Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

5 Integrating immigrants
and minorities in a wider
and deeper Europe
Andrew Geddes
Introduction
Debates about the ‘integration’ of immigrants – for this term with its functionalist
imagery and allusions to mathematical processes of building a whole number is
still the preferred term in many European countries – are strongly, perhaps even
indelibly, imprinted with the hallmark of nation-states that have had difficulty
thinking of themselves as immigration countries. One result has been that European
countries – particularly older, north-west European immigration countries – have
tended to seek to ‘nationalise’ their immigrant and ethnic minority populations,
or at least seek to do so, in relation to host society institutions and norms (Banton
2001; Favell 2001). Indeed, there seem since the mid-1990s to have been renewed
attempts to assert policy approaches that downplay the rights of groups defined in
cultural or ethnic terms and emphasise the responsibilities of individuals. In such
terms immigration can be construed as a challenge to the nation-state and to the
organisational practices and ideas that animate these practices within these states.
Yet, there is another element to this discussion that involves turning this
relationship around and analysing the ways in which changes in nation-states and
changed relations between them affect understandings of migrants and minorities.
This chapter focuses on two elements of these: welfare state pressures as an instance
of changed relations within states and political and economic integration within the
European Union (EU) as an instance of changed relations between them. This is
linked to a policy discourse that places far more emphasis on the responsibilities of
individuals and far less on the rights of groups. This focus and policy discourse
applies more generally to the population as a whole, but has particular effects
on immigrants who – often for reasons linked to understandings of culture and
difference – are viewed as a particular ‘integration problem’. Yet, this perception
of these groups as an ‘integration problem’ has less to do with the culture or identity
of these groups than it has to do with the changes in background institutional
conditions such as welfare state pressures that change the perceptions of migrants
and minorities. Welfare state pressures and changed welfare state ideologies have
prompted a tighter demarcation of the boundaries of the community of legitimate
receivers of welfare state benefits and more efforts to exclude those seen as undeserving,
such as so-called ‘bogus asylum seekers’ (Bommes and Geddes 2000).