Introduction

Migrant integration policy has been a significant part of the Swedish migration regime since the 1970s, but the ideas of what counts as integration, and what practices that contribute to integration in practice, are continuously shifting.Footnote 1 Scrutinizing the concept of integration has been described as entering an academic minefield of conflicting meanings, conceptual confusion, and tensions (Ager and Strang, 2008; Magazzini, 2020; Penninx, 2019). As a part of political processes, integration policy is given a normative framing and formulated as a problem, which is why “the first question to be analyzed is how different political and social actors perceive and frame immigrant integration” (Penninx, 2019:3). Alongside a growing scholarly interest in integration as a contested policy and research field, more knowledge is needed on how local stakeholders, that is those who implement policies or provide support services to migrants, make sense of the concept while directly engaging with migrants on the ground.

The role that local stakeholders play in integration processes is widely recognized in a rich body of literature (see Caponio and Borkert, 2010). As a key point of contact for many newly arrived migrants, local stakeholders provide a range of integration activities and services such as language classes, job training, and legal assistance. In previous research on integration in Sweden, there is an emphasis on national policies and top-down perspectives. This is logical if we consider the introduction of the Establishment Reform in 2010 (SFS 2010:197), when the main responsibility for integrating migrants was centralized to the Swedish Employment Agency (Arbetsförmedlingen). However, local actors are important as well, particularly the Swedish municipality and regional and civil society representatives. We can anticipate differences in approaches to integration on national and local levels as well as between public and civil society actors—both in terms of political strategies as stated by Emilsson (2015), and in relation to socio-economic conditions that differ locally, such as demographics, labor market, and business configuration (SKL, 2017). The focus of this article is on how integration is interpreted by various actors (Campomori & Caponio, 2013). As noted by Bucken-Knapp and colleagues (2019), there is much more to deliberate on how integration in Sweden reflects different understandings of what integration is and who is supposed to be integrated (and into what), which in turn is contextual (Campomori & Caponio, 2013; Caponio and Borkert, 2010).

The article explores how stakeholders in Scania, the southernmost county of Sweden, understand integration. By local stakeholders we mean actors, ranging from street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980) or officials responsible for implementing integration policies to migrant advocacy groups, activists, and civil society organizations. Drawing on qualitative interviews, we use the concept of interpretative repertoires (Wetherell & Potter, 1988), to explore some of the tensions and complexities that arise when incentives for migrant integration motivated by policies meet different stakeholders’ understanding of what integration is. Rather than focusing on the local activities and initiatives or policy outputs themselves, we look at the perceptions and conceptualizations that those who work closely with migrant integration bring to their practices guided by the following research question: How are ideas concerning integration talked about, conveyed, and negotiated among local stakeholders?

In the article, we first look at the Swedish policy context. Here, a recent integration policy shift that mark a new direction is highlighted, providing important clues for how integration is made sense of on the ground. In this section, we briefly also provide a rationale for exploring integration in local settings. Second, we examine ideas and assumptions about integration in the literature which, together with the concept of interpretative repertoires, make up the article’s theoretical framework. Third, we describe and examine understandings of integration among local stakeholders within and across two interpretative repertoires embedded in the material: the separation repertoire and de-migranticization repertoire.

The Swedish Policy Context

Sweden has a four-decade long history of setting up migrant integration policies. Since the 1970s, these policies have undergone numerous shifts in response to changing societal dynamics and political priorities, but also shown a continuity that has distinguished Sweden from other countries in Europe. Sweden has been known for a long-held rights-based integration model, resting on ideas of universalism and egalitarianism with comparatively few demands on migrants for becoming full members of the demos (Borevi, 2014; Bucken-Knapp et al., 2019; Wiesbrock, 2011) and placed at the very top of recent MIPEXFootnote 2 rankings.

