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International Migration and Liberal Democracies: The Challenge of Integration
Rainer Bauböck
1. Why migration theories seem to explain too much
The second half of this century has witnessed growing global
demographic and economic disparities and a simultaneous shrinking of distances for
communication and travel. Both developments have contributed to the increase in
international migration flows. Mainstream theories explain this very well by understanding
migration as a spontaneous movement of persons who seek to improve their situation and
cause thereby a gradual reduction of these inequalities. One problem with this common
sense approach is that it would predict much more migration than we can actually observe.
During the 19th century Europe exported its demographic transition problem to
North America. Why does the global South, where a similar transition occurs today on a
much more dramatic scale, not do the same? According to standard economic theory the free
flow of labor across borders should lead to a more efficient allocation of this factor of
production and to an equalization of income from it, i.e. of wages. Why has the
globalization of markets then not yet created a borderless market for labor? Economists
have in recent years greatly refined their theories of migration. Oded Stark and others
have suggested that in many contexts the family household rather than the individual
migrant is the relevant decision-making unit and that choices are not always driven by
maximizing income, but also by considerations such as risk diversification or relative
deprivation in a reference community 1. Yet even for these new approaches the basic puzzle still remains. As a group of
researchers around Tomas Hammar has pointed out in a recent book 2 the challenge is not how to explain
the increase of migration, but the astonishing degree of immobility of persons in a world
where incentives and opportunities for moving to other countries seem so abundant.
Sociologists and anthropologists sometimes explain this immobility by
including the costs of cultural adaptation in the individual's calculus whether to
move or to stay. Cultural community may thus be a general inhibitor for outmigration, but
more plausibly it is just an initial threshold. Emigration is often not an exit from
community obligations, but a form of compliance which involves promises by those who leave
to return money and finally to return themselves. And in every group of potential migrants
there will be some risk-seeking characters who are likely to explore new destinations. As
the political theorist Brian Barry has pointed out, once these pioneers have established
themselves in another country, the cultural deterrent will be much lower for those who
come after them. As more and more people move from the same origin to the same destination
they form networks of information and material support and create a familiar environment
for later immigrants. Cultural barriers will continue to become weaker so that eventually
only the flattening of economic and demographic disparities should stop the flow 3.
This is a greatly simplified account of the
core idea in migration system and chain migration theories. They explain very well why
migration is a self-reinforcing process whose patterns are not a simple function of
disparities and distances between origin and destination. But they can rarely predict the
beginning or the saturation point of a flow.
2. Bringing the state back in
Why is our world not like Barry’s model? Paraphrasing a famous 19th
century philosopher and economist one might say that migrants make their own choices
whether and when to leave and where to go, but they do so under circumstances not of their
own making. These circumstances are not merely economic, but also political ones. The most
powerful agent shaping the conditions under which international migration occurs is of
course the modern state. In a recent paper Aristide Zolberg has argued for "bringing
the state back" into migration theory 4. Which kinds of movement states
try to control has varied greatly in history and
between different types of regimes. In early modern times migration within the territory
and emigration were tightly restricted, whereas the liberal democratic state has created a
zone of internal free movement but has stepped up its control of immigration to
unprecedented levels. The demographic, economic and cultural factors mentioned above are
good predictors for internal migration when it has become a liberty protected by the
state. But economic migration theories have yet to "factor in" state control of
external borders. Generally they do not attempt to explain what drives regulation efforts,
but instead regard governments as addressees for policy advice on how to regulate
immigration in order to maximize its economic benefits for the receiving society.
Legislators and governments seem to act irrationally when they do not follow such advice.
However, I want to suggest that control efforts are never merely driven by economic
interest. They invariably involve a political logic of sovereignty and nationhood. The
very definition of the basic unit over which costs and benefits will be aggregated is a
political one: it is a national economy. And immigration complicates the
aggregation by blurring the boundaries: Are immigrants to be counted among those whose
collective interest is to be maximized through immigration control? Will they be counted
only after they have become citizens, or right after being admitted, or even before entry,
i.e. as future immigrants? Thus any kind of immigration control refers us back to the
basic question of political membership: Who belongs?
