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Migrant integration: Can we learn from European experiences?
An announcement on a new UK policy on migrant integration has been expected for some months past. According to press reports this has been working its way around government departments to ensure that whatever form it takes, the strategy will be ‘joined-up’, with civil servants and other stakeholders working to the same agenda.
We are also being warned that the policy will break with the previous government’s preference for integration outcomes which could be demonstrated in concrete terms of community cohesion at the local level. Instead we should expect to see the issue being tackled in four separate strands, likely to be establishing common ground; increasing social mobility; improving participation and countering intolerance and extremism.
Worryingly, it seems that ministers from the various departments working on the issue want to see migrant integration being linked to the drive to push down the numbers of newcomers entering the country with the requirement to speak English to higher standards and participate in wider society being used to justify higher refusal rates in the area of family reunification.
The bitter pill on these points will be somewhat sugar-coated by plans to campaign against "anti-Muslim hatred" and an online integration forum, aimed at "barrier-busting" and encouraging different community and faith groups to come together.
This mixture of soft and hard approaches to integration will be implemented in what has, until now, largely been a policy void. National strategies aimed at assisting newcomers to British society were limited to the experiences of refugees under the last government. Though important work was brokered in this area it never covered more than a very low percentage of people arriving in the country each year. Plans to adopt a broader approach were flagged up by the department for Communities and Local Government in mid-2008 but never went beyond the discussion stage.
When the Government finally announces its plans, groups working to support migrants at local community level are going to need to rush to bring themselves up to speed on the principles which underpin good practice in this area of policy. If rafts of new initiatives are coming down the line on the terms of the four strands which civil servants appear to be working on, then community organizations will need to stake out the ground on which they feel projects can be built and supported and which will properly accommodate the interests of new migrant communities.
Some ideas of what those principles might be are set out in a new publication from the European Network Against Racism (ENAR). The toolkit Working on Integration at a Local Level is the product of a three year long project which was concluded last weekend with its official launch at a conference in Brussels. The Migrants Rights and Integration Project (MRIP) involved partners in six EU countries and looked at activities which aimed to implement the standards that had been set within the EU under the terms of the Common Basic Principles on migrant integration adopted in 2004.
The toolkit sets out the case for a values-led approach to integration policies which are intended to keep projects firmly on the track of meeting the needs and interests of the communities immediately concerned with integration. It is alert to the danger that this is an area of policy which is prone to being diverted by larger stakeholders pushing populist messages which often run counter to the things which need to be achieved at community level.
The opportunities and risks involved in planning migrant integration projects are illustrated from experiences as varied as a campaign to improve mainstream media coverage of migration in Bulgaria, activities supporting domestic workers in Cyprus, the labour market position of African women in Sweden, and community-based initiatives in Belgium, Italy and the UK. The message is that a lot of positive outcomes can be achieved by community-led initiatives, providing that they are clear about the values they want to push in their activity, they have identified the risks involved in working with stakeholders like government, which are invariably larger and better resourced but more likely to be pushing in directions which do not entirely honour the principles of good practice, including those listed in the EU’s Common Basic Principles which they are nominally signed up to and committed to applying.
The UK government’s approach which, as far as can be seen, is being developed without any input from groups representing the interests of migrants is likely to carry the maximum risk of overlooking immediate community context for this work in order to push the goals it is trying to achieve within the frame of national politics. Experience suggests that this will be a very bad thing and that migrant-led projects will need to develop a full suite of strategies and tactics which can contain and neutralize these risks.
The ENAR/MRIP has been coordinated over the three years of its work by MRN and we are keen to see what use can be made of the toolkit in the work of community-based organizations in the UK. A copy of the 46-page document can be download by clicking HERE.
We can also provide you with a free copy of the printed copy of the toolkit. Please send an A4 sized self-addressed envelop stamped for £1.09 for first class post or 92p second class, to:
MRIP Toolkit
MRN
Royal London House
22-25 Finsbury Square
London EC2A 1DX
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Comments
Don
I must admit, having looked through the toolkit, while I agreed with much of it I thought it was lacking in its failure to emphasise work with settled communities alongside migrant communites, as being absolute key to success at neighbourhood level. Also, being an EU-wide document, it perhaps necessarily covers issues like long-term residency as a requirement for integration (and of course, it's very desirable), but practitioners can't do much about this at local level.
That said, I think it's good to have EU-material like this as a point of reference.
I think you are right to say that the government's integration policy will enter a policy void (and we'll have to see how successfully it fills it). This was one of the points made in the recent paper on leadership from the Housing and Migration Network( http://www.migrantsrights.org.uk/migration-pulse/2011/migration-who-will... ). I do think though that a lot of useful local work has been done - despite this void - in many cases financed by the Migration Impacts Fund but also by local authorities and sometimes housing associations and other bodies.
It will be a great pity if a policy is launched that not only leaves aside national migrant bodies like MRN, but also local practitioners and - worst of all - migrant groups themselves, especially those which already have relevant experience on which the policy could build - especially those involved in successfully bringing together migrant and settled communities and tackling both their differences and their common problems.
Thanks for this comment John.
I take your point about the need to emphasis bridge-building activities with groups representing the host community. There snatches of that in the accounts of the work in Brussels, with youth groups producing a newspaer that circulates across the whole of the Marolles district. The work in San Salvario in Turin was initated in response to anti-immigrant agitation led by local residence groups. The strategy there was to create a space where the leaders of the these grups could meet with migrant represetnatives and work through the issues that jointly concerned them. It was quickly established that both wanted to see action on more-or-less the same things - petty crime and drug-dealing, litter, few facilities for young people - and very quickly came up with agreements on how they should jointly press their case with the various local authorities. The tension of a few years ago has now largely subsided and the 'Casa del Quartiere' which was the first fruit of the joint campaign now exists as a stylish community resource centre/cafe/library.
I also agree that there are very good examples of local community initiatives in the UK which fit into this model of good integration work. The difficulty is, in their dealings with public authorities they often do not get this aspect of their work and its value across and as a result community-led integration is often tainted with the same sense of failure which politicians work hard to associate with multi-culturalism, etc. The field is then left open for government departments to brand integration as another policy approach altogether, much more coercive and with the element of community engagement and negotiation largely missing.
It will be interesting to see how our sector responds to the policy paper on integration when if finally emerges from government. My view is that we need to raise the volume on the message that there is a success story buried there under all the pessimism about migrtion impacts, and we need to produce the evidence to support this contention. It would be good to hear from others out there who think that the projects they have been working on count as initiatives which have made a measureable, positive contribution to integration.
in english?
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