As noticed by Abdelhady and Norocel (2023), every new wave of migration brings with it debates about social cohesion as well as boundaries around citizenship and belonging. In the current debates on integration, more specifically since the so-called long summer of migration in 2015, ideas of a fundamental break with the Swedish exceptionality are brought forward. In research, it is suggested that policies pushing for conditional integration demonstrate a significant shift away from viewing migrants’ rights as the core principle to increasingly emphasizing migrants’ responsibilities to integrate (Fratzke, 2017; Jutvik & Robinson (2020); SOU 2018:2).Footnote 3 In current political discourses, integration is also talked about in terms of a (need to) transform integration politics in relation to increasing (hyper)politicization of migration (Hagenlund, 2020) including the idea of the Swedish integration models as “failing” similarly to other European countries (Wieviorka, 2014). In a Statement of Government PolicyFootnote 4 in October 2022, conservative prime minister Ulf Kristersson claimed that “Sweden’s largest economic and social problems are due to high levels of immigration, in combination with failed integration”. A few months earlier, the former Social Democratic prime minister of Sweden, Magdalena Andersson, had similarly stated in a press conference that Sweden had failed to integrate the vast numbers of migrants it has taken in over the past two decades, leading to parallel societies and gang violence. In 2022, the Swedish government announced that Swedish migration and integration policy would undergo a “paradigm shift.” The much-debated Tidö Agreement (2022), a political agreement between the conservative government and the far-right Sweden Democrats, includes numerous proposals to change the direction of Swedish migration and integration policy with the purposes of mitigating the perceived failures of integration. Critics argue that the proposed measures rather risk making integration more arduous and produce a “hostile policy environment” (Zetter, 2019) for migrants.

All in all, we can expect that the current policy environment has consequences for the ways in which integration is perceived on the ground by those directly engaged in integration work. In this article, we use the concept interpretative repertoires to understand how local stakeholders navigate and conceptualize integration aiming to contribute with snapshots of acceptance of, or resistance to, discourses among stakeholders from a bottom-up perspective.

The next section presents debates in the literature on integration and the concept of interpretive repertoire from which we build our analytical framework, followed by a section on relevant previous research on local understandings of integration.

Assumptions and Ideas About Integration

As noted previously, integration is a fuzzy and increasingly contested concept. Ager and Strang write that “There is no single, generally accepted definition, theory or model of immigrant and refugee integration” (2008, p. 167). Scholarly definitions of integration typically distinguish between cultural, social, political, and labor market as well as housing integration (Joppke, 2017), also referred to as the socio-economic and socio-cultural dimensions of integration (Freeman, 2004). Integration of migrants can then be seen as involving complex and multi-dimensional issues that covers various aspects, such as economic, psychological, social, linguistic, cultural, emotional, political, and civic domains. As a concept with so many dimensions, it is recognized as being plagued with conceptual confusion. Critics claim that it is not clear whether the aspects included in integration refer to a process (what happens) or the end goal (a final destination), or both (Spencer, 2022; Spencer & Charsley, 2021). Such a confusion between means and goal, the critique furthermore states, is comparable to a labyrinth with no end, to paraphrase Korteweg (2017), or an interminable list of expectations without a clear answer to when one becomes integrated, and who determines what integration consist of (Rytter, 2018).

In the literature, we furthermore find a critique of integration as reinforcing a (false) sense of difference and separation between migrants and non-migrants. It is argued that the concept of integration, in both research and policy, is based on flawed assumptions of “us” and “them” which in practice perpetuate discrimination and exclude immigrants. This critique suggests that the term integration carries underlying assumptions of immigrants as outsiders who need to be brought into society. Integration is then not so much about migrants, but about beliefs and images of what we want a particular (national) society to be, which produces an otherness around immigrants, and hence, their problems are not seen as problems of society, but outside of society (Schinkel, 2018; see also Abdulla, 2017). This creation of society/migrant dualism might, according to the critique, be loaded with preconceptions about nationalism (Joppke, 2004; Mouritsen et al., 2019) or reinforced colonial and (usually) racialized views on immigration (Favell, 2019, 2021; Rytter, 2018). Rytter’s (2019) study on integration in the Danish context for example highlights how the concept of integration carries notions of Danish culture which project Muslim migrants as particularly problematic and deprives them of belonging.

In policy debates, one widely recognized idea of integration is that it replaces assimilation and multiculturalism as a model to govern diverse societies and better foster a two-way process to diversity, social cohesion, and equality (Dodevska, 2023; Klarenbeek, 2021). However, scholars criticize this understanding, pointing to a legacy of assimilation still plaguing the concept. It is asserted that there are still one-way expectations on migrants to conform to the receiving society disguised in integration models (Klarenbeek, 2021). As forwarded by Brekke and Borchgrevink (2007) clearly, integration reflects battles of definitions and categorizations both when it comes to ideas of what integration is and in explaining how integration happens. What is at stake conceptually are questions about “Who are to be integrated, and into what? Who are integrated already and who decides (who are to be integrated)? Why should someone be integrated and how it is to happen” (Jørgensen, 2006:269 cited in Brekke and Borchgrevink 2007).

