In this chapter we turn to issues of how migrants participate in society and especially their gendered aspects. Why is gender important in this regard? It is a consideration that is usually absent from both theoretical and policy discussions of what is commonly termed integration or the basis on which migrants are incorporated into a society, a term widely used across different societies but with different meanings (Rytter, 2019). Whilst integration policies might seem to be neutral, they may in effect target women and men differently and have different outcomes for them. Such policies may also apply primarily to certain categories of migrants, although the categories and nationalities change over time. As we shall see, concerns over what constitutes problematic integration vary, such as: lack of knowledge of the language of the country, non-participation in the labour market and traditional cultural and social practices transferred from societies of origin. These have generated demands to impose integration measures and contracts as conditionalities of immigration and, if applicable, to the different stages in the pathway to citizenship.

In the first section we examine an increasingly critical debate on the notion of integration. This debate has probably been more visible in academic writing than in policy interventions, where discourses of securitisation, targeting of Muslim populations, their unwillingness to ‘integrate’ (Kontos, 2014) and the retention of transnational ties and practices, prevail. The relationship between academic discourses and policies is a difficult one in which the critical edge of academic studies may be lost (Rytter, 2019). There has also been, with a few exceptions (Anthias & Pajnik, 2014; Korteweg & Triadafilopoulos, 2013), little reflection on gendered or intersectional aspects. For Schinkel (2018: 4) class and race have been purified from integration and, we would add, so too have gender and sexuality.

In the second section, we show how integration discourses are gendered in the way they represent and target migrant women and men (Anthias & Pajnik, 2014; Kofman et al., 2015). Those entering through family migration routes (Bonjour & Kraler, 2015; OECD, 2017), whom as we have seen in Chap. 4 are in the majority women, were the first to be subjected to integration measures. In terms of integration, women are supposedly reluctant to ‘integrate’ and ‘become one of us’, while men’s patriarchal culture, especially if Muslim, holds women back and is dangerous for contemporary values of gender and sexual equality (see also Chap. 5 in relation to recent discourses on young refugee men). In effect, in gendering, racializing and classing certain categories, it is the ‘migrant with poor prospects’ (Bonjour & Duyvendak, 2018) who must be forced to integrate. In earlier years of proposals to implement integration measures in particular, a gendered argumentation was evident in a number of states (Kofman et al., 2015; Korteweg, 2017). And as a number of scholars have critically commented, the analysis of what is to be done in relation to integration strips migrants of any heterogeneity or probes the relationship between the different aspects of their subjectivity i.e. intersectionality (Korteweg, 2017) or problems the receiving society puts in the way of their insertion (Korteweg & Triadafilopoulos, 2013). Women’s bodies have become the battleground, for example through the targeting of garments worn by Muslims as inimical to Western liberal values and a threat to security. At the same time, the skilled are depicted as unproblematic in terms of their integration and hence not requiring any support to settle (Weinar & Klekowski von Koppenfels, 2020: 3–4).

6.1 Immigration and Integration: Insights and Debates

Migration scholarship has applied a number of terms to denote processes by which immigrants participate or not in the new societies they move to, the degree and context of such participation, the impact on their identities and their offspring’s identities and so on. The terminology includes such concepts as ‘integration’, ‘incorporation’, ‘assimilation’, ‘acculturation’, as well as the evolving phenomena transforming societies termed ‘multiculturalism’, ‘cosmopolitanism’ and recently, ‘superdiversity’. Theorists (Brubaker, 2001; Favell, 2003; Schinkel, 2018) have argued about the validity, usefulness and limitations of these concepts and have exemplified their usage in particular historical and geographical zones (Alba & Foner, 2015).

Indeed, integration has been reconceptualised ‘as a two-way process’ and as such conceived as ‘primarily a matter of social standing, and not legal or socioeconomic status’ (Klarenbeek, 2019: 2). In this sense the evaluative standard is viewing society with no social boundaries demarcating participation between those legitimised as members and thus societal insiders and those non-legitimised members and hence outsiders. In another sense, the grappling between the need for migrants to maintain their ethnic differences and cultural identities and the functionality of becoming ‘absorbed’ in their new place of residence points to the ability to interact on a normative equal level with those of the majority population and established as residents. In other words, according to Castañeda (2018: 2–3) ‘integration means upward social mobility, no residential segregation, intermarriage, and the potential for equal participation in politics and public activities. …Unlike assimilation, integration does not imply losing the culture of the country of origin but actually being able to sustain it while also adapting to a new city’. Castañeda finds the term integration to be similar to the concept of incorporation in pointing to the inclusion of excluded groups into the political and social structures of a given city and thus important in understanding feelings of belonging for migrants to the cities where they are residing. From a more intersectional perspective, the notion of integration for some scholars produces gendered and racialised non-belonging (Korteweg, 2017).

Furthermore, others have underscored that the concept ‘further risks concealing and perpetuating power dynamics and (colonial) hierarchies’ (Meissner & Heil, 2020: 1). Such hierarchies contribute vastly to social differences and the relational practices, power asymmetries and everyday life materialities that create group dynamics and reconfigure social relations. As a result, some researchers find more analytical purchase and conceptual utility in the concept of ‘disintegration’ (ibid) as a provocation to moving away from integration processes and the examination of group or individual performance in a given society.

However, policy aspects of integration impact on immigrant labour, families and refugees. Recent literature (Birkvad, 2019) delineates the significance of citizenship in a ‘Western’ country of residence as naturalisation has important meanings for: mobility which in turn facilitates transnational connections; denoting legal stability offering a sense of security for those in precarious situations and liminality of legality; designating a formality of recognition of equality and belonging. Such meanings placing importance on citizenship in achieving migrant access to mobility, stability and recognition combine both strategic and more instrumental conceptualisations aligned to more emotive and symbolic meanings around civic status.

Some of the conceptualisations we discussed in Chap. 2 (affective, performed/embodied, intersubjective and spatial) are key dimensions in how the key concept of ‘lived citizenship’ has been applied in the last two decades since its emergence (Kallio et al., 2020). Lived citizenship has been conceived as a ‘locus of political agency in participatory policy’ (Kallio et al., 2015) while acknowledging the spatial complexities in transnational mobilities (Wood, 2013) and the emotional geographies of citizenship participation. In this direction, an intersectional lens can be applied to contesting integration (Anthias & Pajnik, 2014) as an interconnected analytical venture with larger social inequalities and hierarchies within transnational experiences and perceptions of migrants as active social agents in contemporary host societies. This inevitably links integration discourses with migrant experiences and negotiations in their everyday life practices and instances of marginalisation. This approach points to the way gender hierarchies are intertwined with gendered social relations of power and renders integration a highly normative and problematic concept (Anthias, 2013; Anthias et al., 2013).

Approaches to the study of migrant integration are multiple and range from focusing on social, political, cultural or economic integration and even expand to literatures in the second and subsequent migrant generations. In this chapter, the gendered focus on integration and citizenship is on contemporary issues regarding policy matters of immigrant generations primarily in the European landscape but with a few global examples supplementing the debates. From a policy objective, the foci are primarily on interventions and practices that make integration successful or problematic. While meanings of successful and unsuccessful integration might diverge, the emergence of an increasingly hostile environment, everyday bordering and efforts towards activism in combating such phenomena suggest that by and large policy approaches to integration require re-thinking (Yuval-Davis et al., 2018).

While migration has always been a divisive political issue as it concerns issues of sovereignty and identity, the increasing ethno-cultural diversity of receiving societies requires governments to find ways to respond to such changes. Subsequent immigrant generations have grown up protesting exclusion, racism and discrimination in the societies where they claim their right to equal opportunities. Political tension and conflictual clashes have evolved in the form of riots such as those in the UK and France over the last two decades. At the same time, there are politicians and media outlets who shift the blame to the migrants themselves by underscoring their failure to integrate in privileging their distinct cultures and religion, thus jeopardising social cohesion and becoming a threat to national security (de Haas et al., 2019; Korteweg & Triadafilopoulos, 2013).

More reflexive approaches to the study of integration have advocated a shift outside the normalisation discourse in order to disentangle research from the migration apparatus. This has led to methodological strategies to de-naturalise and de-ethnicise integration (Amelina & Faist; 2012; Levitt, 2012) and even to the more ambitious approach to ‘de-migranticize’ integration studies to be more reflexive in this regard by distinguishing analytical and commonsense categories, by aligning social theory to research on migration in order to remove the ‘migration container’, and by challenging the object of study from the entire migrant population to segments of the overall population (Dahinden, 2016). It appears that Dahinden (pp. 2219–2220) does not argue either for ‘more’ or for ‘fewer’ migration and integration studies, but for different ones which would reconcile these contradictions through following a triple strategy, of firstly, centring migration studies within social theory; secondly, moving out of ‘migration containers’ to alignment with and within social science; thirdly, ‘migranticizing’ general social research by embedding ethnic and migration studies into disciplinary university curricula. This, Dahinden calls, a plea to establish a ‘post-migration’ social science that embraces migration and integration transversally within social science research and theory.

While these elements are sound endeavours to a more inclusive alignment of migrant integration approaches and social theory, social science research and academic curricula, there appears to be an oversight of a more gendered and intersectional engagement which would address some of the extractive and power laden entanglements of who is ‘integratable’, who is not, who is more, who is less, why and when some groups are allowed to integrate and others are continuously marginalised. A gendered and intersectional awareness of these issues also has implications about the ways we teach our curricula, the research that informs and drives the pedagogies we produce, what gets to be on those curricula and what is excluded, who teaches what, what kind of research is conducted, what is published and receives funding to co-produce gendered and intersectional knowledge on these themes. Thus, are we yet entering additional spaces of neo-colonialities of epistemic communities if we don’t consciously engage with a gendered and intersectional approach within and beyond integration. But this does not mean that just as colonialism expertly abused nations and people for raw materials, diverse epistemologies should also become extractive mines for the accumulation of knowledge and the development of theory in the global North. The intellectual and epistemic reparations we envision are those dismantling existing epistemic hierarchies to prevent the reproduction of similar damaging dynamics. We need to think about what knowledge has been denied or silenced and how we give voice, not in a paternalistic context, but a critical, uncomfortable, and meaningful way to think differently about dominant knowledge. Perhaps future research is what is needed to claim new spaces of knowledge production which are not superficially dismissive of integration, but instead, seek to situate its limitation and harness its public policy potential.

