Settling In: How Migrant Communities Integrate

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Integration is one of those words that everybody uses and few people define the same way. Politicians tend to mean cultural conformity. Economists tend to mean labour market outcomes. Migrants themselves usually mean something more practical: whether the qualifications count, whether the accent is a problem at work, whether the children are doing well, whether the neighbours say hello. Because the word carries all these meanings simultaneously, arguments about integration frequently involve people talking past each other while believing they disagree about facts.

The academic literature has at least tried to be precise. The American sociologist Milton Gordon, writing in 1964, broke assimilation into distinct dimensions that need not move together: cultural change such as language and dress, structural entry into the institutions and social clubs of the receiving society, intermarriage, identity, and the disappearance of prejudice and discrimination. His central insight was that a group could adopt the host culture thoroughly while remaining structurally excluded, which is precisely what happened to many minorities. Later scholars, notably Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou in 1993, proposed segmented assimilation: the children of migrants do not all converge on a single mainstream but follow divergent paths, some into professional life, some into stagnation, and some into upward mobility achieved specifically by retaining rather than abandoning ethnic community ties. The last of these findings is counterintuitive and has held up reasonably well.

What receiving states actually do

Settlement policy is a relatively recent invention. For most of the twentieth century the major English speaking receiving countries operated racially restrictive entry rules and then expected whoever got in to disappear into the majority. Australia's Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 established what became known as the White Australia policy, using a dictation test to exclude non European arrivals; it was progressively dismantled between 1966 and 1973. Canada removed racial criteria and introduced its points system in 1967. The United States abolished national origins quotas with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Britain moved in the opposite direction over the same period, restricting Commonwealth entry through successive Acts while legislating against racial discrimination domestically through the Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968 and 1976.

The shift from assimilation to multiculturalism as an official stance came in the 1970s. Canada declared a multiculturalism policy in 1971 and passed the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988. In Australia, the Galbally Report of 1978 recommended funded ethnic community services, interpreter provision and multilingual broadcasting, and became the foundation of a settlement services architecture that still exists. Practical instruments matter more than declarations here. Free or subsidised language tuition, such as Australia's Adult Migrant English Program which dates from 1948, telephone interpreting services, recognition assessment for foreign qualifications, and settlement grants to community organisations do more observable work than any statement of values. Several European states run compulsory integration courses combining language with civic instruction, and the Netherlands, Germany and France all tie aspects of residence status to passing them, a model that raises the question of whether integration is a service or an obligation.

Enclaves, credentials and the second generation

Migrants cluster, and the clustering is usually described as a failure of integration when it is more often a mechanism of it. Southall in west London, Harris Park and Parramatta in Sydney, Jackson Heights in Queens, Devon Avenue in Chicago, the Gerrard Street India Bazaar in Toronto and Little India in Singapore all developed the same way: one or two businesses catering to a specific need, then a critical mass, then a place where a newcomer can find housing, employment, credit, groceries, worship and advice in a single afternoon. Research on ethnic economies suggests such concentrations lower the cost of arrival substantially. They also carry costs, including lower exposure to the majority language and dependence on employers from the same community, who may pay below market rates. Whether an enclave is a springboard or a trap is not a question with a general answer, and depends heavily on whether its residents can leave it.

The single most persistent obstacle for skilled migrants is credential recognition. Engineers, doctors, accountants, teachers and nurses arrive with degrees that receiving countries either do not recognise or recognise only after long and expensive re-examination. The consequence, widely documented in Canada and Australia in particular, is that migrants selected precisely for their qualifications end up working substantially below their skill level, a phenomenon usually called brain waste. Medical registration is the most conspicuous example: overseas trained doctors typically face examinations, supervised practice periods and, in several countries, geographic restrictions requiring them to work in underserved regions before gaining full registration. Governments defend these systems as necessary for patient safety and professional standards; critics point out that the barriers are applied unevenly between countries of origin, which is difficult to justify on safety grounds alone.

The measurable evidence tends to show integration happening across generations rather than within one. Migrants who arrive as adults usually retain an accent and often earn less than comparable native born workers for years, with the gap narrowing but not always closing. Their children generally reach or exceed local averages in education, particularly where the parents were selected for skills, and they typically speak the local language as a first language. Rates of intermarriage, residential dispersal and civic participation all rise in the second and third generations. This is the pattern behind the observation that integration is slow but rarely stalled, and it is why studies that measure only recently arrived adults produce systematically pessimistic conclusions.

There is one dimension where the optimistic reading does not hold automatically. Structural acceptance, in Gordon's sense, depends on the receiving society and not on the migrant. Discrimination in hiring has been demonstrated repeatedly through correspondence studies, in which otherwise identical job applications carrying different names receive different callback rates; such experiments have been run in the United States, Britain, Australia, France and Sweden with broadly consistent results. No amount of language acquisition or civic knowledge addresses that. This is the honest limit of the integration debate: half the variables belong to the people arriving, and half belong to the people already there, and public argument tends to concentrate almost entirely on the first half.

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