As Erdal (2013) suggested, to counterbalance political viewpoints on integration, it is
essential to incorporate migrants’ voices in the integration discourse, which would contribute to more balanced and multi-sided apprehensions of the concept of integration. Especially, as integration is often considered as migrants’ ‘homework’ (Rutter et al. 2007: 99), and its steps are indeed primarily taken by migrants. Therefore, there is an acute need to investigate
migrants’ approaches to integration. This Section 2.2.6 will contain a concise overview of migrants’ understandings of integration, primarily within the UK context.
Since integration programmes in the UK ‘traditionally’ targeted refugees, refugees’ views on integration have been collected from time to time. For instance, Ager and Strang’s 2004 report, commissioned by the Home Office, examined refugees’ voices around integration. Several main themes emerged that refugees saw as paramount for their integration. British citizenship was, for example, a much sought after legal status to achieve, enabling full political participation and providing a sense of strong legal stability. The right to vote was also perceived ‘as an important sign of recognition by the host society’ (p. 9). Apart from these political aspects of integration, refugees seemed to be mostly concerned about cultural and structural incorporation shown mainly in learning English and civic information, getting access to vocational training and education in general, and also to information on services. Refugees increasingly saw that ‘the onus of responsibility is on them to integrate’ (p. 9). A following piece of research focused similarly on refugee integration, more specifically on the integration experiences of refugees (Rutter et al., 2007). The report claimed that most studies on refugee integration overlooked more subtle issues of integration, and thus to gain a more holistic view on refugee integration it was essential to involve refugees in developing integration policies targeting them. From their narratives, integration emerged as a concept far from being linear, heavily contextualised and strongly impacted by everyday
circumstances and the responses to them. For the interviewed refugees, practicalities of integration could be best understood at the micro level, at sites that were closest to them and most significant in their everyday lives. Labour market immersion of the individual migrants was high on the list of their integration-related priorities. Social integration in the form of frequent encounters with others within their neighbourhood was also a key element of feeling integrated. A palpable appreciation of basic rights permeated their recollections, which transpired from their high-level political involvement and presence in the ethnic minority voluntary sector. Contrary to what political discourses on unsuccessful integration of some ethnic minorities might have suggested, participants in the research successfully negotiated their multiple identities in their host country and viewed Britishness as part of their integrated identity, allowing them a more secure life cushioned by political, economic and social rights. Britishness for them did not necessarily mean interiorising ‘British’ cultural norms and values, although they certainly shared and conformed to values and norms of the British ‘mainstream’. As Hammond (2013) claimed in a more recent study,
if integration is associated with migrant identity and the migrant who thinks of him/herself as belonging to the place in which s/he has settled, then this kind of integration does not appear to be a high priority,
which is also applicable to the participant refugees of Rutter et al.’s study. Although it is a major step that policymakers have turned their attention towards this specific group of migrants, nevertheless, like Ager and Strang’s research described above (2004), Rutter et al.’s research also focused on the experiences and views of a particular group of migrants, that of refugees, who represented only a fraction of the whole migrant population in the UK, and who possibly would have had different integration related needs ensuing from their pre- migration life histories of uncertainties and fear. Collecting refugees’ voices, nevertheless, still remains relevant.
Recently a number of scholars have begun to focus on the concept of integration as
understood by immigrants as a wider group (Amin 2007 in Rutter 2013; Brubaker et al 2008; Cherti and McNeil 2012; Korac 2003; Rutter et al. 2007; Rutter et al. 2008; Wessendorf 2011). Their qualitative social research unveils a pragmatic approach to the notion of integration. According to such studies, for migrants, integration is linked to and gains meaning from everyday and local relations. Participants tend to conceptualise less in abstract terms. Instead, they highlight integrative powers of tangible encounters within everyday social spaces that can be directly linked to their lives. These happen primarily at workplaces, children’s schools, sport clubs, or otherwise in their closest spatial vicinity (Cherti and McNeill 2012). Refugees’ understandings of integration seem to be closely in agreement with such findings, except that for refugees, acquisition of political rights seemed to be more accentuated. The labour market emerges as an area of social participation that is equally significant for both policy makers and migrants, albeit from different perspectives. The chief concern of policy makers is to avoid migrants being dependent on the state, whilst migrants view labour market participation as a financial, social and emotional necessity (Spencer 2006) for their life in the host country, and their integration. Labour market integration for them thus functions on at least two levels; it is often seen as both precondition and outcome of migrant integration. Although not often considered, the level of income could also be closely related to integration, especially as it impacts on the financial capacity to interact with others in social spaces outside the workplace (Datta et al. 2006).
A more recent study from the Institute for Research into Superdiversity, ‘Migration and Integration’, examined factors facilitating and impeding migrant integration, primarily in
their local communities and neighbourhoods (Craig 2015). This was considered chiefly in relation to the ‘critical’ domains of health provision, education, housing and the labour market. Also, the research shed light on how integration programmes work in practice, thus contributing to gaining further insight into how certain factors and circumstances impact on local integration endeavours.
Although seeking integration-related ideas of those who assume the lion’s share in the process of integration would seem obvious, there is a relative lack of interest in the wider group of migrants’ views on integration at the highest policy making level. Also, the voices of migrants themselves are usually absent from the literature (Craig 2015). It is argued that the main reason for that is that the highly informative ‘grey’ literature, prepared by
community organisations and NGOs that have most access to migrants and knowledge of migrant integration due to their local position, is rarely considered in top-down migration discourses and literature, hence the need to address this hiatus (Craig 2015). Also, most studies of migrant integration construe migrants as a homogeneous group, and thus in general fail to give adequate attention to certain main markers of difference, such as gender (Goodson and Phillimore 2008), level of education, or class. Considering the role of gender in integration is highly relevant, the more so as ‘too often integration processes take place in the context of organisations and groups which are dominated by men’ (Craig 2015:
8). Furthermore, in relation to the level of education, it is a widely-held assumption that (highly) skilled migrants, i.e. ‘those at the top’ (Gidley and Jayaweera 2010: 11), are exempt from integration-related difficulties, and as such have relatively smooth integration paths. This premise was strongly questioned by Gidley and Jayaweera (2010) in their research conducted on migrant incorporation in London. It is therefore imperative that when assessing integration of migrants of first and subsequent generations, differences construed alongside such markers of difference should be taken into account (Saggar et al. 2012). My research therefore aims to address this gap in the literature by exploring understandings of integration of migrants themselves, situated at the intersection of gender (women), educational level (highly educated), class (higher classes, from middle-middle class upwards), and to a certain extent ethnicity.