Читать книгу The Integration Nation - Adrian Favell - Страница 12

The political demography I am sketching here is grounded in a broader view of global society constituted by a potentially infinite range of human mobilities and diversities, which nationalizing conceptions of population, international migration and integration work to reduce, shape and demarcate into governable statuses, units and groups. In this section, I offer some clarification on my background assumptions on mobility, diversity and society beyond the nation-state, which inform my critique of conventional notions of immigration, integration and citizenship.

Firstly, it is worth noting in passing that the notion of political demography I present might be said to necessarily underpin more conventional understandings of the global system in terms of political economy. That is to say, there is a prior theoretical question of defining sovereign populations and border demarcation before we broach questions of international political economy – international relations, the balance of states and markets, national and international institutions of governance, and so on (see Bashford 2014). In a globalizing world, the normative possibility of sovereign nation-state-societies as more or less stable, bounded ‘population containers’ – the Westphalian system defined by essentially immobile ‘native’ citizenries, which may absorb limited numbers of ‘newcomer’ immigrants – needs to be settled first.

At the same time, there is a prior question to that of political demography: the issue of political ecology. This would concern how a distinctly Anthropocenic ‘modern’ society of ‘human’ individuals and humanly constructed institutions is able to demarcate itself as a separable domain of social and political thought from that of the ‘natural’ world, of ‘objects’ and other beings around and outside it (as famously analysed by Latour 2006). Completing this account, by embedding our critique of the political demography of liberal democracy in an account of its political ecology would, as Latour (2018) suggests, help fill out the fully realized notion of planetary society beyond that of (Anthropocenic) global society. In this book, I leave aside the question of political ecology, except for a brief excursus on the implications of the COVID pandemic in the closing section of the book.

In the geographical literature – where there is a strong influence of political ecology – mobilities are defined in a much broader way to include all kinds of non-human mobile objects, goods, virtual transmissions, cultural artefacts, ideas, flows of production, information, capital, waste and so on (Sheller and Urry 2006). This is all certainly relevant to both political economy and political ecology. However, in advance of a full theoretical account, the specific issue of political demography can be practically limited here to identifiable human mobilities since it still helps clarify an alternative way of looking at migration, travel, border crossings, population movements and cross-border transactions more generally, which is clearly transformative of the standard linear view of immigration, integration and citizenship (see also Cresswell 2006). The alternative view of political demography presented here also relates to the kinopolitics (politics of movement) identified by critical scholars similarly concerned with how states make migration visible and governable (Nail 2015; van Reekum 2019).

Human mobilities effectively may include all kinds of movements by people in time and space: from the shortest trip to a local corner shop to a lifelong transcontinental relocation. What is conventionally designated ‘immigration’ is only a tiny fraction of a continuum of the spatial movements that states seek to govern by classifying and making them legible in various ways. Some, like walking to the shop, are almost entirely invisible to the state and are usually disregarded. Others, like immigration, involve international border crossing and so are highly visible and pertinent to it. Border crossing itself is a broad continuum: from tourism and trade or business visits at one end, through cross-border commuting and family life, to various forms of immigration, asylum seeking and irregular migration at the other. All these forms need governing, although governance can be porous and control a matter, much of the time, of ‘smoke and mirrors’ (Massey, Durand and Malone 2002). At any given border – for example, the most dramatic population divide in the modern world, which lies between San Diego and Tijuana – the daily number of ‘immigrants’ crossing is tiny compared to all such other crossings. The Westphalian conventions of space and territory quickly make most of these crossings invisible politically as the focus narrows on wanted and unwanted ‘migration’. Moreover, a conventional notion of time is also a factor in delimiting those crossings that count as ‘immigration’ – as noted previously, the one year of residence rule in international statistics on flows and stocks. At the same time, other categorical definitions may stretch this: for example, some cases of temporary migration – student migration, guest worker systems, trade in services, indentured labour – are not counted as ‘immigration’ or subject to ‘integration’ until some other formal line is crossed (see also McNevin 2019).

Asylum seeking and refugee migration have long had their own governing logic – anchored in the specific statuses established by post-war international refugee law – although they have been frequently seen to collapse into ‘immigration’ in recent debates (Gibney 2004). Internal and cross-border displacements, and various forms of temporary and indentured labour mobility – often far from the western world as receiving society – further complicate the picture (Koser 2016). Ordinarily, these are not subject to integration thinking.