Other recent critical literature focuses on the tendency to overlook structural barriers that come with integration. Integration policy brings with it an overly focus on individual responsibility of migrants, to the extent that unequal conditions or obstacles that migrants and non-migrants also might share are neglected. This understanding might highlight how integration policies fail to address structural obstacles that limit the ability of migrants to fully participate in society, such as discrimination in the labor market, racism, discrimination, uncertainties of temporary residencies, and inadequate housing. Structural barriers such as these are not properly addressed within the range included in integration, as the term places the burden of adaptation and change merely on migrants, rather leading to marginalization and exclusion, than inclusion (Klarenbeek, 2021). This relates to the concept of de-migranticization, which was put forward by Dahinden who critiques the tendency in research to take migration-related difference as “naturally given” (2016:2208). Migration research, Dahinden argues, needs to leave the “migration container,” and at the same time, social science in general needs to be “migranticized” since migration and integration are fundamental parts of societies (2016:2220).

Following the method section below, we will explore how some of these questions raised above were answered (implicitly and explicitly) by the interviewees in our material, using interpretative repertoires as an analytical framework. Potter and Wetherell (1987) originally coined the concept interpretative repertoires to explore the use of language to construct and express meaning in social interactions. They define interpretative repertoires as “basically a lexicon or register of terms and metaphors drawn upon to characterize and evaluate actions and events” (1987:138). This means that interpretative repertoires are units through which people develop explanations, descriptions, and versions of different phenomena. Interpretative repertoires are not fixed but shaped by social and cultural contexts and entail different, sometimes competing or contradicting, meanings that represent discourses. Potter and Wetherell’s work on interpretative repertoires is part of a broader undertaking in discursive analysis which distinguishes itself from Foucauldian perspectives by emphasizing human agency in relation to institutional power.

We suggest that the concept of interpretative repertoires, understood as formulation of discourses, is suitable to identify patterns in how people talk about integration and to explain how different interpretations of integration can arise. By approaching integration as a concern that is given normative framing and formulated as a problem, we use the concept as a tool to analyze how local actors frame and give meaning to “integration” on the ground. This approach suggests that conceptualizations of integration are not channeled unswervingly from paper to practice but embedded in normative framings, as argued by Penninx (2019), or intertwined in policy discourses and contested ideas about what integration is and what it is supposed to be.

Local Conceptualizations of Integration

Previous knowledge on local conceptualizations and meanings of integration have analyzed integration in Sweden from the perspective of both migrants and officials. Grip (2020) has shown how “on the local arena, there is an unclear perception of what integration policies should achieve—who should be integrated and what the objectives of the policy are” (2020:871). Integration is primarily talked about in spatial terms; that is, migrants need to “enter” or “be let into” the labor market or society and they need to “get out” into the community, leaving their perceived isolated homes. Integration is thus characterized by a “(dis)similarity paradox” where similarity is the purpose of the policy “while simultaneously only identifying and dealing with differences” (2020:874). In a similar vein, albeit phrased within a framework of racial discrimination, Eliassi (2017) has explored perceptions of integration among Swedish social workers. Eliassi concludes that there is a lack of progressive approaches to institutionalized racism because of the prevalent “color-blind” approach among many White majority social workers (2017:31).

Previous international research has also examined how local stakeholders’ interpretations of integration impact how it is enacted locally. In Denmark, Vitus and Jarlby (2022) have found tensions between restrictive national immigration policies and local integration work, particularly focusing on the observation by local stakeholders on how this tension undermined integration efforts by young migrants. Siviş’ study on local integration actors in Turkey (2021) demonstrated how they formulated their own integration approach in the absence of formal integration policies. Similarly, Sabchev (2021) has shown how local authorities in the Municipality of Thessaloniki in Greece, together with IGOs, responded to the lack of policies and plans for the reception and integration of refugees with their own local solutions.

It can be concluded that local ideas and understandings of integration and integration policies matter, both in contexts where the definition of integration is contested, and where there is lack of formalized integration policy, but further studies are needed in order to grasp conceptualizations of integration among stakeholders on the ground.