Although immigration control has become the most important way in which
states impact on migration flows, one should not forget that states are also often the
cause of emigration. Political or religious oppression, wars and civil wars, foreign
occupation or the breakup of multinational states have triggered some of the largest
population movements in contemporary history. Furthermore, immigration control is not
always meant to reduce flows. Sometimes receiving states encourage them proactively by
recruiting foreign labor abroad or through an open door policy for co-ethnics who are
regarded as belonging to a national community. Certainly, state control over immigration
is always imperfect – it is not like opening or closing a water tap. Even where it is
triggered by political action, migration is a processes with its own economic and social
dynamics which may subvert regulatory efforts or produce unintended effects. Recruiting
temporary workers leads to their permanent settlement, closing front doors for legal
inflows diverts them towards back doors for illegal immigration, sponsored immigration
selected by its ethnic origins brings in others who are not seen as belonging to the
nation. What these well-known phenomena illustrate is, however, not a general ‘loss
of control’, a succumbing of the state to the forces of economic globalization. By
and large the problem is less the technology needed to control border crossing or to
detect and deport overstayers, nor the costs for implementing it. When control does not
achieve its stated aims this results more often from a political inhibition to use
available means – for example to introduce a general population registry in the US
– or from constraints imposed by domestic interest groups, by judicial review or
international conventions and human rights norms.
In order to understand the politics of immigration at the receiving end
we must therefore consider the state not only as an agent in the international arena
driven by the goals of maximizing its security and influence but as itself an arena for
domestic political forces. Democratic states are responsive to organized interest groups
and to the preferences of the general electorate. Unless we take these into account we can
hardly explain why governments have adopted so different policies towards immigration.
Gary Freeman has suggested the interesting hypothesis that immigration control in liberal
democracies is not merely constrained by the rule of law but tends to be more liberal than
voter preferences. The reason is that the burdens of additional immigration (e.g. on
social services) are widely dispersed throughout society whereas the benefits are highly
concentrated in particular sectors (such as certain businesses or established immigrant
groups). The latter groups are thus more motivated and capable to organize and can block
the implementation of restrictive programs which are popular with voters 5.
However, this does not yet explain why
these are so popular among voters who are hardly affected by immigration. The general
public attitude towards immigration and its impact on government policies is often quite
unrelated to the actual size of inflows and the costs and benefits they generate. In
recent elections in Europe the ‘immigration issue’ has become a wild card and
both right and left wing governments seem to be under stronger pressure from xenophobic
sentiments than from pro-immigration lobbies.
We have to take one further step beyond the description of the state as
an international agent and a domestic political arena. In democracies political legitimacy
is grounded on the idea of popular sovereignty, that is of a self-governing political
community. Modern states have been engaged in nation-building projects identifying the
boundaries of their particular community and its historic and cultural character.
Immigration policy is an essential instrument for this purpose. Those who come from
outside are not merely assessed by economic criteria but also by how well they fit into
the national mold. Ours is an age of global migration 6, but also still an age of nationalism. The locally and historically specific
interactions of these two conflicting forces have shaped different immigration regimes.
Since Rogers Brubaker’s historical study of French and German citizenship 7
there has been a growing awareness that
comparative research on the link between nation-building and immigration is indispensable
for understanding both the patterns of international movements and the integration
patterns of immigrants after settlement.
3. How immigration contributes to nation-building and subverts it
Yasemin Soysal, Stephen Castles, Jim Hollifield and others have
suggested various typologies of what may be called "immigrant integration
regimes" 8. Often these are
idealtypic in Max Weber’s sense – they condense observed differences between
countries into a classification which seems to exhaust logical or conceptual
possibilities. While this is a valuable endeavor, it may often be more interesting to
focus on the internal complexities of each regime without abandoning the comparative
perspective by reducing them to a series of singular cases.