Refugee settlement in the West, however, clearly has become a central subject for integration thinking, which in the past has been more applicable to the long-term settlement of labour migrants and their families. Refugee migration has become the principal form of immigration in many countries which are otherwise now extremely restrictive on forms of ‘economic’ migration. Integration of refugees is seen to be an imperative and strongly progressive goal – it is sometimes seen as less encumbered by the issues of race and colonialism that characterize post-empire labour migrations (Grzymala-Kaslowska and Phillimore 2017). Yet the concern with refugee integration contradicts the principle of temporary protection and potential future return – the removal of oppressive regimes and the rebuilding of failed states – and in this sense marks a further dissipation of the post-war refugee regime. A whole new wave of integration model building – largely overlooking earlier critiques of linear, implicitly colonial, integration thinking – has followed the crisis responses in Europe and the developed world to recent mass refugee and undocumented migration (Ager and Strang 2008; Donato and Ferris 2020). The migration status of many of the populations attempting to desperately enter Western Europe across the Mediterranean or via border passes in Central Europe is highly unclear (Crawley and Skleparis 2017). The determinate relations of economic and political domination and inequality between receiving and sending societies are lost in the focus on the moral response of the West to obligingly welcome claimants, each on individual grounds (Mayblin 2017). Given these particular aspects, refugee integration may play out differently from post-colonial labour migration or other transnational forms of movement but is no less problematic.

A further complication is added by noting that international migration subject to integration is also heavily distinguished from population movements that take place within and across the territory of nation-states. The canonical distinction between internal and international migration has long been criticized by geographers in migration studies (King and Skeldon 2010). It is often an arbitrary distinction which reifies the international border when both/all are forms of spatial movement, simply viewed. However, normatively, the modern nation-state clearly views things differently. In the contemporary view, internal populations are already integrated as nationals; they are not at all subject to the same linear immigration to citizenship template, let alone the same nation-building symbolism as ‘immigrants’. In historical terms, this distinction is clearly arbitrary and a figment of the late modern world (Harzig et al. 2009) – in the past, it did not apply to many regional periphery-to-urban migrations within incomplete nation-states or across macro-regional spaces (Moch 2003). Their migration patterns might, in that view, resemble those of immigrant foreigners – as do contemporary internal migrants moving across regions in contemporary China, for instance (Xie, Leng and Ritakallio 2016). Here, a nation-building ‘integration’ perspective might work, even in the absence of immigrants. As we will see, the ‘integration’ of people assumed already to be ‘natives’ is often left unexplored in discussions of immigrant or minority integration.

On the other hand, different concerns may indeed apply to migrations between countries within empire-scale systems of governance, or across macro-regional common markets, which also do not (or should not necessarily) count as ‘immigration’. It can be argued that free-moving EU citizens within the single market space of the European Union, who retain their own nationality and enjoy a different kind of (European) citizenship as the basis of residency, rights and recognition, are not subject to integration when they settle in another country – until perhaps circumstances change, a border crosses them, and they become ‘immigrants’ needing to think about permanent settlement (Gonzales and Sigona 2017). Other historians would further complicate this and de-naturalize the normality of the narrow sliver of migration and mobilities that is viewed as state-sanctioned immigration in the contemporary view: for example, the movement of settler colonials within empires (Bhambra 2014), or the ongoing movement of expatriates living and working for corporations around the world (Kunz 2020). These movements all have consequences that fall outside conventional patterns of migration, settlement, integration and citizenship. At the other end of the scale, other anomalous cases include the international movement of labour as slavery or the forced migration of stateless persons held in spaces outside receiving state jurisdiction (McNevin 2011).

The shrunken post-colonial nation-states that as empires were built on mass population movements to and from the colonies, outside any immigration-to-citizenship model, have worked hard to reduce the many historical and contemporary anomalies this produced for the Westphalian view. One recent example I will return to later illustrates their ongoing effects. British subjects from the West Indies and South Asia who moved across the empire to live and work in Britain in the immediate post-war period did not move as ‘immigrants’; they only became ‘immigrants’ retrospectively with changes in nationality law and a momentous historical rethinking of nationhood from boundless global empire to bounded European nation-state and sovereign island (Bhambra 2016). Victims of the Windrush scandal have discovered the power of the modern political demography of immigration and integration self-imposed on the sovereign United Kingdom, when they were unable to prove their long-term right to live in Britain for lack of citizenship papers (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss and Cassidy 2019).

The point of these various examples linked to the broader continuum of mobilities at a global scale is to underline that the singular contemporary notion of immigrant integration and its linear properties is particular to the present moment and serves a very particular normative purpose. This is for reasons to do with the central symbolic importance of immigration control, bordering and population management to sovereign nation building in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a particularly charged vision of the reaffirmation and recomposition of the nation-state-society focused on a very particular, selected mobile population – perhaps ironically in an age in which its future as a basic political unit never seemed less clear because of the regional integration and globalization associated with new forms of mobility and population flux.