In terms of the public policy and activist potential for migrant groups, more novel interpretive frameworks use the lens of ‘communities on the move’ (CoM) and focus on the idea of such cultural communities capitalising on shared values and network ties which produce knowledge and opportunities to facilitate integration (Parrilli et al., 2019). In a sense this is the next phase of the ‘social capital’ migration theories approach which underscores the capacities of mobile communities to shape migrant well-being and innovation through knowledge production aiding integration. In essence, this approach focuses on the bonding and bridging of migrant groups as a complementary performance to embed them into the regional context.

Other studies show that national narratives of negative expatriate nationalism might even prevent integration into the host society. The study of Isaakyan & Triandafyllidou (2014) on Anglophone marriage-migrants in Southern Europe focusing on expat nationalism and integration dynamics has revealed that their own understanding of themselves as ‘long-term visitors’ evaluating an ‘inferior’ culture of the country they are ‘visiting’, coupled with their Anglophone culture of origin, leads to them coining the term of ‘broken integration’. This term is a useful heuristic device to explain the challenges of adaptation, interaction and ultimately integration within the host country culture. This is a particularly intriguing insight into the reverse kinds of power dynamics that can stimulate nationalisms that obliterate pathways to integration when migrants perceive themselves in a cultural hierarchy above the host society which they consider inherently inferior. Ultimately, this is also ‘resistance agency’ on the part of migrants who perceive ‘broken integration’ as their sole option in accepting their settlement as inherently problematic because of their superiority and not that of the majority residents.

Those studies continuing and contributing to the strand of literature that bridges social, political and acculturation psychological theories on immigrant integration aim to disentangle how the objective of citizenship and the subjective of perceived social status and belonging correspond in different societal contexts to socio-political integration. These studies examine integration as a mutual intergroup process between immigrants and the receiving society and utilise a person-oriented approach, such as the study by Renvik et al. (2020) with their survey exploring the patterns of socio-political integration among Russian-speaking minority group members in three neighbouring countries in the Baltic area: Estonia, Finland, and Norway. While three profiles were obtained in all countries (critical integration, separation and assimilation) that of ‘critical integration’ was the most common and when examined in relation to the citizenship and integration context.

Finally, extending the concept of ‘critical integration’ to delving into more critical explorations of the utility of the concept of integration, in a recent themed issue of the journal Comparative Migration Studies (2019) on debating integration as a central, yet increasingly contested, concept, Willem Schinkel’s (2019) article triggered a flurry of responses and then a rejoinder by the author concluding that migration studies should be seen as an ‘imposition’. Schinkel’s initial paper entitled, ‘Against “immigrant integration”: For an end to neocolonial knowledge production’ (2018), based on his book Imagined Societies. A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe (2017), and intended as a provocation piece, outlined three core arguments: firstly, immigrant integration research has been lacking robust conceptual grounding and in particular sociologically rigorous notions of core concepts such as ‘society’; secondly, the very process of monitoring immigrant integration is a form of neo-colonial knowledge production deeply entangled with contemporary workings of power; and, thirdly, makes a bold proposition for a more critical social science perspective, one that bypasses notions of ‘immigrant integration’ and ‘society’ in perhaps embracing more of a sociological imagination. This approach would focus on the actuality of migrants crossing social ecologies without the deterministic aspects of policy categories or commonsense explanatory frameworks.

Penninx (2019) in his response signals three building blocks as alternative solutions to the problems that Schinkel advances with the concept of integration. The first proposed is that research uses the broadest heuristic definition of ‘processes of integration’ as analytical concept to study a threefold approach (individual, collective and institutional) of a threefold dimensional context (legal, socio-cultural/economic and religious) of interaction between migrants and receiving society. The second proposition is to distinguish the study of integration policies as fundamentally distinct from the processes of integration and hence key questions should be framed to reflect perceived causes and solutions. The third component of an alternative practice is rather a sensitive one alluding to pressures in ‘safeguarding scientific independence against mounting pressures on programming and content of research – often through funding of research’ where the challenge is seen as the strong politicisation of the topics of migration and integration, as can be seen in the ways in which the need for integration of selected migrant categories are framed (Kofman et al., 2015; Korteweg, 2017).

Adrian Favell (2019) proposes a series of 12 propositions to rethink the utility of ‘integration’ as a concept, given that it is deeply embedded in methodological nationalism and by extension produces colonial, nation-state centred visions of societies while sustaining inequalities and orders of social power hierarchies (Anthias & Pajnik, 2014; Korteweg & Triadafilopoulos, 2013). In the next section we explore in greater depth how integration policies have been framed in the past two decades (Eggbø & Brekke, 2019), highlighting the key role of gender and sexuality in othering non-Western populations and regulating their family practices. Whilst for national populations not requiring integration (Schinkel, 2018), family life has become a matter of individual responsibility, for families with a migrant background it requires a tutorial state (van Walsum, 2012: 6).