Method and Material

The empirical data was gathered within the framework of a large European research project on integration. The article builds on 28 semi-structured interviews conducted during spring of 2021 with local stakeholders involved either directly or indirectly with migrant youth in Southern Sweden. Of the 28 interviewees, 13 had immigrant background (i.e., born in another country, or parents born in another country). They held professional titles such as the following: municipal manager and officer, adult school principal, educational officer, NGO operation manager, founder and board member, youth center coordinator, project and process leader, or integration consultant. This variety among the interviewees has enabled us to capture interpretative repertoires across a wide range of professional positionalities, authority, and influence.

Due to recommendations during the pandemic in Sweden, all interviews except two were conducted via Zoom. The interviews lasted typically one to two hours using a semi-structured interview guide set by the project. The questions prompted the interviewees to discuss their experiences of working with migrant integration and to reflect on their perceptions of the concept of integration and local integration processes. Four interviews were conducted in Arabic (transcribed and translated into English) and two in English by a research assistant (fourth author of the article), and twenty interviews were conducted in Swedish by researchers (first, second, and third author).

To capture the interviewees’ interpretative repertoires, we paid close attention to patterns in language use, prompts, figures of speech, and metaphors (Potter, 1998:177) in the following abductive steps: First, we coded transcriptions in NVivo using an analysis framework provided by the project and extracted additional themes. Key themes used were “conceptualization of integration,” “barriers to integration,” “responsibility,” and “accountability” for integration. Second, we made a more thorough coding on the theme “conceptualization of integration.” During this step, we re-read and made sure we scrutinized each other’s interview transcripts. At this stage, stakeholders involved in the project were invited to a one-day workshop where early interpretations of the material were presented and discussed as an attempt to do member-checking (Lincon and Guba, 1985) of our preliminary findings. Third, we reviewed the current scholarly critiques on integration together with our coding of the empirical material and categorized the data according to two identified repertoires: separation and de-migranticization. Of course, these repertoires do not have sharp delineations. The value of these two types is that they help to gain an apt understanding of the multiplicity of interpretations and common denominators within dominant discourses of integration embedded in the material.

There are multiple factors that may have impacted the local stakeholders’ talk and understandings of integration. All in all, to reduce the risks of inducing our own biases, terminology, and beliefs on the material, we used strategies such as recoding and member-checking as explained above during the process of analyzing the data. We especially want to highlight the importance of the role played by institutional logics (Ocasio & Thornton, 1999) embedded in different workplaces, with varying professional ambitions and personal commitments among the stakeholders. Some stakeholders gave meaning to integration to promote social cohesion and equality or advocate for policies that address the root causes of integration problems. Other understood integration as an outdated term that should not be used when talking about or working with migrants’ inclusion. Municipality officials noticeably have a delegated responsibility to implement policies as postulated in integration law and policy. Within civil society organizations, understandings of integration are expected to differ, for example between advocacy groups, immigrant organizations, and international organizations. While some institutional logics may play a role of creating spaces of participation, others may be safeguarding cultural and linguistic identities, or actively combating policies that perpetuate discrimination and exclusion. In the interviews, the stakeholders were nevertheless asked to share both their personal understanding of integration and the approach to integration of their organization, service, or project which, we believe, enabled an elaboration on differences and similarities between the personal and the professional as well as on the shortcomings of integration as they understood it. Some municipal officers were hesitant to sharing their personal views on integration and preferred to simply represent the organization’s approach to the term. In addition to institutional logics, questions concerning the effects the interview guide had on the material is also of importance to delve into. For example, the theme “responsibility” became a prominent theme across much of the interview data. While this could simply be explained by the interview guide explicitly asking about it, it does not inhibit the possibility to analyze the ways in which responsibility was talked about and how it relates to the two repertoires. We noticed that among all the themes that were brought up in the interviews, the question of responsibility was something that all interviewees strongly connected to, which is reflected in the analysis below.

Integration from Local Stakeholders’ Perspectives

When the interviewees shared their understandings of integration, various meanings came to the fore. Integration was related to complex issues such as culture, religion, identity and belonging, political participation, or civic and social engagement, as well as justice and equality. Integration was perceived as something that might include very different parts of a migrant’s life, and a plethora of different terms were mentioned as they reflected on the concept. More concretely, the terms they chose to describe integration range from safety (trygghet in Swedish), inclusion, trust, encounters, respect for human dignity, to specific policy-oriented terms such as establishment (etablering in Swedish) with its emphasis on education and employment. Key topics that most interviewees related to integration include employment, housing, and education, with specifically Swedish language skills seen as fundamental.

We have divided meanings, topics, lines of argument, dilemmas, ideas, and tropes of integration found in the material into two interpretative repertoires that local stakeholders draw upon to make sense of integration: the separation repertoire and the de-migranticization repertoire. It should be noted that we do not suggest that the interviewees adhere to only one repertoire. Rather, we see it as a continuum in which we find a common denominator in perceiving integration as a failure in Sweden that the interviewees drew upon. We have attempted to illustrate the relations between the repertoires in Fig. 1 below.

Fig. 1
figure 1

The two interpretative repertoires

Full size image

As the figure shows, different perceptions of failure are included in both repertoires with varying emphasis on the responsibility of (migrant) individuals/groups or society/structure. The interviewees who articulated the separation repertoire tend to see failure linked to migrants, while those who articulated the de-migranticization repertoire tend to place failure in the structures of the state and the obstacles posed by the Swedish society. Differently put, as the interviewees framed integration in Sweden as unsuccessful, lacking or deteriorating in different ways, they disagreed on who is responsible for the failures, on the extent or cause of the perceived failures and how this ultimately should be defined. While some talked about a need to push for faster and better integration and connected this to the idea of integration as a problem of and for migrants to solve, others were keen to underscore Swedish authorities’ inability to provide equal opportunities and rights for all. We analyze these differences in more detail next.

The Separation Repertoire

This repertoire presents integration as a process between migrants on the one hand and the (Swedish) host society or non-migrants on the other. The repertoire includes ideas that emphasize difference and separation between these perceived groups, reflecting Grip’s (2020) (dis)similarity paradox. Within the repertoire, a common viewpoint among the interviewees was the idea of integration as a two-way process (echoing official EU-policy), that is, with two separate but equally responsible parties for integration. By viewing both migrants and host societies as parties with rights and responsibilities—and embracing the idea that societies change because of migration—several interviewees approached integration as different from a one-way assimilation approach:

I do not think that you should be assimilated or adapted, this is about a two-way interaction/interplay (växelverkan). And the responsibility is shared. (S3, Municipal Unit Manager)

I think that integration is to be able to keep one’s traditions, one’s culture and one’s religion while at the same time absorbing the new country’s culture, tradition and understanding of religion or whatever it may be. The mix of being allowed to be this larger identity than either or. (S12, NGO Operations Manager)

While these quotes above illustrate notions of a two-way approach to integration with shared responsibilities for both groups, the separation between those in need of integration and the host society is still prevalent and the question of where the responsibility lies is still central. For one interviewee (S11, Municipal officer) who read out loud a two-way definition of integration in a policy document during the interview, the idea of a shared responsibility was evident in the distinction between “establishment” (etablering) as more focusing on the responsibility of the individual and integration as focusing more on the larger processes in society. This view was shared by another municipality officer who interpreted establishment as only one part of integration, which he believed included more aspects than only merely having a job.

The separation repertoire therefore contains both ideas about integration as migrants’ one-way assimilation into a dominant Swedish culture, or as above, a two-way shared responsibility. That is, even though some ideas comprised within the separation repertoire breathe discomfort with the concept of assimilation, they still reproduce understandings of “migrants” and “Swedes” as separate groups with the key question raised: Which out of these two groups does the responsibility of integration ultimately fall upon?

Ideas reflecting an assimilationist (one-way) view on integration were not as explicit in the interview material but sometimes expressed implicitly. Within the separation repertoire, integration was also linked to differences between migrants (them) and host societies (us) in terms of cultures, values, and norms, which then makes integration challenging or complex. To illustrate a view of integration as separation between us and them where more emphasis was put on the responsibility of the migrant, one interviewee mentioned religion, parenting norms, and gender equality as markers of difference in terms of when integration is needed and for whom:

Integration, that’s a big issue. I see you have a lot of papers too. That’s a big question, of course. There are many different pieces. It’s food, it’s health, it’s Ramadan, it’s how they eat, it’s culture clashes, it’s from school, it’s dealing with parents. Is it the man who rules at home or do they share it? So, that’s a huge issue. Ouff! (S28, Coordinator of Youth Center)

This approach implicitly puts most of the responsibility of integration on the migrant. Even though some stakeholders openly pointed out specific groups as failing in their integration more than others (such as migrants from sub-Saharan African countries with lower education), in most cases, there was a reluctancy to explicitly point fingers towards specific groups of migrants. Also, among some of the interviewees with migrant backgrounds (including S28 cited above), the separation repertoire included implied perceptions of “them,” that is, those in need of integration—which did not include themselves.

Interviewees drawing on the separation repertoire generally also stressed the primacy of personal determination when talking about integration. Some emphasized primarily the importance of individual abilities to “crack the codes” of “Swedish society,” and others mentioned resources such as social and educational capital. One interviewee defined integration for example as “having the ability to make decisions that lead to long term success in one’s own life” (S25, Municipal officer), or, as expressed similarly in the following quote, about understanding your role in society:

That is, when you can see that you yourself have a responsibility, that I, myself, must take my responsibility and how I can do it. When I realize that I have the power myself to make a difference. When I realize the power that I have, and that I can use that power to do something, I can affect my own situation. (S23, Employment officer)

Relatedly, others made sense of integration primarily as an individual adaptational journey where migrants are assumed to be willing, able, or indeed allowed to adopt. Class or cultural differences, lack of resources, or obstacles that migrant may face will matter less for the success of integration if there is a personal will or ability to accept society’s goals, values, and the institutionalized means to attain them:

From my understanding, integration is that I must respect the law here. There are some values that are negotiable, and that I can abandon here, while there are other values that I will never ever let go of, and this society does not require me to get rid of these values. […] Integration is something that we must feel, it is not just a word. […] So, I am translating my thoughts into action through my work. I always tell people what my understanding of integration is, and they were very receptive. (S33, Project Assistant)

All people must be able to support themselves. I think that is crucial. Because I think ... well, I mean, it’s not like you end up in the shadows because you were born somewhere or look a certain way. But it is a matter of having lost faith and not having the financial means to do anything about it. (S22, Integration consultant)

The above two quotes point to an understanding in the separation repertoire of integration as something happening among individual migrants, or at least, that it is primarily measurable in relation to his or her inner, individual capabilities or abilities. Another related idea points to the perceived need to expand integration to include Swedish norms and values (often linked to gender and democracy) and how these aspects are communicated through bureaucracy and the educational system. Here, interviewees expressed notions of integration policy having failed due to migrants’ unwillingness or inability to integrate, using the Swedish welfare state as a yardstick. One key argument that came up in these interviews stressed the need to include for example parental or democracy education, to foster norms about how the Swedish welfare state needs well-integrated individuals.

Overall, the separation repertoire is characterized by an understanding of migrants and non-migrants as being separate, with different perceptions of who is seen as primarily responsible for integration; the individual migrant or together with the “non-migrants” represents society as a whole.

The De-migranticization Repertoire

The de-migranticization repertoire can be seen as the opposite to the separation repertoire. Within this repertoire, interviewees talked about integration as something that erroneously targets and problematizes only migrants and their (in)ability to integrate. Instead, they argued; problems associated with integration reflect larger societal issues that also concern non-migrants. Rather than focusing on migrants and existing barriers to “fit in,” they would therefore stress inequality in Sweden and pay attention to issues such as discrimination, unemployment, housing, or other structural shortcomings and welfare retrenchment. One interviewee mentioned how he, in his activism circles, instead of talking about integration, use the term Right to the City, to take a clear stance against the separation between the majority population versus migrants implied in the term integration. For him, integration is about everyone’s right to the resources produced, making the right to a good life a core issue, independent of whether one has migrated or not.

