Читать книгу The Integration Nation - Adrian Favell - Страница 8

International migration is frequently cited as one of the key ‘global challenges’ facing the planet. Along with other economic, political and ecological ruptures, it is often rolled into a more generally perceived ‘crisis’ of liberal democracy. A constructive and ostensibly progressive attitude to migration management was a hallmark of the ‘global era’ of the 1990s, which gave way to the much more anxious and politically contentious debates of the 2000s and after about the future of globalization. Yet a forward-looking view on ‘immigrant integration’ is still the commitment of much academic and policy research, seeking to respond to ongoing international migration in a positive way. Such work is trapped in a paradigm caught between modernist social theory and the demands of ‘impact’-oriented applied social research. This is the doxa of mainstream thought on migration, expressed in an unquestioned linear view of immigration, integration and citizenship that anchors the power of notionally post-colonial nation-states in the North Atlantic West. Introducing the elements of a new political demography, in this opening chapter I expose the mainstream linear view, then discuss some of my background assumptions about mobilities, diversity and the persistent idea of society beyond the nation-state.