6.2 Integration Policies, Gendered Interventions and Outcomes

National policies on migrant integration in the EU have emerged within regimes and debates shaped by a ‘Euro-crisis’ that sees fundamental disagreement about migration issues at large and certain aspects of the debate constructed in discourses of moral panics, deviance, crime and securitisation (Trimikliniotis, 2014). This is also a reflection of how historical contexts have shaped governance practices in different EU countries and by extension integration agendas reflect distinct agendas and institutions in turn shaped by politics, history, and culture (Hernes, 2018). As such, Nicos Trimikliniotis (ibid) suggests we need to map integration agendas as we map contestations about the meaning and priorities of integration while locating the debates in the neoliberal transformations taking place.

As a consequence of a neoliberal conceptualisation of integration and the implicit accusation of migrants as ‘unwilling to integrate’ into their host societies this has led to a normative framing of action in the form of the ‘integration contract’. The latter has been implemented in a number of European countries such as the Netherlands since 2002, Austria since 2003, France and Denmark since 2006, Luxembourg and Germany since 2011. This constitutes a form of an explicit agreement between states and migrants setting out what measures and support the state offers and what needs, responsibilities and expectations the migrants have in order to integrate. The compelling of compliance with the core (‘westernised/democratic’) values of the respective society are summarised as the basics of gender relations, diversity, equality and freedom of speech. In an assimilationist understanding of cultural negotiations of values and expectations, often women’s rights and compliance with particular understandings of gender equality are instrumentalised for a synthetic subordination (Kontos, 2014; Kostakopoulou, 2014).

While gender relations and inequality had largely passed without comment in discussions of the crisis of multiculturalism in academia or in the media (Phillips & Saharso, 2008), migrant women moved from the invisible periphery to the all too visible core (Prins & Saharso, 2008) in discourses around the need to impose integration measures for migrants.

It can be seen most clearly in the conflicting positions adopted around the veiling of Muslim women. Opposition to the wearing of the headscarf by Muslim women emerged as a major political issue, especially in France where it was seen as undermining secular values, in the 1990s. Some feminist voices have highlighted the continuation of colonial practices of controlling colonised bodies (Bassel, 2021) evident in this intervention in which the colonial trope of unveiling women as liberation prevails (Scott, 2007), and the role of liberal feminism in refusing to acknowledge the voices and demands of Muslim women (Korteweg & Yurdakul, 2020). The oppressed Muslim woman is pitted against the opposite of the free, gender-equal citizen in what Dahinden and Manser-Egli (2021) have called “gendernativism”, a “gendered and racialized form of xenophobia that constructs the ‘Other’ as the opposite of the free, gender-equal, ‘real’, ‘authentic’, ‘rooted’ citizen”.

The arguments for and against the banning of different forms of veiling (headscarf, niqab, burqa), its contestation, the role of the state, the place of religion in the public sphere, and the recognition of diverse practices are too complex to address in this chapter. In the box below on the comparison of headscarf debates we briefly outline the legal and political tussles in states in which the issue has been politicised. Courts have more often adopted rights-based perspectives while the political realm has focussed more on the issue in terms of integration, national unity, expression of political Islam and security (Joppke, 2009).

Box: Comparison of Headscarf Interventions

Only a few states in the European Union (Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Portugal, and Romania) have not implemented or debated proposals to ban the headscarf either in public space in general or more commonly in specific sites, such as schools, or among particular occupations such as teachers or civil servants (Weaver, 2018). France is the most restrictive and after 15 years of contestation since 1989, over what was known as l’affaire du foulard’, Parliament passed overwhelmingly in 2004 a law banning the wearing or display of ostensible religious symbols in public schools, seen as the crucible of Republican values. In Germany it was teachers as civil servants who were targeted by many regions. In 2003 in response to a teacher (Fereshta Ludin), who had been prevented in 1998 from working wearing a headscarf, the Constitutional Court ruled in her favour but passed the matter to the political level stating that those Länder seeking to prohibit the wearing of the veil had to pass legislation. However in 2015 the Federal Constitutional Court issued a clarification stating that if ‘there is no concrete danger to disrupting the peace at school or the state’s duty of neutrality, headscarves are permissible for women in the teaching profession’ (Chang, 2021).

In addition the firing of women for wearing the headscarf in workplaces has also been challenged. Initially the European Court of Justice concluded in a ruling (2017) of cases brought by Muslim women in Belgium and France that the employer could ban an employee from wearing visible religious symbols as long as they had a policy in place (Weaver, 2018). However a more recent judgement by the European Court of Human Rights concluded that a Belgium court had no right to insist that women appear uncovered in court, which was the first time this court has ruled in favour of the right of Muslim women to be veiled (Cox, 2018).

In terms of face veiling, France and Belgium banned in 2011 the niqab and the burqa in public which has been followed in other countries such as the Netherlands in 2015 (only on public transport and public areas but not on the street), Austria (2017) and Denmark (2018). Actual bans or proposals to ban the wearing of the full veil have happened in almost all European countries (Open Society, 2018), the latest being supported in the Swiss referendum in March 2021.

In terms of interventions relating to immigration and integration, one can discern several, often overlapping, discourses from the beginning of the century.

  1. 1.

