (dis)integration. Second, the meso scale provides an account at the level of organisations, such as municipal councils or NGOs. Finally, the macro scale explores the ways in which (dis)integration is an essential nation-building process, carefully policing the borders of membership. By combining these levels of analysis, we are interested in highlighting instances where the (dis)integration of certain individuals is produced by law, policy and/or everyday practice.

In addition, we wish to highlight the various ways in which (dis)integration processes are intertwined across different social systems. Some contributions in this volume primarily focus on one such system – like the labour market or welfare institutions – and show how policies designed to prevent certain groups from participating in these systems may negatively affect the functioning of relevant institutions and have implications for their involvement in other spheres of life. Other contributions examine categorisation processes in policymaking and their effects across various social systems.

Rather than limiting the book’s geographical focus strictly to Europe, we decided to also include chapters that look at Israel and Canada. The former presents a unique case that allows highlighting the crucial role that the politics of (dis)integration can play in relation to ongoing processes of nation-building. The Canadian case delivers a transatlantic comparative insight as it is juxtaposed with an analysis of policies in the UK.

Turning to the chapters themselves, first, Sophie Hinger’s chapter ‘Integration through disintegration?’ enquires into the meanings of local and national integration policies in Germany which target asylum-seekers. The core argument is that there is a difference between the logics underlying the policies at both the national and the local level. The national integration law is mainly marked by an ethno-national framing of integration, which contributes, through the introduction of the notion of ‘(not) being likely to stay’, to a further fractioning of the refugee label and thus the deterioration of rights of asylum claimants. While it posits integration as a privilege and duty for ‘genuine’ refugees, it aims to undermine the integration of those not deemed to be genuine refugees, following the logic that the disintegration of the latter is necessary in order to successfully integrate the former. At the local level, on the other hand, asylum-seekers are increasingly viewed as a potential resource for and part of a heterogeneous urban society, where participation rather than legal status matters. Yet, also at the local level, integration is ultimately tied to disintegration, as local authorities try to select who becomes part of the urban population in the first place.

Tina Magazzini’s chapter on Roma integration picks up on the framework set out in this introduction to consider ‘integration’ as ‘a set of normative assumptions, practices, policies and discourses that are always embedded in specific context’. Her chapter examines the context of integration policies and practices addressed at a specific minority, the Roma, in two Southern European countries – Italy and Spain – which share many characteristics and yet have adopted very different understandings of ‘Roma integration’. Roma integration strategies are examined as a way of contributing to an understanding of how policies that are officially aimed at ‘integrating’ others can, in practice, be used to compartmentalise and exclude a group from the national imagined community. This chapter relates to the idea of integration as a stratified process (how the very concept of ‘Roma integration’ is the result of layers of meaning attributed by different European directives and national governments) and draws attention to the actors involved (the policy-makers in charge of integration policies). The main point is to show how the regimes of (dis)integration apply not only to migrants but also to ethnic minorities who are narrated and treated as similarly ‘foreign’ to the mainstream’s imagined community. In this sense, Roma-specific integration measures do not challenge wider structures of inequality but, rather, contribute to the normalisation of a hegemonic discourse that sees a certain section of society as the bar for normality.

Sahizer Samuk asks ‘Can integration be temporary?’. Temporary migration policies are made for those who are not supposed to integrate. This may include seasonal agricultural workers, construction workers, domestic workers and many more. Those who do not have the ‘high skills’ depicted and decided by the immigration categorisations are forced to be temporary. They are needed but they are not wanted. They stay but no integration budget is spent on them. They are here to work, not to integrate. However, they are disintegrated via temporariness and a lack of access to the most basic social and economic rights. In some countries they do not have the right to strike or to become a member of a union, nor can they benefit from the pension or unemployment system. So, what if they stay? The chapter examines the cases of Canada and the UK comparatively, seeing that, despite their diverse immigration histories, they do follow similar logics in devising policies for temporariness. The life of continuous disintegration led by temporary migrant workers is not only of six months’ duration but, in some cases, a whole life, unless they apply for permanent residence schemes if these possibilities of transition to permanent stay are within their avail. The chapter calls for the attention of the policy-makers. Apart from whether they stay or not, the migrant workers need the empowerment of their own agency, supported by changes to the institutional frameworks that surround them and that determine their living conditions.

In her chapter, Nina Sahraoui examines migrant and minority-ethnic workers’ experiences in older-age care. From the specific perspective of racialised workers’ experiences in this highly segmented section of the labour market, she sheds light on some of the mechanics of disintegration in three European capitals. Sahraoui’s chapter illustrates how labour-market segmentation, while representing a form of inclusion, translates into everyday experiences of (dis)integration for migrant and minority-ethnic workers. Her empirical section, by focusing on cases of racist behaviour by colleagues and harassment/discrimination by managers, sets out to relate the level of individual interactions to the workings of institutions in order to inform our understanding of how policies produce (dis)integration. It offers insights into the workings of (dis)integration at the workplace level and the coping strategies that arise at the level of interpersonal relationships. Overall, this chapter demonstrates that anti-discrimination legislation often remains out of reach for racialised precarious workers and argues that anti-racism is too often reduced to the legal framework of anti-discrimination policies, falling short of analysing the structural dynamics that foster racism at multiple levels.