I have just proposed that we should examine the makeup and shared sense
(or, if you prefer, the structure and ideology) of political community in various
countries in order to understand the different kinds of immigration and integration
regimes they have developed. We will then start by asking questions like the following
ones: Is a political community understood to be multinational, mono-national, or composed
of a national majority and various kinds of minorities? Does the hegemonic group regard
itself as a nation of immigrants or has it been shaped by emigration and exile? On the one
hand, the particular mix of these and other building blocks of political community may
then explain a country’s general approach to the integration of immigrants. On the
other hand, ongoing immigration becomes itself a part of the framework; it is also an
independent variable which changes the ethno-cultural makeup of ‘receiving
societies’ and their sense of political community and it is often the most dynamic
element of such change. We should therefore not expect that countries can be easily
classified by their ethnic or civil national identities which are frozen in time and shape
the general public attitude as well as immigration policies 9.
This assumption would simply translate nationalist ideology into research
hypotheses. What we should explain is persistent difference as well as convergence between
integration regimes. In order to do this we have to examine structural features of
political communities and their endogenous as well as exogenous evolution over time.
With these ideas in mind, let me now take a brief look at four
different kinds of integration regimes which cover most of the current Metropolis project
countries. These are the USA, Canada, Israel and the European Union.
USA: the ethno-racial Pentagon
The US are generally seen as the world’s foremost society of
immigration, which is still true in terms of absolute numbers of legal admissions per
year, but not with regard to per capita immigration or the percentage of foreign born
among the population. In these regards they have been overtaken by Israel, Australia,
Canada and some western European states. It is also important to remember that the
American self-perception as a nation of immigrants has not prevented widespread resentment
against successive waves of European immigrants (first Germans, then Irish, then Slavs and
Jews), the Asian Exclusion Acts of the late 19th century, waves of nativism and
‘Americanization’ efforts since World War I, and finally a long period of
extremely restrictive and selective admission from 1924 to 1965. In the early 1990s both
immigration and integration have again become divisive issues in American politics.
Anxieties about national identity are a subtext to much of the debates on illegal
immigration or on welfare benefits for foreign residents. They rise to the surface in
ballots against bilingualism in education and other areas of public life. Yet on balance
there is a remarkable persistence of the idea that the US is not only a nation of
immigrant origin but ought to continually renew and change itself through further
immigration.
It has been often said that what keeps this country united and open for
future self-transformation is commitment to a civic rather than ethnic idea of nationhood.
But, paradoxically, since the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s the very commitment to
a more inclusive interpretation of political equality has led to a renewed emphasis on
ethnic and racial difference. American nationhood had been constructed on the twin
foundations of inclusion of European immigrants and exclusion of Blacks. Attempts to cope
with the continuing discrimination against African Americans have produced a much more
heterogeneous nation. In the late 19th century America may have been close to
becoming a multinational society of European immigrant groups 10;
during much of the 20th century it was a real melting pot for
immigrant identities and now it has become a multicultural society, divided
according to David Hollinger into an ‘ethno-racial pentagon’ with Euro-American,
African American, Indigenous, Asian and Latino segments 11. The latter two sectors are formed by the fastest growing groups of recent
immigrants. The borders between these five categories are of course quite artificial, but
whether they will soften over time does not merely depend on rates of intermarriage and
residential desegregation. Or rather, these social patterns of intermingling will be
strongly influenced by public perceptions of ethno-racial difference. Softening the
borders will require a more inclusive national consensus which may feed on the old idea of
the republic of immigrants but has to interpret it in new ways. The alternative to this is
a pattern of what Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou have called ‘segmented assimilation 12
’ into the separate compartments of the pentagon.
Canada: binational, indigenous and multicultural
Canada is the country where the term multiculturalism was for the first
time embraced for public policy purposes. However, the general framework of national
identity and officially recognized diversity is quite different from the US model of
ethno-racial segments. It is more like a multi-layered structure where each layer has
different fault lines along which it may crack or break apart. If the windshield of a car
has such a structure it offers better protection in case of collision than if it is made
from homogeneous glass. Yet in contrast to the Swiss federation, which has been remarkably
stable for just this reason, in the Canadian case one fault line dominates the others and
it is showing numerous cracks. It is unclear today whether the country will survive the
impact of a third referendum on Quebec’s independence in its present form.
Canada is also a white settler society, split into two language groups,
the smaller of which has over time developed a distinct national identity and has acquired
substantial powers of self-government within the province where it is now almost
exclusively concentrated. But Canada’s bilingual federalism does not easily fit its
constitutional design as a federation of ten provinces whose equal federal representation
and political powers conflict with Quebec’s claim to be recognized as a
‘distinct society’. The third layer of Canada’s diversity is indigenous
self-government for Indian, Inuit and Meti groups. Their autonomy has more political
weight than in the US and relies strongly on federal protection against the provincial
governments of both language groups. Immigrants form the fourth layer and the notion of
multiculturalism is strongly associated with respect for their ethnic diversity. Both
aboriginal First Nations and the Québécois have seen in this policy a downgrading of
their more specific claims to territorial self-government. The Québécois government has
signaled its reservation by replacing the term itself with the notion of interculturalism,
emphasizing thus the importance of integrating immigrants into its distinct political
community 13. The integration of
immigrants has thus become to some extent instrumentalized for the national conflict
within the Canadian federation. In its admission system Quebec gives more points to
immigrants with a Francophone background and it requires immigrant parents to send their
children to French public schools. But focusing on maintaining French as the language of
public life makes Quebec’s policy in the end not so different from that of many
democratic nation-states 14. And
promoting immigration from diverse origins (including Francophone Western Africa) has made
Québécois identity much less ‘ethnic’ and more similar to multiculturalism in
other parts of the country.
The dilemmas of Canadian multiculturalism have provided a background
for some of the most imaginative political thought how liberal democracies ought to
respond to cultural heterogeneity. Charles Taylor suggests that in an asymmetrical
federation of this sort citizens belong to the wider political community both directly as
equal individual members and in a mediated way as members of partly self-governing
communities. ‘Deep diversity’ requires a mutual acceptance not just of cultural
differences in society, but of different ways of being a citizen of the federation 15.
Will Kymlicka disagrees with Taylor on the
moral foundations and limits of cultural rights. But his theory contributes to
understanding the implications of diversity in societies which are simultaneously
multinational and multiethnic 16.
‘Polyethnic rights’ for immigrants as well as self-government and special
representation for national minorities are justified insofar as they provide external
protection against majority preferences, but their purposes are different – while the
former serve the integration of immigrants as equal citizens, the latter establish groups
as constitutive parts of a federal polity. The common label multiculturalism for both
kinds of claims has distorted this difference and has led to false accusations that
cultural recognition for immigrants will eventually lead to separatism.
Israel: immigrant nation, multireligious state, contested borders
The third case which I want to consider is our host country Israel. It
is much more obviously a unique case, but it is also a mixed case and some of the
ingredients may not be so completely unique that comparison becomes meaningless. First, as
the two countries discussed so far, it is a political community created and sustained
through immigration. But immigration is linked to a nation-building project in a quite
different way. Israel is a state which remains not only open for immigrants but whose
proclaimed raison d’être is to serve as destination for aliyah, the
ingathering of exiles from around the world. Some have even said that the newcomer rather
than the veteran or native-born Israeli represents the core identity of this community.
Yet, compared to the early stages of other nation-building projects and in spite of the
avowedly Jewish character of the state, there seems to be remarkably little effort to
create a homogeneous public culture and identity. Israel is therefore, secondly, also a
deeply diverse society split along religious and ethnic lines between secular and orthodox
Jews and between Ashkenazim and Oriental Jews 17. The religious divide is not merely derived from the diversity of immigrant
origins but is linked to a regime of established religious group rights the roots of which
extend back via the British mandate to the Ottoman Empire. Thirdly, Israel is also a
multinational society if one considers its Arab citizens as a group whose particular
identity is not so much shaped by its Muslim or Christian religion, but much more so by
the history of conflict between the Israeli and Palestinian national projects. As the
local majority population before 1948, they obviously perceive Jewish immigration as an
instrument for further marginalizing them in their own country. In Michael Walzer’s
words Israel combines thus three different ‘regimes of toleration’ 18
which frequently generate intolerance when
they come into conflict with each other. In addition to all this there is the overriding
concern and unresolved question of external borders and of peaceful co-existence with the
Arab neighbors and with a future Palestinian state. This context has shaped a peculiar
immigration regime, but that regime has also been transformed in quite unexpected ways by
immigration so that over time Israel has in certain aspects become less exceptional. Let
me mention three phenomena which illustrate this interaction:
The first observation is that while immigration is of course still
strictly selective, the mode of integration has thoroughly changed. The original Zionist
vision of a melting pot in which the various Jewish identities would be transformed into
an Israeli one has given way to a more limited insistence on Hebrew as the common language
and much wider scope for the toleration or even recognition of persistent diversity among
Jews. This transformation from an assimilationist to a multicultural regime of
integration, which parallels developments in the US or Canada, is not merely a result of
the increasing diversity of origins which have shifted from European to Middle Eastern and
finally Russian. It has been greatly accelerated by the immigrants’ political
empowerment in a state which grants them citizenship not at the end of a process of
integration but already at its very beginning.
