Europe's migration challenge: from integration to inclusion

This much we know: Europe needs migrants for a host of well-known reasons including their economic contribution to EU coffers and pension systems, creaking under the pressure of ageing populations. Migrants and refugees are also needed for their skills and talents – and their hard labour in sectors which are no longer viewed as attractive by many Europeans.

The number of migrants arriving in Europe is down from the peak reached in 2015. Many refugees who fled violence in the Middle East are returning to their homes. Increased border controls and EU deals with Turkey and Libya have succeeded in keeping out many migrants – but have also led to many being stranded in camps outside Europe. 

Yet, the hysteria over the ‘migration crisis’ is very much alive across Europe. It targets not only the newcomers but also settled migrants – who came to Europe in the last century – their children and grandchildren. Fuelled by Far Right populists, deliberate disinformation and misleading reporting, ‘us and them’ stories dominate Europe’s political and social landscape, with the implicit understanding that ‘they’ – the outsiders, intruders, foreigners – are aliens who do not belong and can never belong in a ‘white and Christian Europe’.

Assimilation and multiculturalism haven’t created ‘true Europeans’

As the focus rightly turns to the future, similar false claims and erroneous arguments cloud the discussion over ways in which migrants and refugees – new and old – can become full-fledged members of their new communities, assuming the rights but also the obligations of being ‘true European’ citizens.   

There is no magic bullet for transforming migrants into ‘true Europeans’. Governments in Europe have tried both assimilation and multiculturalism policies. As Giles Merritt, President of Friends of Europe, notes in an upcoming book, neither approaches have worked. “So far there are few convincing models” for ensuring the social and economic integration of newcomers,” Merritt correctly argues. “There must be a far more determined effort and a greater financial commitment if present and future newcomers are to be absorbed into European society.”

‘Integration handbooks’ aren’t the magic bullet

With assimilation and multiculturalism equally discredited, the focus has switched to ‘integration’. No one doubts that – as underlined by the European Commission – the integration of third country nationals is “a precondition for an inclusive, cohesive and prosperous society”.

But how do you get there?

The Commission Action Plan for the Integration of Third Country Nationals published in June 2016 includes actions across a number of policy areas considered “crucial for integration”. They include:

• Pre-departure and pre-arrival measures, including actions to prepare migrants and the local communities for the integration process
• Education, including actions to promote language training, participation of migrant children to Early Childhood Education and Care, teacher training and civic education
• Employment and vocational training, including actions to promote early integration into the labour market and migrant entrepreneurship
• Access to basic services such as housing and healthcare
• Active participation and social inclusion, including actions to support exchanges with the receiving society, migrants’ participation to cultural life and fighting discrimination

The Plan also includes tools to “strengthen coordination between the different actors working on integration at national, regional and local level and encourages mutual learning between EU member states”.

A ‘Handbook on Integration’ published in 2010 contains useful lessons learned and good practices for “successful integration policies.”

The International Organization for Migration, meanwhile, defines integration as “the process of mutual adaptation between the host society and the migrants, both as individuals and as groups”. Integration implies a sense of obligation and respect for a core set of values that bind migrants and their host communities in a common purpose, it says, underlining also the need to ensure the “full engagement” of migrants in society, economy, culture and  politics. Also highlighted is the importance of noting the positive contributions of migrants and the promotion of inter-cultural dialogues, handbooks and toolboxes for cultural awareness.

“The duty to integrate”

This is all good, solid advice. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, however, has gone a step further. In a report published by his Institute for Global Change, Blair insists that migrant communities must be compelled to do more to integrate to help combat the rise of “Far Right bigotry”.

“There is a duty to integrate, to accept the rules, laws and norms of our society that all British people hold in common and share,” says Blair, adding: “Integration is not a choice, it is a necessity.” Governments should be enforcers of the “duty to integrate” through, among other things, so-called “civic integration contracts”.

Blair’s comments have triggered a strong response including from respected British writer and Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty: “If integration is your sole metric of success, we will always, at some level, fail. I can’t make myself white, my mother can’t forget her Bengali, and neither of us can be you.”

Attempts at forced integration, through special courses for migrants and a focus on rules and laws have, in fact, long been considered the “institutional backbone” of integration policy. They may be useful for newcomers as they try to learn a new language or find jobs. But there is scant evidence that they instil a true sense of belonging or the kind of complete integration desired by Blair and others.

They can in fact have the reverse effect by underlining the migrant’s ‘otherness’. In Friends of Europe’s discussion paper Real people, true stories: refugees for more inclusive societies, contributor Tamim Nashed says being obliged to attend ‘integration’ programmes in Austria made him feel excluded from his new friends and community, reminding him that he was an outsider. Others in the publication point out that instead of focusing on classrooms, authorities should encourage integration through everyday life and contact with the majority population.

So how about switching the conversation to inclusion?

With the conversation around integration becoming increasingly complicated and confusing, along with the focus shifting to compulsory integration and more prescriptive top-down approaches, it’s time to try a different approach.

Despite all the talk of how societies have to accept, adjust and adapt to new arrivals – or to those who have been here for some time but still look and act ‘foreign’ – European and national policies have traditionally put the onus on the newcomers to integrate into communities.

Integration may in theory be described as being a ‘two-way street’, with all members of society making compromises and finding common ground, but the burden is most often solely placed on migrants. The explicit and implicit narrative is simple: start thinking, behaving and dressing like ‘true Europeans’.

The illusion that there is ‘one’ over-arching European identity is hammered home in schools, at work and at play. The message is reinforced by the lack of diversity in European and national institutions. Disinformation campaigns further widen the rift.  

Putting inclusion at the centre of the migration debate means shifting this one-dimensional focus on migrants as perennial ‘others’ to a recognition of the dynamic, multi-faceted and multi-layered interaction between people as they live and work together.

Inclusive societies provide ALL members of society with the opportunity to participate equally in political, economic, social and cultural life. They do not cling to out-dated ideas or uni-dimensional definitions of ‘European identity’, preferring instead to recognise that there are many ways of being European – and that ‘hyphenated Europeans’ with fluid, changing and multiple identities are full members of society.

In other words, inclusive policies encourage a sense of togetherness and instil a sense of belonging rather than exclusion and non-belonging or otherness.

Shifting the conversation – and crafting policies – which focus on inclusion isn’t going to be easy, however. We suggest three ways of making a start: