The Democratic Shortcomings of ‘Immigrant Integration’

Integration purports to secure two aims: it empowers immigrants and minority communities so that they can exercise free and equal membership in the state, and, because it does so by ensuring some shared commitment to liberal democratic values and other national cultural practices, integration purports to maintain public values necessary for the liberal democratic nation-state, to foster trust and social cohesion, and to forestall the rise of the far right. By securing these two ends, the story goes, integration sustains liberal democracy. Drawing on scholarship in sociology, history, and migration studies that critically scrutinise the ‘integration paradigm’ (Anderson 2024; Favell 2022; Schinkel 2017), I argue that integration policies fail in both aims. First, integration practices do not empower immigrants and minority communities to exercise free and equal membership; rather, they place immigrants in a subordinate position: the ‘good immigrant’ is a deferential immigrant who knows their place. Integration does not achieve democratic inclusion. Second, by advancing an idealised conception of the political community and the ‘good citizen’ (Anderson 2013), integration undermines equality amongst non-immigrants and hinders localised and pluralistic forms of democratic engagement and active citizenship that are not disciplined by the state.