‘The problem is: how can we get Norwegians to integrate with us?’

Blog post by Alyssa Marie Kvalvaag, Nord University, Norway

When questions around migration appear in a European context, the concept ‘integration’ often follows. Despite being a well-established concept within migration policies and studies, many scholars have highlighted that integration is characterized by ambiguities and multiple, often unclear, meanings (e.g., Grillo 2011; Kutor, Arku, and Bandauko 2023; Vertovec 2020).

In my Identities article, ‘Contesting integration discourses: migrant organizations and epistemic resistance in northern Norway’, I explore how leaders of migrant organizations use and contest integration discourses by drawing on their experiential ways of knowing and doing. Migrant organizations are understood as organizations created by migrants and run (primarily) for migrants. I argue that leaders of migrant organizations use integration discourses to ‘do’ multiple things, at times subverting common ways of knowing about integration and carving out new spaces of possibilities in thinking about what integration is and may be. 

My article draws on empirical material collected in northern Norway to discuss three aspects of integration discourses that leaders of migrant organizations contest. First, leaders of migrant organizations contest the target groups of integration and distribution of resources for learning the Norwegian language. The ways in which the Norwegian state categorizes migrants determines whether they have the right and duty to complete free language courses. Leaders express concern that labour migrants may remain ‘invisible’ in Norwegian integration policy, where lack of access to Norwegian language courses may create, sustain, amplify and reproduce social and economic segregation and inequalities.
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Second, leaders of migrant organizations contest unequal expectations regarding participation and emphasize the importance of Norwegian participation. As one of the leaders I interviewed expressed: ‘The problem is: how can we get Norwegians to integrate with us?’. As opposed to letting integration discourses position migrants as subjects of charity (McPherson 2010), the leaders demonstrate that migrants are not merely passive recipients of charity, nor are they merely participants in initiatives, activities and events arranged by the majority society. Rather, they are creative agents who also identify needs and interests in their local communities and mobilize to the benefit of the local community at large.

Third, leaders of migrant organizations contest the idea of migrants as being in a perpetual state of arrival. Rather, they frame integration as feeling at home and being seen. This understanding of integration emphasizes migrants’ presence and their contributions as vital members of their respective local communities.

Integration discourses involve powerful representations of the self and others; inform state created categories, rights and regulations; shape expectations regarding participation; and suggest ways of relating to one another in practice. Leaders of migrant organizations use integration discourses to work with and against integration as a concept to ‘bring about different ways of knowing, doing and being’ (Gunaratnam 2003). Through their experiential knowledges and practices, leaders of migrant organizations explicitly and implicitly challenge integration discourses in essence and content.  

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Image credit: Photo by Martine Jacobsen on Unsplash

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Read the Identities article:
Kvalvaag, Alyssa Marie. (2024). Contesting integration discourses: migrant organizations and epistemic resistance in northern Norway. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2024.2398899   OPEN ACCESS

Read further in Identities:

Towards a differentiated notion of the mainstream: superdiversity and residents’ conceptions of immigrant integration   OPEN ACCESS

Multiculturalism and welfare state integration: Swedish model path dependency   OPEN ACCESS

The labyrinth towards citizenship: contradictions in the framing and categorization of immigrants in immigration and integration policies