Similar things may be said about diversities in the modern world. If global or (better) planetary society is the totality of all diversity, the modern nation-state clearly is preoccupied with cutting down and managing this diversity in order to differentiate itself as a unit from the outside world. National integration – whatever rhetoric it may have when it celebrates multicultural or multiracial inclusion – is therefore necessarily about reducing diversity as well as unifying it within some singular, bounded whole. Globalization and the transformation (or hollowing out) of national cultural distinction by ongoing migration and mobilities is, on the other hand, a de-differentiation – an integration into larger-scale units, with greater degrees of diversity, which indicates a loss of national power (i.e., sovereignty) over its own specificity and definition of ‘diversity’. A separate issue may be raised here about the homogenizing pressures of capitalism as an institutional form of global integration – I will go on to question neo-liberalism as a supposed challenge to national integration. But in any case nation-states, to again put this in Luhmannian terms, can only assert sovereign powers over their territories and population by reducing the noise of the planetary environment. Immigration control and its management via integration are one of the key means of getting a grip on diversity, not least as a growing and diversifying international population movement is taken as a dimension of globalization. Managing this globalization is key. The integration nation at its most powerful is not one which falls back onto some archaic, closed ethno-cultural self-definition but one which successfully governs immigration as a source of power: where it builds integration after diversity.

As with mobilities, I therefore take diversity as a background assumption, without seeking to be exhaustive of its definition. Thinking about integration after diversity refers to the condition induced by rising international migration and mobilities, as well as the ongoing differentiation – in all kinds of intersectional senses – observable in ever more porous global societies, economies and cultures. Integration to a particular model of immigration and citizenship is how the modern nation-state-society responds to these diversities, by reducing them. This has tended to be an isomorphic process in the context of global societies – against the background of global capitalism and its systems of governance – yet is still expressed in nation-state form (Meyer 2010). Although forward-looking and modernist in its outlook, integration tends to be inherently conservative because of the reduction of diversities implicit in national modes of self-differentiation. Yet nation-states may still be diversifying internally. Immigration observers have noted an ethno-cultural and racial ‘transition to diversity’ in recent decades in nearly all highly developed global societies (Alba and Foner 2015) – even long-standing exceptions such as Japan (Liu-Farrer 2020). Other scholars emphasize the increasingly intersectional properties of the new diversity: as a form of ‘superdiversity’ no longer encompassed by relatively stable post-colonial patterns of migration and intercultural contact (Vertovec 2007).

There has also been a critical literature, emerging out of concerns with multiculturalism, which has pointed to the rhetoric of diversity as a typical, flattening policy device of neo-liberalism (Ahmed 2012): an empty rhetoric that hides much tougher issues of racialization and ethno-racial differentiation and intersectionality present endemically in supposedly free, open, egalitarian liberal democracies. I will come back to critically assess some of the more optimistic variants on superdiversity associated with transnationalism, globalization from below, cosmopolitanism, diaspora, hybridity, conviviality and so on in a later chapter. For sure, the global integration of neo-liberalism irrevocably linked to these progressive ideas so redolent of the optimistic 1990s has to be evaluated negatively – while not excluding all the potentially transformative effects of migration, mobilities and diversification of this era.

Integration is, in any case, positioned solidly against these ‘post-national’ forms – yet has found its own way to encompass and incorporate certain ideas of legible diversity made safe for the nation-state. This is why there is often also a Lockean-style discussion about the ‘limits of toleration’ attached to the question (Parekh 2000). Nations may integrate as much migrant diversity as they are able to recognize, something which in turn reflects their sovereign legitimacy to do so. Superdiversity, however, may disrupt this – just as allegedly receiving too many immigrants from too distant cultures may cross some notional threshold and cause integration to fail (Putnam 2007). I will pick up this question of whether there are legitimate limits to integration in this sense at a later point – as well as the neoconservative uses to which these arguments have been put. I will also focus on the question of managing diversity, mainly through the state-sanctioned production of knowledge about it, in categories of ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationality’ produced in official national statistical apparatus. These highly variable approaches across advanced liberal democratic states are one of the most visible ways in which states can be seen to impose categorical and normative models of population classification as a form of governance.

Against this wider backdrop, my focus here is on the problems associated with those forms of mobility and diversity that become governed and managed as ‘immigrant integration’. I will return to the question of an alternative politics to colonialism and neo-liberalism in the closing chapter, but at this point it should be noted that, even in a heavily re-nationalizing world – arguably accelerated by the border closing and state-reinforcing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic – the de-nationalizing effects of mobilities and diversity outside the integration paradigm remain a potentially transformative force.