My second observation is how the goal of nation-building through
immigration has come into conflict with a religiously grounded definition of membership.
For deciding who is a Jew the Law of Return uses the traditional definition of matrilineal
descent and includes converts, but a 1970 amendment broadened this substantially by
imparting an independent right of access to all spouses, children and grandchildren of a
Jew and their children’s or grandchildren’s spouses making thus a lot of room
for non-Jewish immigrants. Recently, the status of Jewish converts has become a bone of
contention, with some denying the validity of conversions unless they have been accepted
by a tribunal of orthodox Rabbis. Current policies with regard to non-Jewish relatives and
converts have given rise to concerns about abuse by purely economically motivated
immigrants. This sounds very familiar to observers from Europe where the institution of
asylum which once served to define a western political identity during the Cold War has
been tightly restricted under the pretext of preventing similar abuse. Of course, aliyah
is much more central to the Israeli national project than political asylum ever was for
any European state, but the debate about the Law of Return signals another aspect in which
the dynamic of immigration undermines exceptionalism.
My third example relates immigration to the external conflict about the
status of the occupied territories in Gaza and the West Bank. In reaction to street
protests there and to terrorist attacks in Israel itself a previously well-established
system of commuter migration of Palestinian workers was not only temporarily suspended,
but to a large extent replaced by recruiting guestworkers from abroad. Israel embarked
thus for the first time on the course of temporary migration and has since made the same
experience as so many other countries before – that nothing is so permanent as
temporary labor. A recent report put the number of foreign workers as high as 190.000 of
whom more than 50% are in an irregular status 19. Ultimately, Israel will have to face the task of integrating a great part of
this non-Jewish population socially, culturally and politically. This will create a whole
set of new dilemmas in a nation whose public culture and institutions are shaped to
provide a homeland for Jews.
European Union: supranational governance and multinational federation
The European Union is of course not a state, nor should it be
understood as a nation-building project. It is a union of states with very different
traditions and conceptions of nationhood. However, it is more than an international
alliance or confederation where decisions at the federal level are exclusively taken by
representatives of national governments and have to be translated into domestic law before
becoming effective. The European Commission is removed from the control of national
governments, the European Parliament does not represent national electorates but a
European citizenry and the European Court of Justice’s sweeping powers in
interpreting the Treaties resemble those of a Supreme Court. Decisions in the Council of
Ministers have direct effect in the national legal systems and are in some areas now taken
by majority vote. All these are indicators for an emerging supranational polity with a
‘pooling’ of national sovereignties. But is this federated polity as democratic
as its separate parts? Concerns about the ‘democratic deficit’ have led to the
formal introduction of a citizenship of the European Union in the Maastricht Treaty of
1992. This citizenship is still extremely thin with regard to the rights and obligations
it confers upon its holders. And it is entirely derivative of member state nationality.
The current fifteen members are thus the gatekeepers of access to European citizenship.
Although the European Union is not a state it has developed a distinct
migration regime. Among the Union’s basic principles is the free movement of persons
between member states. This had led to the abolition of internal borders between the
countries participating in the Schengen Agreement and to the harmonization of external
border controls, asylum and visa policies. While these core elements of national migration
regimes have been largely shifted to Union levels, there is still no harmonization of
integration. The legal status and rights of third country nationals are almost entirely
decided by domestic law, as are naturalization and the acquisition of nationality at
birth.
