Provincializing "immigrant integration": privileged migration to Nairobi and the problem of integration. Issue 10 (27th July 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kunz, Sarah
• Is Part Of: Ethnic and racial studies. Volume 45:Issue 10(2022)
• Page Start: 1896
• Page End: 1917
• Publication Date: 2022-07-27
• Subjects: Privileged migration -- integration -- postcolonialism -- immigration -- discourse -- expatriates; Race -- Periodicals; Race relations -- Periodicals; Ethnic groups -- Periodicals; 305.805
• DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1980222
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0141-9870

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Immigrant integration is a key concern in migration research. Yet, recent critiques argue that "immigrant integration" amounts to a neo-colonial form of governance and that scholarship needs to study the discourse of integration, rather than operationalize integration as analytical tool. Drawing on ethnographic research in Nairobi, this article engages and develops these critiques in two ways. It discusses how the notion "integration" is used as a "category of practice" in relation to privileged migrants, so-called expats, in ways that reflect personal anxieties and aspirations, uneven power relations and structural inequalities. Further, the article suggests "provincializing" integration as a way forward: (re)visiting "integration discourse" from its constitutive objects, others, and silences. This requires placing more centrally the voices of those assumedly in need of integration and examining how integration is formulated, practized and contested also in relation to privileged migration and in the Global South.