Monitoring the impact of doing nothing: New trends in immigrant integration policy

Abstract

‘Mainstreaming’ has recently been considered as a possible new strategy for advancing immigrant integration in Europe. However, policy documents and current academic literature have hardly conceptualized what we label as ‘ethnic equality mainstreaming’. In this article, we lean on the widely available research on gender mainstreaming, to provide such a conceptualization of ethnic equality mainstreaming. Once conceptualized, we verify whether there is indeed a trend towards mainstreaming in Western Europe's old immigration countries. Our results show that there is no straightforward trend towards ethnic equality mainstreaming in these countries. However, the indicators that served to detect the existence of ethnic equality mainstreaming allowed us to uncover a new double and paradoxical trend in immigrant integration policies. This ‘new style’ immigrant integration policy can be depicted as follows: increasing ‘colourblindization’, in combination with ‘ethnic monitoring’. In other words, states increasingly monitor the impact of ‘doing nothing’.

Knocking on the Doors of Integration: Swedish Integration Policy and the Production of a National Space

“…Just as many other European countries adopted a multicultural policy approach, this Bdownscaling^of multiculturalism was not a sole Swedish approach either. Similar processes and debates also happened in other countries where multiculturalism had been embraced (Borevi 2014;Westerveen and Adam 2018). Kaczmarczyk et al (2015) write that the belief that a multicultural approach is positive for integration of immigrants was diminished in the last year's debate in Europe and has reverted to a more socioeconomic conception of integration, with focus on the adaptation of immigrants and their establishment to the labor market (Favell 2014).…”

“…From the mid-1970s, equality has been the overriding policy objective in Sweden, and Kaczmarczyk et al (2015) write that Sweden was a pioneering state in Europe in adopting a Bmulticultural policy^as early as the middle of the 1970s. Many European states followed and approached towards acceptance of cultural and ethnic diversity (Kaczmarczyk et al 2015;Westerveen and Adam 2018). The selective policy model in the 1980s is a period of critique towards the multicultural model (Dahlström 2004)-yet not the universal policy model that still made the base for the integration policy.…”

Diversity-mainstreaming in times of ageing and migration: implementation paradoxes in municipal aged care provision

“…In the Netherlands, a shift from multiculturalism to assimilationism has taken place over the course of two decades, starting in the 1990s with the rise of societal concerns about the relatively negative outcomes of citizens with a non-Western migration background in statistics on education, labour market participation and crime (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010;Westerveen and Adam 2019). Whereas previously, differences between citizens with and without a migration background were mostly attributed to structural inequalities, which were to be addressed through targeted policies to support minorities, since the late 1990s the responsibility for closing societal gaps was increasingly put on the shoulders of immigrants and ethnic minorities themselves (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010;Westerveen and Adam 2019). As part of the shift towards assimilationism, people with a migration background were also expected to identify more with an (imagined) Dutch community than with an ethnic minority group.…”

Boundary Integrationism and its Subject: Shifts and Continuities in the EU Framework on Migrant Integration

“…Amidst recent immigrant and refugee arrivals and in the context of controversies related to security, Islam and the alleged failure of multiculturalism, immigrant integration has remained high on the European political agenda in the past decades. Rather than improving the livelihoods, rights and opportunities of non-citizens and citizens alike, scholars have argued that integration policies instead burden "migranticized" (as per Dahinden, 2016) and minoritized groups with "ethnic monitoring" (Westerveen & Adam, 2019) and serve as a boundary-making tool (Brown, 2016;Schinkel, 2017). Since the 1990s, the governance of "integration" in Europe has undergone a decentralization of authority from national governments downwards to city levels, outwards to civil society, and upwards to the European Union.…”