    Gender inequality in relation to work where migrant women have low rates of participation in the labour market which has generally been the core element of equality. In Scandinavia, the emphasis on emancipation and independence is to be achieved through the labour market (Eggbø, 2010). A satisfying family life would be achieved by women working and independently earning their own income (Bech et al., 2017) working was an integral part of being a good citizen. In other countries, such as the UK, the desirability of labour market independence might be more about reducing reliance on public services. As has been pointed out (Korteweg & Triadafilopoulos, 2013), there was little consideration of discrimination faced by migrant women in the labour market or the actual level of participation of different groups of migrants, some of whom had higher levels of participation than native women. Instead the focus has been on Muslim women from Morocco and Turkey in Germany and the Netherlands, and from Bangladesh and Pakistan in the UK.

  2. 2.

    The failure of integration due to socio-economic marginalisation and the formation of an ethnic underclass arising in part from poorly educated spouses who as mothers do not have the requisite skills to educate their children to succeed in society and hence contribute to the continuing reproduction of socio-economic inequalities (Joppke, 2007). This emerged quite clearly in the Netherlands. The motto ‘if you educate a woman, you educate a family’ was used in the Dutch PaVEM Commission (Prins & Saharso, 2008) where women were seen as the reproducers of the next generation and thus required a better start (Kirk, 2010). Dutch parliamentary debates mentioned that the marginalisation of specific population groups could be passed from generation to generation, hence the need to ensure that women have a better starting position in the Netherlands (cited in Bonjour & de Hart, 2013). Though most explicitly stated in the Netherlands, this theme of the social reproduction of family members (love, marriage, parenthood, fertility, adult dependency) as future citizens would implicitly underpin a series of future regulatory controls over intimate and family relationships seeking to steer migrants’ belonging to the nation (Bonizzoni, 2018.)

  3. 3.

    Family practices incompatible with liberal societies and the formation of couples within transnational marriages (see Chap. 4). Western ‘liberal’ and open societies had to be protected from patriarchal and traditional gender roles where the body of the female Muslim migrant served to demarcate the boundary between the civilised Westerner and the uncivilised illiberal outsider (Kirk, 2010; Razack, 2004). Gay emancipation was also mobilised to frame Muslims as non-modern subjects (Mepschen et al., 2010). These illiberal practices included forced marriages, honour killings and transnational marriages with cousins, a particular concern in Denmark.

There was widespread agreement that the problem lay in the laxity of family reunification policies (Schmidt, 2011) and high levels of transnational marriages, hence family migration became the terrain for the control of cultural differences beginning with admission but extending to further stages of permanent residence and citizenship. Hence, dealing with forced marriages generated demands for language proficiency prior to entry. Thus Ann Cryer, at the time a Labour MP for a constituency with a large Muslim Asian population, made a direct connection between arranged marriages, difficulties in learning English and the success of different ethnic communities in the UK and thus called for English tests (Kofman et al., 2015). In Germany too it was argued that those caught up in forced marriages were prevented from leading an independent life because of poor language proficiency (Yurdakul & Korteweg, 2013) and resisting parental authority and other family pressures (Lechner, 2011). Initially men were not envisaged as being affected by forced marriage though in the UK gay men were subsequently included (Samad, 2010). In Denmark, politicians conceived of forced marriage as primitive and ‘un-Danish’ with no place in the country (Schmidt, 2011: 362–3).

Whilst certain attitudes were shared, policy responses differed. An understanding of options pursued would need to take into account the strategizing deployed by politicians, NGOs and individual feminists and the interplay of political forces in a particular context. As Hagelund (2020) suggests, migration studies require more focused attention to discursive processes of policy construction in understanding how integration policies vary, not just in sense-making, but also in the implications for policy choices in crafting policy agendas.

From about 2005 to 2006, three major policy initiatives ensued in a number of countries in North western Europe. These were implementation of language and, in some cases knowledge of society pre-departure tests; raising the age of marriage; and the imposition of a minimum income for the sponsor to be able to bring in a spouse or children.

Language tests were adopted in a number of countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK) (Goodman, 2011). In the Netherlands an analysis of the effects of the application of the language test of an A1 knowledge in Dutch as from 2006 showed that it had upgraded the human capital of the entrants but this may have been as much the effect of the selection of a spouse who was capable of passing the test (Scholten et al., 2012). Their effect was to change the socio-economic composition of family migrants and/or reduce the numbers entering through family migration.

Though forced marriage had played a part in the rationale for language tests, the predominant argument came to be the improved chances for integration. It was in relation to an increased age in marriage where the argument of prevention of forced marriage dominated. The targeted political subject was the Muslim woman but in order to avoid accusations of discrimination no one was exempt, including partners with non-migrant backgrounds. Only in the UK was the lifting of the age of partners in overseas marriages from 18 to 21 years in 2008 successfully challenged in the courts and lifted in 2012. The judgement found that imposing a blanket rule in order to deal with about 4% potentially of forced marriages was unjustified and disproportionate. Age of marriage was raised first in Denmark to 24 years in 2003 where it was strongly felt that intervention in the private sphere was seen as appropriate to ensure conformity to social norms (Fog Olwig, 2011). Furthermore, an attachment condition stating that one had to have more links with Denmark than with any other country was stipulated. In Norway, on the other hand, although forced marriages were hotly debated in the Immigration Act Commission of 2004, policy attempts to regulate forced marriages among Pakistani and Turkish populations did not take the route of raising the age of marriage for migrants, which was scrapped in 2007, but through imposing a minimum income rule (Eggbø, 2010; Staver, 2015).

Minimum income regulations represent the drift towards economic imperatives and links labour market participation to family migration (Kofman et al., 2015; Staver, 2015; Sirriyeh, 2015), in this case by the sponsor. As such, it reflects the transposition of economic criteria normally demanded of skilled migrants to family migration based on normative principles. In an increasingly neo-liberal immigration policy, not only migrants but those sponsoring migrants, are expected to demonstrate that they are able to be autonomous and responsible for themselves (Schinkel & van Houdt, 2010) and not be a burden on welfare services. In countries that imposed the highest income criteria – the Netherlands in 2004, Norway in 2010 and the UK in 2012 – the latter two demand high income levels in which only the individual, and not the family as a whole, can provide the necessary resources, that is the individual must demonstrate that he/she is responsible for themselves. The outcome is to produce a class and gendered and discriminatory impact. Other countries have since then also adopted minimum income requirements (European Migration Network, 2017).

Let us take the case of the UK to probe the gendered and intersectional possibilities in the right to family life. The objectives of the policy were: ‘ensure that migrants are supported at a reasonable level that ensures they do not become a burden on the taxpayer and allow sufficient participation in everyday life to facilitate integration’ (Home Office, 2011a). The premise is that low income British citizens as sponsors would lead to difficulties of integration. It’s clear that the unspoken assumption is that sponsors would be either settled migrants or descendants of migrants, and probably of South Asian origin. When the original level of minimum income of £18,600 was introduced in July 2012, it was set at 140% of the minimum wage, at which level it was calculated that the couple would not qualify for any income-related benefits. The Migration Observatory estimated at the time that 47% of British citizens in employment would not qualify as sponsors but that women, certain minority ethnic groups, especially Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, young people between 20 and 30 years and those living outside of London and the South East would be disproportionately affected.

Analysis of Labour Force Survey data for 2012–2017 confirms that women are the most affected followed by ethnic minorities overall (Sumption & Vargas-Silva, 2019). In general the gender pay gap, concentration in low paid and greater propensity to work part-time, and their caring responsibilities, mean that women’s annual incomes are lower than men. However when we combine gender and ethnicity using data from the January to March 2017 UK Labour Force survey a much more complex picture emerges. The median salary of women employed full-time is about 88% of the UK median income. It is slightly lower for white women, much higher for Chinese, Indian and the category of other ethnic, but substantially lower for Bangladeshi and Pakistani women. Including part-time work as well pushes the median below £18,600 for everyone except the group Mixed Ethnic, itself a very heterogeneous category. Thus family migration is only a possibility for full-time workers.

An interesting dimension of this requirement was that as a result of the increasing precarity, even middle class highly educated citizens could also be caught in its tentacles. Global mobility by working holiday makers, students and workers has led to an expansion of intimate relations and partnerships (Wagner, 2015) complicating stereotypes of transnational marriages. While 10 nationalities made up almost 50% of marriage migrants in the UK, a very large number of diverse nationalities comprised the rest (Home Office, 2011b). However, those with some flexibility and cultural capital turned to remedies available in international law, for example, exercising their free movement rights to go to another European Union country which allows them to move and reside freely with their spouse and children and even parents without any income requirement. A small scale study of 20 couples in the UK, who fell short of the stable minimum income, highlighted their high cultural capital and flexibility in relation to types of work and age of children (Wray et al., 2021). We do not know how common this strategy has been in the European Union, although as a result of Denmark’s stringent attachment rule, it is estimated there are 2000–3000 Danes unable to reunify who have moved to neighbouring Sweden, especially those living in Copenhagen.

Though an attitude shared with other countries, Denmark probably exemplifies more than any other a fixation with transnational marriages by minority ethnic groups (van Kerckem et al., 2013) arising from the stringent attachment rule (Bissenbakker, 2019). From 2000 to 2018, the Danish attachment requirement stated that family reunification in Denmark could only be granted if the spouses’ combined attachment to Denmark was stronger than the spouses’ combined attachment to any other country (Ministry of Integration, 2002 [L152] §9, part 7). It had followed from an increase in the marriage age to 24 years for both partners but had effectively been raised to 28 and then dropped to 26 years as the length of the attachment period. Following a court ruling of the European Convention of Human Rights in 2016 (European Commission, 2019) finding the requirement to be discriminatory against some Danes, both major parties agreed to replace it with an integration requirement. However this makes the conditions even harsher with stipulations of language requirement for both sponsor and spouse together with three out of five other requirements. A draconian extension has been that the housing criteria has been expanded to cover not living in a ghetto defined as an area of non-profit social housing, in which ‘the proportion of immigrants and descendants from non-western countries exceeds 50 percent’ and in which, ‘compared with the country as a whole, residents in the designated areas will generally have a significantly lower educational level, a weaker connection to the labor market and the educational system, a lower income, or have committed more criminal offenses’ (Ministry of Foreigners and Integration 2018 [L231], 23). One wonders how long this extraordinary form of discrimination will survive without a legal challenge.