There is something strange about this. How can there be a common
citizenship of the Union which is acquired in fifteen different ways? And why would a
federation deprive its members of their sovereign power to control admissions to their
territory but leave them with the prerogative to determine who will become a member of the
federal polity? The United States, for example, established a uniform naturalization
regime soon after adopting the Constitution and almost hundred years before immigration
policies became a federal matter. There appears to be a simple explanation for the
European federation’s different course and this is its multinational character. The
Amsterdam Treaty affirms that "the Union shall respect the national identities of its
Member States" 20. Whereas
controlling admission to the territory is a hallmark of sovereignty, the rules for
admission to citizenship do indeed reflect various conceptions of national identity.
Yet it seems to me that a multinational federation can respect the
national identities of its constituent parts and still have uniform standards for
admission to federal citizenship. In the case of the European Union, it is not only the
common federal citizenship but also domestic considerations which provide arguments for
harmonizing nationality laws and the legal status of the extracommunitari. All the
member states have become countries of immigration and their own norms of democratic
inclusion should require them to set their immigrants, to quote once more Michael Walzer,
"on the road to citizenship". 21 Consider the case of ‘Mehmet’, a boy of 14 born in Germany who had
inherited his parents’ Turkish citizenship but had never lived in that country. After
having committed a series of criminal offences he was recently deported to this ‘home
country’. This decision is not merely an unreasonably harsh punishment but, in
Avishai Margalit’s words, "a withholding of citizenship from someone entitled to
it." 22 A ‘decent
society’ must not humiliate persons within its jurisdiction by excluding them from
full membership.
The institutions of the European Union have created a powerful supranational
structure of governance, but they still lack an adequate project for the political
community they are about to build. I want to suggest that this community should indeed be
a multinational federation which affirms the different identities of its
constituent parts. At the same time it must reflect the fact that Europe as a whole has
become a continent of large scale and permanent immigration. And that requires common
standards for the integration of immigrants, including their access to citizenship.
4. The virtue of ambiguity: integration as inclusion, cohesion and
federation
My brief tour d’horizon through the four integration
regimes has highlighted their different starting points as well as their internal
complexities which make them difficult to classify.
From the perspective of immigrants the differences between
nation-building projects appear less relevant: What newcomers seek is after all very much
the same in various countries: economic opportunities, security of residence and freedom
to practice their languages or religions and to pass them on to their children. By and
large, these expectations are underwritten by liberal democratic principles which western
receiving countries embrace in their constitutional traditions. The basic norm is that all
those who are permanently subjected to a political authority must enjoy the liberties
which this authority is meant to protect and must be represented in the legislative
process. This is a powerful argument for providing immigrants with previously denied civil
rights such as free choice of employment and freedom of association and speech, a right to
family reunification, a consolidation of residence permits, inclusion in welfare benefits
and access to citizenship by naturalization or birth in the territory. An extension of
rights along these lines has been achieved in many countries after World War II. Some have
taken more significant steps towards a transnational conception of citizenship by
introducing the local franchise for foreign residents or by recognizing dual citizenship.
This semi-secular trend was of course not brought about by the sheer force of moral
persuasion, but it converged for a significant time with an enlightened self-interest in
receiving countries that wanted to attract immigrants.
However, concerns about external sovereignty and a rise of
anti-immigrant sentiment in domestic politics have limited and to some extent even
reversed the extension of rights. Diffuse fears about the effects of globalization on
national sovereignty and more manifest fears about the decline of welfare states have been
projected upon immigrants. They personify the threats of globalization both as its agents
and its victims. In contrast to the anonymous forces of financial markets immigrants are
visible not only as competitors for jobs, but also as a ‘third world’ within the
first, showing to native populations a frightening image of a possible future they might
face: hard work and precarious jobs, poor housing and the need to rely on solidarity
within family and ethnic networks rather than within the wider political community.
Resisting these trends towards nativism and xenophobia requires a new
emphasis on integration which appeals to the universalistic norms of liberal democracy but
pays equal attention to the historic particularities of ‘receiving societies’
and to the perspectives of the migrants themselves.
But is integration not a dubious concept? Does it not often merely
serve as a less offensive substitute for assimilation which still conveys the same message
of unilateral adaptation into a supposedly homogeneous national culture? And is it not
inevitably linked to a ‘receiving country perspective’ which ignores the stakes
of sending societies as well as the ethnic diasporas and transnational networks of
migrants? There is some truth in these charges. Still, I want to defend the use of the
concept in a modest way, not as general paradigm, but because it seems to me sufficiently
flexible to be combined with other perspectives.
There are other words which have been suggested to replace the
discredited term ‘integration’, such ‘settlement’ or
‘incorporation’. While these may serve to describe certain aspects of the
process how immigrants become a part of the societies they have entered, the advantage of
‘integration’ is that it is not only more readily accepted by a larger public
but is also more complex.
Integration can be understood in three different ways: as inclusion of
outsiders or newcomers into an already established society, but also as internal cohesion,
as the integration of that society itself that makes it a stable and bounded social
entity. Finally, integration can refer to a process of federation, the forming of a larger
union from various societies. I want to suggest that this ambiguity of the concept is its
virtue. It allows us to understand how an integration regime for immigrants is shaped by a
dominant understanding of a society’s own integration and by projects of integration
into larger regional federations and global institutions. This may help to explain why
integration is in some countries or for some groups equated with assimilation but in other
contexts with a high degree of social and cultural segregation between groups. In liberal
democracies we can link the three interpretations by demanding that the norms of
integration for immigrants should be derived from those which are meant to secure internal
cohesion or to facilitate larger federations. Societies which are themselves divided into
many different interests and identities but politically integrated through the rule of
law, equal citizenship and democratic representation must accept that immigration will
contribute to this internal diversity and that immigrants have to be integrated into the
structure of political equality.
Obviously, this interpretation of integration still focuses on
receiving societies. There is a tension with two other views of migration: with the larger
systemic one which sees it as an aspect of globalization that undermines the very idea of
separate societies bounded by nation-states; and with the micro-perspective of the
migrants’ biographies, family networks and communities which transcend national
spaces and projects. Let me conclude by suggesting that the challenge for migration
studies is how to reconcile these three views.
My own preferred term for describing such an integrated perspective is transnational
rather than postnational. The national outlook sees communities whose membership is
internally homogeneous and does not externally overlap with that of other nations. Its
spatial image looks like the political map of the world with each country painted in one
single color and separated from others by a black borderline. At the same time, these
communities are imagined as unbounded in time, as an unbroken chain of generations
reaching back into a mythical past and forward into a distant future. The postnational
literature imagines deterritorialized communities which mark their differences by invoking
ethnic or religious origins and seem to live in time rather than space while the spatial
aggregates we use to call societies exist merely in the present tense of market exchange. 23 A transnational
perspective emphasizes instead that societies and cultures increasingly overlap both in
space and time and it challenges the assumption that this makes it impossible to integrate
them into larger and multilevel polities which share a political authority, a bounded
territory and a historical horizon. This is not meant to deny that there are powerful
nationalist as well as postnational forces which reshape our world by pulling it into
opposite directions. I only want to suggest that a transnational view of this world
provides the most convincing starting point for dealing with the dilemmas arising from the
clashes between these two contrary developments.
Footnotes:
1 Stark (1991)
2 Hammar et al. (1997)
3 Barry (1992: 281)
4 Zolberg (1998)
5 Freeman (1995)
6 Castles and Miller (1993)
7 Brubaker (1992)
8 Soysal (1994), Castles (1994), Hollifield (1996)
9 See Hjerm (1998) for empirical evidence that there is surprisingly little
difference in the distribution of ethnic and civic national identities between the German,
Swedish and Australian populations.
10 This vision most strongly expressed by Horace Kallen (1915).
11Hollinger (1994)
12 Portes and Zhou (1993)
13 Juteau et al. 1998
14 Carens (1995)
15 Taylor (1993)
16 Kymlicka (1995)
17 Ben-Rafael (1998)
18 Walzer (1997:40-43)
19 Migration News, September 1998
20 Article 1(8)
21 Walzer (1983:60)
22 Margalit (1996:152)
23 see, for example, Appadurai (1996)
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Zolberg, Aristide (1998) ‘Matters of State: Theorizing Immigration
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