The notion of -immigrant integration- is used everywhere - by politicians, policy makers, journalists and researchers - as an all-encompassing framework for rebuilding -unity from diversity- after large-scale immigration. Promising a progressive middle way between backward-looking ideas of assimilation and the alleged fragmentation of multiculturalism, -integration- has become the default concept for states scrambling to deal with global refugee management and the persistence of racial disadvantage.
Yet -integration- is the continuance of a long-standing colonial development paradigm. It is how majority-white liberal democracies absorb and benefit from mass migration while maintaining a hierarchy of race and nationality - and the global inequalities it sustains. Immigrant integration sits at the heart of the neo-liberal racial capitalism of recent decades, in which tight control of nation-building and bordering selectively enables some citizens to enjoy the mobilities of a glo