Today the integrationist imperative applies to other categories of the population, including skilled labour migrants, and refugees who are increasingly exhorted and compelled to integrate, particularly through participation in the labour market (Rytter, 2019; Schultz, 2020). The conditionalities of entry have also been extended to the pathway to citizenship, which are increasingly accompanied by criteria and requiring resources en route. Thus the path to citizenship is less than smooth with numerous hurdles of language, economic resources and dependency through the increasingly lengthy probationary period, potentially locking spouses into harmful relationships and subjected to gender violence in order to remain in the country (Briddick, 2020). The Council of Europe Istanbul Convention preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (adopted in 2011) covers asylum-seeking, refugee and migrant women. Chap. 7 Article 59 asks states to do all in their power to give partners who are dependent on their spouse for a residence permit to be given an autonomous residence permit in case of dissolution of the marriage due to violence irrespective of the duration of the relationship. However the Convention has not been signed by a number of countries, especially those in Eastern Europe and the UK. Furthermore, Poland notified in July 2020 its intention to withdraw which Turkey did officially on 22 March 2021.

6.3 Beyond ‘Integration’? Activism and Inclusion

Overall, the concept of integration has been problematic with limited heuristic value when it shifts away from the functionalistic underpinnings that most policy-driven approaches offer. Reframing the concept in the direction of more democratising discourses which are transnational and intersectional can uncover some of its paradoxes away from its purely normative considerations (Anthias et al., 2013). To ameliorate its conceptual framing from an instrumentalising apparatus of domination over migrants and revitalise its meaning-making to one of social inclusion requires the consideration of critical citizenship studies combined with activism practice.

Migrant voices count, migrant experiences count and their agency is how these are actualised in activism. The mobilisation of migrant agency happens in both organised movements but also everyday acts of resistance and solidarity. These can be digital but also embodied. Karayianni and Christou (2020: 11) talk about ‘new geographies of empowerment’ in the digital era during which misogyny, sexism and gendered violence continue to explode and perceive feminisms of resistance in relation to social media as a renewed opportunity for activism. Embodied activisms are particularly pronounced with direct public interventions as in the case of the Athenian context where the socio-political forms of migrant squats and the socio-spatial interactions they foster and generate, represent not just sites, but also embodied practices for contesting citizenship (Raimondi, 2019). Raimondi (2019: 559) explores such migrant acts of resistance and activism by looking at them from a particular angle that draws on the ‘gaze of autonomy’ in also reinventing migrants and non-migrant activists in urban spaces.

As political struggles, these are historical strategies to gain access to urban space as a ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1996; Harvey, 2008), including gendered rights to participate and reclaim the city for migrant and minority women (Vacchelli & Kofman, 2018) whose claims to rights to the city and assertion of everyday citizenship take a number of forms. Muslim women, particularly those who are most visibly from the banlieue (suburbs) in the Paris Region, have experienced discrimination and harassment and a restricted “right to the city”, particularly in affluent or middle-class areas, which has forced them to modify their use of transportation and shopping (Hancock, 2015; Hancock & Mobillon, 2019). However on International Women’s Day eighth March 2015, some feminist groups staked a claim to central areas of Paris in marching in an alternative demonstration comprising women wearing a veil, lesbian, bisexual and queer persons and sex workers in opposition to the official march in which they were often placed at the end (Hancock et al., 2018). Another example of claiming urban rights are those engaged in heightened mobility, such as circular live-in-care workers, whose numbers have increased substantially in many European countries, have also fought through the courts and through collaboration with researchers and unions to overcome the lack of rights stemming from their in-betweenness and lack of protection for workers in household. In the example from Basel, Switzerland, they successfully gained recognition and financial compensation for the work they undertake. Beyond the successful outcome, Chau et al. (2018) note the way in which the gendering of the right to the city draws attention to the bridging of the divide between public space and private households beyond the more typical focus on formal citizenship and the public sphere.

Domestic work (see Chap. 3) has been increasingly politicised and an issue bringing together the global, national and the local in activism seeking to improve conditions of work and social protection (Cherubini et al., 2018; Mulally, 2015; Schwenken, 2017). Global networking (International Domestic Workers Network in 2006 subsequently Federation in 2012) together with collaboration with trade unions and institutions of global governance, namely the ILO led eventually to the passing of Convention 189 on domestic work in 2011. Though global in reach, it has only been ratified by 31 countries, largely in Central and South America (17) and Europe (8) as of March 2021. However ratification has not necessarily brought mobilisations and enactment of rights. Cherubini et al. (2018) note that the Convention has tended to generate mobilisations and extended rights where it is embedded in prior local struggles and political projects and involves national workers and internal migrants from rural areas, as in the case of Colombia. Where it largely concerns international migrants, as in the case of Italy, which ratified the Convention in 2013, it has been treated as a bureaucratic matter with advocacy organisations not particularly visible.

