I recently listened to some Brexit voters complaining about immigrants failing to integrate. I’d like to ask what they think ‘integration’ means. No doubt they’d cite nebulous ideas such as “accepting British values” — terms so open to interpretation they’re impossible to quantify.
The ambiguity around integration is best exemplified by the ‘British citizenship test,’ designed to ensure immigrants possess the necessary information to integrate. This test is universally mocked because the questions have nothing to do with everyday life and most British people would struggle to answer them.
The test includes questions like: Who first printed books with a printing press? Where did the first farmers come from? Under which king did the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in England unite to defeat the Vikings?
Personally, I can’t imagine a situation where I’m asked if I have integrated in the Czech Republic and I reply: “Yes, because I know Wenceslas inherited the throne of Bohemia (Czech Republic) in 921.”
Those who dislike these tests believe that, in reality, integration is about how well immigrants ‘fit into’ their new culture. This definition sounds better, but only creates more problems:
Firstly, ‘fitting in’ is another vague notion (are you sensing a pattern here?) And secondly, people confuse ‘fitting in’ with replicating the behaviour of the host. I know foreigners who have lived in China for twenty years, speak the language, have a Chinese family, eat Chinese food and watch Chinese TV. In their spare time you’ll find them spitting venom at how they’re still treated as foreigners.
Perhaps such people would be better off accepting they will always be ‘foreigners.’ And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I mean, what’s the end goal here – for immigrants to become so integrated there is nothing left of their previous selves? That’s not integration, it’s disintegration — discarding their native cultures and replacing them with new ones.
Where does this leave us with our definition of integration?
Some argue foreigners can at least integrate in the physical sense by living among the locals and throwing themselves into the local community. In reality this is rare. A typical complaint in Leeds is: “They (insert race) come here and stay together in one place, they’re taking over whole areas of our cities.”
It’s true the Indian community (for example) favoured one area, but isn’t this to be expected? They share things in common and so want to live close to each other; in the same way expats can often be found hanging out together. Also, the Indian community weren’t shutting white British people out. I lived nearby and everyone was friendly, so if anything the white British had shut themselves out by claiming the area was no longer ‘for them’.
Finally, some people argue that we should avoid the term integration altogether because it implies a hierarchy. I.e., we want to assimilate or integrate a group that are different from us because we believe our culture or state is something worth assimilating in (ours is a norm everyone else should get closer to).
As you can see, defining integration becomes a near impossible task. But before creating more initiatives showing people “how to integrate”, let’s reconsider what successful integration might look like.
Currently, we have a utopian vision of people from all various countries seamlessly mixing and mimicking their hosts. Not only does this vision kill multiculturalism, it’s also impossible to achieve. I’m not saying foreigners shouldn’t make an effort to understand the culture or the language. My point is their outlook and behaviour will always be coloured by their cultural conditioning. And a culture is so intricate that to some extent they will always be viewing it from the outside.
With this in mind, what might our new vision of integration look like?
Integration means bringing two or more things together. For me, this means neither trying to be Czech nor forgetting I’m English. I aim to recognise what I can give to the foreign culture and what I can receive from it return. Broadly speaking, whenever we bring two or more things together it’s unlikely everything will fall into place. Friction and chaos are inevitable, but we must keep trying — because while immigration can sometimes feel like a failure — it brings enrichment and innovation in the most unpredictable ways.