In a similar line, other interviewees talked about integration at large as a matter of questioning the “who” included or concealed in the term integration. They interrogated where the lines around difference are drawn when we define who needs integration. As explained here:

When it comes to integration, I am kind of divided. I see it both as a cultural integration, where you come from another culture and try to find your way into the Swedish culture. But I also see how Swedish children starve, and how young people and citizens are pushed to the fringes of society. And if so, how do you integrate them? So, I try to think a little broader [about integration] than this first narrow way which only recognizes the immigrant who comes and wants to start a new life. (S27, Youth leader)

Another interviewee similarly wanted to expand the common way of understanding integration, which she considered to be wrongly associated with a process concerning foremost racialized migrants in vulnerable conditions. She claimed that “integration” needs to expand beyond our (mis)conceptions of difference pertaining only to being non-European or Muslim. Not only Syrians need to be integrated, but Danish and Dutch and so on too. We all need to feel like members of the society, she asserted. This idea of broadening the concept of integration to also include migrants from Northern European countries was also shared by another interviewee (S17, Educational organization officer) who described integration as meeting and understanding the other in a wider sense than those who are culturally and ethnically different. These statements convey the idea that integration is not a matter of whether you are born abroad or not but about understanding each other despite a multitude of differences, such as interests, professional and educational background, and class.

Within this repertoire, we also find a line of argument about the usefulness of alternative concepts such as citizenship or belonging—instead of talking about integration:

I am against the term integration. I prefer using the term citizenship which means knowing my rights and duties in this country, and settle, and stop thinking that ‘this is not my country and not my place, and I don’t want to live here.’ I chose to come to live here, regardless of the circumstances, I am living here and making the best out of it. It’s not about integrating or assimilating or forcing people to live the way I want. (S32, NGO founder)

In a stronger line of criticism within the de-migranticization repertoire, others disapproved of the term integration altogether based on a perception of the term as ethnocentric or racist concerning racialized understandings of “good” and “bad” members of society. The concept presupposes a flawed us-and-them dichotomy, where the majority population represents the norm and the “good” and culturally “others” the “bad.” As one interviewee puts it:

Personally, I think that the concept of integration is problematic because it is based on certain notions that I do not perceive to be true. [...] There is a norm and there is a hierarchy in views on integration where the majority society and those who belong to the majority society are higher up in the hierarchy. I think that’s really problematic. I think there are ethnocentric or racist understandings in that. [...] I also think it is problematic in the view of what a society is because it is based on views that society is static. […] We never talk about integration [at our school]. We do not use the term “immigrant”. We talk about our students as “students” or “participants”. We sometimes discuss that someone have an experience of migration - if it is relevant. (S4, School Principal)

Other interviewees with critical views of the concept of integration emphasized the need to focus on patterns of inequality along racial lines, and how these intersect with other axis of inequality. In their view, it is more useful to talk about societal problems that affect “everyone” against understandings of integration that single out (primarily non-European) migrants as a problem.

Another issue within the de-migranticization repertoire concerns how the interviewees understood integration in practice. Several interviewees suggested that by targeting only migrants, integration activities risk being counterproductive since they do not create spaces where immigrants and non-immigrants meet. One interviewee mentioned that when migrants first arrive in Sweden, they are unable to interact with residents because all integration activities that they attend are geared towards their own integration and do not include any representatives of the local population. Other activities that might not directly be labelled as integration activities in the first place potentially create (better) conditions for integration, several interviewees claimed. Playing football or joining book clubs, for example, do not necessarily officially promote integration, but they can create conditions for integration in different ways. As explained by one interviewee:

[In our organization,] we never say that we are integrating people. We never, ever would call it that. We have just found this need in society: different people don’t meet. And that’s true for everybody in the Swedish society, also elderly people. I mean, young people don’t meet older people. People with disabilities don’t meet people without disabilities. It’s like this phenomenon in Swedish society. And surely it was the same thing with newly arrived people – they had a hard time getting to know and meet people who already live in Sweden. (S30, NGO project leader)

Since encounters may be difficult to realize, some interviewees mentioned cultural events as key to bring different groups of people together, like music festivals. Reflecting the quote above, some interviewees mentioned that it is even hard for them (as “Swedes”) to meet new people although they are part of the local population, which is why one interviewee advocated for creating a safe space for different people to meet informally, rather than creating a formal activity where migrants have to learn about the language and norms of the new society in order to “integrate.” Similarly, another interviewee, himself having parents from the Middle East, said he has participated in what he called the best “integration platform ever existing,” namely the supporter section of a sports stadium at football games.