In France, on the other hand, which has not ratified the Convention, the sector is much more regulated due to a national collective convention for salaried workers employed in the private sector since 1982 and updated in 1999 (Lepetitcorps, 2018). Furthermore undocumented workers are also recognised as having employment rights unlike in the UK and Ireland (Murphy, 2015). Though traditional trade unions in France have tended to treat activist groups in this sector as ethnic ones despite the fact they have moved beyond an initial network of those belonging to a single nationality or regional focus to one that embraces a wider spectrum of migrants. Lepetitcorps’ study drawing on the experiences of two activists in this sector, notes their previous work experience in their countries of origin and their diversity of class backgrounds. Their engagement in political mobilisation stemmed from different trajectories. For the person from Mauritius it was to regularise her status and those of other domestic workers, for the middle class woman from the Ivory Coast it was to organise in a specific sub-sector of child minding, which was becoming professionalised, respect for clearly demarcated tasks in their contracts. Citing Rancière (2001), Lepetitcorps (2018: 92–93) comments that these women belong to three groups (women, domestic workers, foreigners) which the state had traditionally excluded from citizenship, and that their activism in fighting for their rights has generated a new political subjectivity in which they brought a private issue into the public domain.

At the same time, one needs to recognise the intersectionality of these activisms for as Kudakwashe (2019: 30), in relation to Zimbabwean domestic worker activism in South Africa, argues ‘any intervention or mobilisation that does not take intersectionality into account cannot redress the specific manner in which they are subordinated… . African women do not constitute a homogenous category politically or otherwise and do not necessarily share or perceive “objective” gender interests as they are both united and divided by ethnicity and nationality’.

There are few systematic studies of migrant associations and networks that focus on women’s and gendered issues at national levels. In Ireland, De Tona and Lentin (2011) identified 40 women’s groups in Ireland in the first decade of the century finding that they tended to have very loose multi-national, multi-ethnic and multi-faith boundaries and that most of the networks were inclusive and expanding, usually avoiding the more traditional hierarchical community structures where networking assumes a gendered act of resistance to communitarian discourses and politics. Some of the key associations have played major roles in challenging and transforming politics. For example, AkiDwA (African and Migrant Women’s Network) worked to mitigate the shift from a jus soli to a jus sanguinis citizenship policy (removing automatic Irish citizenship from children born in Ireland) in 2005 and campaigning to have migrant mothers have the right of residence to care for their children which had been removed in 2003. It was restored in 2005, 6 months after the change in citizenship laws. This network has also been involved in issues of gender-based violence and black women in the labour market. Another organisation of Muslim women (NOUR), set up by an Algerian woman who entered through family reunification, sought to enable women to debate the nature of Islam in Ireland, advocate for gendered services for women and destabilise stereotypes of Muslim women. Since the 2008 financial crisis and the growing privatisation of welfare, competition, commodification and the struggle for resources have made it more difficult for NGOs and networks to survive and engage in solidarity, as a comparative study of France and Britain highlights (Bassel & Emejulu, 2018).

Finally, wider international networks of migrant activism can shape more transnational and ideally global efforts of mobilisation for migrant justice. For instance, the European Network of Migrant Women (https://www.migrantwomennetwork.org/) is a feminist secular migrant-women led platform of NGOs and individual women that advocates for the rights, freedoms and dignity of migrant, refugee and ethnic minority women and girls in Europe. Their membership ranges from grassroots service providers to NGOs focused on advocacy and research. Members cover a diverse range of subjects in the area of human rights of migrant and refugee women, with economic empowerment, anti-discrimination and access to justice and combatting ‘Male Violence against Women and Girls’, being the most frequent activities.

Various analyses (Lahusen & Theiss, 2019) show that most solidarity organisations remain active primarily at the local and/or national level/s, and that only a minority of solidarity organisations are engaged in cross-national activities. Transnational activism entails a web of transnational partners, organisations and activities for a politicised mission which will lead to more global activism. It is important that such cross-national organised activisms start developing at the grass-roots level where there is no direct dependence on supra-national and inter-governmental governance of organisational linkages while adhering to more organic forms of organising activisms.

6.4 Conclusion

As we have seen in this chapter, the notion of integration as a form of policy intervention has been subjected to increasing academic critique. Whilst its links with the transposition of colonial governance to settler societies has been highlighted, its historical embeddedness in gendered dimensions of othering of non-Western populations, also warrants our attention. It has been extensively argued that the trope of women portrayed as vulnerable, in a state of victimhood and in need of protection (see Chap. 5) is one aligned to their integration seen as both problem and solution for the project of migrant integration at large. Frequently, the discussion of socio-economic aspects of integration policies are overlain with discourses focusing on challenges with integrating Muslim women, thereby shifting the debates to ethnoreligious undertones with significant policy exclusions. In the past 20 years or so, Muslim women have been propelled to the foreground of integration debates and their bodies a battleground over which national identity and security are fought. Gendered perspectives on integration discourses thus require a more nuanced intersectional lens to understand how integration measures affect the diversity of family and labour migrants and refugees. Mechanisms of the hostile environment function as assemblages that ignore such intersectional situatedness in policy and thus exacerbate exclusions.

In seeking to go beyond integration discourses, migrant associations and networks have sought to resist the exclusion of migrant and refugee women from citizenship, extend their socio-economic rights and challenge stereotypical images. Political subjectivities of rights claims are thus political possibilities for inclusion underpinned by those progressive struggles that understand the politics of resistance as the politics for belonging. This is occurring at national, European and international levels though the degree to which rights-based instruments are able to effect change and improved conditions depend on local and national contexts, as can be seen in the application of the decent work for domestic workers agenda.