Here and there

The ‘integration’ of foreigners has become a centrepiece for migration policy in many European countries and is seen as exceptional to modern Europe in comparison to immigration policies within the global north both historically and legally. While the othering of outsiders can be found throughout history, the historical exlusion of foreigners was usually an outright call for dehumanizing dominion over other groups and a complaint that those who were given equal rights would discretely pervert the mythical greatness of a homeland. Integration is built on the assumption that foreigners are intrinsically different and require mechanisms to thrive within a paradoxically homogeneous society.

Similar to Chakrabarty's (2007) notion of the magical histories and subject making of Europe, recent history shows that integration-oriented policy is the best way to support migrant populations. Scholars will return to the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees who gained asylum in Germany and consider how well they have integrated since arriving. Who is employed? How are they employed? Do they speak German well? What about the second generation born after they received asylum?

Few will ask questions regarding their ability to adapt to shifting bureaucratic expectations or how family dynamics changed over time as they gained rights or remained without certain ones. This book has attempted to avoid the gaze towards questions framed in terms of whether or not I believe there is a holistic society one can integrate into, as Schinkel frames discourse on integration (Schinkel 2017, 3). Instead, I have tried to unpack the social phenomena that works as a feedback loop for integration policy and what happened once hundreds of thousands of refugees were introduced into this feedback loop. In doing so, I engage with Schinkel's analysis of ‘the phenomenon of society observing itself in terms of such integration’ (Schinkel 2017, 5). Schinkel calls it the ‘imagined society’, but similar arguments have been made by Glick Schiller and Salazar, by way of the concept of ‘national mythscapes’ (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013), and by Chakrabarty, by way of the continued exploration of Europe as subject (Spivak 1994; Chakrabarty 2007) – the latter two of the three approaches capture the more dynamic feel of the integration regime I explore here.