Integration: a tale of two communities

UK integration policy has attempted to respond to some of the critiques of the integration framework, and policymakers are pursuing an approach that focusses on the local. This paper examines this response with a particular focus on the city of Bristol. It first sets out the fundamental critiques of the integration paradigm and connects these to more general concerns in migration research about methodological nationalism and scholarly engagement with policy making. It notes different responses to these critiques including a turn to place-based approaches. It describes the history of integration policy as a background to understanding contemporary policy and observes the overlooked importance of community. The paper then describes the ESRC Everyday Integration project and the city and neighbourhood context of Bristol before moving to discuss the findings from the project’s fieldwork. We find that ‘community’ was a very important reference point when our interviewees discussed what integration means. Talking about integration helps turns neighbourhoods into ‘communities’, but it also foregrounds ‘national communities’. Integration discourse elides these two meanings of ‘community’, and locates connections between race and class in the challenge of problematic cultures.