The chapter by Mateusz Karolak acknowledges the heterogeneity of contemporary migration patterns and expands the field of analysis on the oft-neglected experiences of labour migrants voluntarily returning to their countries of origin. Through the analysis of the life histories of Polish post-accession migrants returning from the United Kingdom, Karolak looks at the subjective and objective dimensions of the returnees’ labour market (dis)integration. He argues that, in spite of the fact that the returnees do not lack the foundations for integration, they often fall into the ‘experience trap’ and transfer their vulnerable labour-market position from abroad. Moreover, due to the internalised feeling of ‘permanent temporariness’, returnees resign from collective attempts to change their situation and instead employ individualised strategies of re-emigration. In this way, despite the pricing discourse on the universal advantages of intra-EU mobility, it turns out that, for some Central and Eastern-European migrants, the current regime of EU mobility, alongside passive state policies and self-fashioned neoliberal subjectivities contributes to the further fragmentation of migrants’ careers and precarisation of their work.

In the following chapter, Reinhard Schweitzer turns to the UK’s experience of implementing the ‘hostile environment’. Immigration control is gradually shifting from external borders to the interior of the state and society. As part of this broader trend, irregular migrants face policies that explicitly aim at preventing their settlement, integration and access to services. The UK government explicitly presents these as an effort to create ‘a hostile environment’ for this part of the population. In order to be effective, many of these policies have to be implemented within some of the core institutions of the liberal welfare state, which at the same time fulfil a crucial role for the integration of society as a whole. Based on original interview data from London, this chapter looks at various sites where the exclusionary logic of immigration law intersects with the different inclusionary logics underlying public service provision. Crucial insights from organisation theory help to show how (and why) different public institutions (hospitals, universities and social-service centres) have responded to this by establishing specialised subdivisions that deal specifically with migrant irregularity. Schweitzer argues that, while this allows them to shield their core staff from contradictory logics and demands, it further increases the dangerous overlap between these institutions and the immigration regime.

In her chapter, ‘Disintegration within integration’, Amandine Desille examines more recent transformations of Israel’s Law of Return – the Israeli immigration policy which provides the (imagined) repatriation of Diaspora Jews to Israel – in a context of liberalisation of the Israeli economy and the devolution of power to local authorities. Today, new immigrants follow two paths of ‘integration’: ‘direct absorption’, where immigrants are granted benefits while being free to settle wherever they find fit; and ‘community absorption’, where immigrants are placed in ‘absorption centres’ and see their entitlements conditioned by residence, religious observance and more. Those two paths are ‘ethnicised’ in the sense that they depend on country of origin – Western immigrants, considered as economically useful, benefit from direct absorption and a more pluralist attitude of local governments, while immigrants from Africa and Asia are the objects of an assimilationist policy. This situation of ‘(dis)integration’ within what is supposed to be an inclusive immigrant policy for all Jews, shows the extent to which new criteria of perceived economic performance limit the integration of specific segments of newcomers. The rescaling of immigration and immigrant policies to subnational governments, although it has introduced a more multicultural approach, antagonist to the assimilationist ideology at work in Israel, has not enabled an alternative policy framework which is more accommodating to all.

Céline Cantat examines the way in which a politics of spectacle is employed by Hungarian authorities in their government of migrants. She argues that this spectacle of the border participates in the delineation of a legitimate Hungarian public and in the representation of the Hungarian state as the protector of a ‘desirable’ national order. The chapter then looks at how this process of hyper-visibilisation is complemented by more discreet practices of negligence towards migrants and refugees. It argues that these less-visible acts of destitution directly contribute to the unweaving of the social, economic and political ties and spaces available to migrants and refugees in the country, thus contributing to a calculated process of social disintegration targeting migrants and refugees. Against this background, the chapter goes on to investigate instances of solidarity with and support for migrants and sets out to assess their potential in countering dynamics of disintegration.

Finally, the chapter by Sarah Nimführ, Laura Otto and Gabriel Samateh is concerned with the so-called ‘integration paradox’ in the Maltese manifestation of the European border regime. Despite a lack of public effort in support of integration – moreover, even the active pursuit of making integration more difficult – refugees are nevertheless required to integrate themselves into society, resulting in an ambivalent situation. The authors focus on refugees’ coping strategies by looking at practices of (dis)integration acted out by governing and non-governing actors. Based on ethnographic data, they argue that (dis)integration is a continuum, created by both legal frameworks and individuals’ action, producing different forms of differentiated in- and exclusion. By employing a textualisation strategy based on collaborative research with Gabriel, who is a classified refugee in Malta, their contribution offers an analysis and representation beyond the merely scholarly, White perspective. In so doing, the authors provide an example of how research is possible that enables understanding of the lived reality of refugees and, at the same time – through Gabriel’s contribution – intervenes into hitherto normalised power relations in the scientific knowledge production on forced migration.

In the conclusion, Violetta Zentai reviews key messages from the volume as a whole, regarding the conceptual, political and policy formations on the management of migration and the relations that these interventions shape and re-shape in wider societal affairs amidst weakening mechanisms for protecting human dignity, rights and equal citizenship in Europe and beyond.