Deeper Histories of Immigration - #6 Integration
The concept of integration is widely hailed by policy people as the best result for new immigrant arrivals. But let's dig a little deeper. The integration concept was first invented in late 19th century Europe, among philosophers, “fathers” of sociology like Emile Durkheim, and elites. It was joined to the coinage of “modern society.”
Modern social life meant the entry of peasants, displaced by capitalists, as workers into growing industrial cities 🏭. It also meant demands by new radical politics like Marxism, trade unionism, feminism, anarchism, and so on. This (and of course all this is simplifying) was labeled a “problem" of "modern society."
❗ Here’s where the “need” for integration was invented.
You see, the peasants turned workers were often seen as uncivilized, unproductive, irrational, incapable of political participation, a new threat to the social order. As were vagabonds, Jews, people in psychiatric institutions, anybody non-white, prisoners, immigrants.
Integration was a proposed “solution” to “foreign” threats to modern capitalist society, immigrants being one of them, today the only one for which terms is reserved.
It gets a little complicated here. The threats were understood in organic terms 👩🔬 , through two forms of thought that became (and still are) dominant in political and social discourse, but were unheard of a mere century earlier:
1️⃣ Organicist sociology. Piggy-backing off evolutionary theories 🐒 , organicists sociologists saw society like an organism. New parts (individuals) could be integrated to the organism, but only under the premise that they shared the same immutable “organic traits” (language, religion, custom…). If not? Then they were a social pathogen.
2️⃣ Organicist nationalism. Nationalists took this one step further: the nation-states were social organisms. So, society and social body were subsumed under particular national registers: 🇫🇷 society, 🇸🇪 society, 🇬🇧 society.
Organicism led to the belief that being a (true) member of a nation, of a national society, is a matter of fixed traits, intimately tied to some bordered soil.
Here’s the often missed vicious result of this conceptual alchemy: “integrating” became kind of an impossible demand. No matter how well you adapted, how well you spoke the language, how successful you were, there was always the matter of your other fixed national, skin color, "race"... origins.
Later on, integration came to mean a more “two-way” structural and cultural exchange, where the demands were less, well, racist. Just follow the laws in your new country, speak the language, participate, 🆗 be "different," that kind of thing.
But the organicist form has made a comeback with a vengeance in policy. As popular as it’s become again, know that it rests on pseudo-scientific racialized thinking that’s been debunked over and over again. Time for some new radical thinking about what integration should mean.