Interviewees drawing on the de-migranticization repertoire also spoke against what they believed to be a misdirected focus on individual responsibility (away from a rights-based approach) present in current discourses on integration:

Society has hardened. We have become much better at talking about what obligations people have, but not as good at talking about their rights. We see that daily. (S9, NGO Unit Manager)

Besides expressing the need to reorient the meaning of integration away from the mere responsibility or shortcomings of individuals, others also criticized the overarching ideas about integration as merely an issue of labor market participation or “establishment.” This way of perceiving integration, they lamented, can risk more “failure” and has to do with a larger understanding of people as defined by their capacity to “produce” or to contribute economically to the Swedish society as individuals today are being valued according to their economic output, as explained by one interviewee:

It is my personal opinion that the right to stay [in a country] should be based on other principles than whether one is useful to society. Whether you have a job [or not]. It needs to be based on something else. (S4, School Principal)

The quote is suggesting that migrants’ right to stay or longer integration processes are related to human dignity and value, which should not be measured or considered in economic terms. In line with such a critical view on current shifts in Swedish integration policy from rights to responsibility, another interviewee lamented a marketization of education affecting integration policy, coupled with the general tendency of increased neoliberal politics in Sweden. In her view, this increases the requirements of formal education which affect many migrants in Sweden negatively. Employability has more and more become the main aim of formal education instead of intellectual development and the learning of democratic values.

Overall, the de-migranticization repertoire is characterized by the dismissal of a sole focus on migrants or migration, including the very use of the term “integration” or carrying out “integration activities,” which are conceived to erroneously target and problematize only migrants when rather processes of structural inequality and processes of racialization more broadly should be the focus in discourses and efforts to create equal life opportunities.

Conclusions

In this article, we set out to explore how ideas concerning integration are talked about, conveyed, and negotiated among local stakeholders in Sweden. With the help of the concept interpretative repertoires, we propose that local stakeholders who work closely with integration of migrants in Southern Sweden draw on what we call the separation and the de-migranticization repertoires to make sense of and frame integration. By looking at the repertories as a continuum, we suggest that perceptions of failure are a common denominator among the stakeholders with dissimilar views on the extent or cause and main responsible party of the perceived failure. In fact, the stakeholders displayed very different understandings of how the problems framed as “failed integration” should be described and tackled locally. In the article, we have shown that within the de-migranticization repertoire, integration was perceived as something that creates troublesome boundaries between different groups (in this case “migrants” and “non-migrants”) and erroneously targets individual migrants at the expense of a structural approach which is sensitive to societal responsibility in issues such as inequality, discrimination, or racism in Sweden. Within the separation repertoire, integration was differently framed as (individual) processes where migrants primarily are seen as responsible for their own integration and hence mainly accountable for failing integration.

This key distinction in how integration is conceptualized and conveyed between the two repertoires reflects how the contested field of integration is framed and practiced differently in local settings. Noticeably, the repertoires are infused with tensions between rights and responsibilities and the (hyper)politicized nature of migration currently marking integration policy shifts and discourses in Sweden. We can conclude that the differences in perceptions of failure (and responsibility) point towards both acceptance of and resistance to the present-day integration policy environment in Sweden, among the stakeholders directly working with migrant integration in our material.

Here, we can highlight some limitations in our study. The stakeholders, including those more critical to current integration policies in Sweden, all needed to relate and position themselves to current discourses—not the least since they might be reliant on project funding where the funding agencies use a mainstream discourse drawing on official EU-policy and its “two-way process” model of integration. Therefore, we can expect that some interpretations of integration might have intentionally or unintentionally been excluded in the interviews. It is also likely that those critical of integration on the ground move between the repertoires and frame integration differently depending on the context. And we, as researchers, must hence continuously be reflexive about how such biases influence our own conceptualizations in the labyrinth of integration (Korteweg, 2017). It is however important to point out that we do not claim that the two repertories should exclude other alternatives to local stakeholders’ conceptualizations of integration. Our findings should rather be viewed as snapshots of how local stakeholders make sense of integration with reference to current policy shifts from rights to responsibilities and a presumed break with the long-held and well-reputed Swedish integration line. Clearly, more research is needed to further analyze the implications, for example by considering the impact of interpretative repertories on local implementations of integration policies or by analyzing to what extent implementations might differ depending on the repertories. Finally, we also invite future research to refine the repertories with more empirical research on how integration is understood and framed in the context of a presumedly increasingly “hostile policy environment” for migrants in Sweden (Zetter, 2019).