03/2010: Dr. Howard Duncan and Prof. Michael Keith

SPECIAL IOM/EURASYLUM INTERVIEW SERIES ON ”THE FUTURE OF MIGRATION”

(February-June 2010)

Building on Eurasylum’s existing monthly policy interviews, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Eurasylum have launched a special series on ”The Future of Migration: Building Capacities for Change”. This monthly interview series will run from February to June 2010 and will aim to feed into the World Migration Report 2010, which will be dedicated fully to this policy theme. This special monthly interview series is designed to collect the views of senior public officials, social partners and reputable academics worldwide about the needs for new capacity building measures in five major policy areas:

– Climate change (February 2010);
– Integration and Rights (March 2010);
– Labour Migration (April 2010);
– Migration and Development (May 2010); and
– Migration Governance (June 2010).

These interviews will be published in full on Eurasylum’s website and excerpts will appear, as text boxes, in the next World Migration Report (September 2010)

___________________________________________________________

MARCH 2010

Dr. Howard Duncan
Executive Director of Metropolis,
Citizenship and Immigration Canada

and

Prof. Michael Keith
Director of the Centre on Migration, Policy, and
Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford; former member
of the UK government’s Commission on Integration and Cohesion

on

‘’Integration and rights of migrants: policy priorities and
directions for new capacity building measures”

 

Ü IOM/Eurasylum: Integration and rights of migrants is a multifaceted policy concept that encompasses a range of economic, social and cultural factors. In your opinion, and drawing on the situation of different regions in the world, what are the most critical priorities/needs for the development of new institutional frameworks and capacity building measures in this policy area, distinguishing among short term, circular and long term migrants?

Ü Dr. Howard Duncan: For the better part of a generation, many states in the developed world placed their migration policy focus on measures to prevent the entry of foreign nationals to their territory. Even some states that had migrants present would deny that they were countries of immigrants, preferring to think of foreign nationals as temporary residents who would eventually return to their homelands. This attitude has given way to not only an acceptance of the fact of immigration but, in a growing number of countries, to a recognition of the desirability, even the necessity, of managed migration for economic prosperity and the maintenance of population size. This will take on a stronger edge as the West sees its historical population and economic advantages lose ground to rapidly developing economies elsewhere in the world.

Accepting immigration has encouraged governments to shift their attention from almost exclusively border control towards integration. This shift has taken many avenues including the incorporation of immigrants into the labour market, their taking on an active membership in the society of destination, rights protection for the immigrant, the bolstering of national identities and mainstream customs in the face of rapid population change, and protecting national security. The point is that immigrant integration has acquired a prominence on government agendae that it has not had for a very long time, and some countries and their institutions are better able to take this on than others.

Governments embarking on integration initiatives need to pay careful attention to the end game, to what they hope to achieve through their interventions. The term ‘integration’ is far from univocal; what it means varies considerably from one society to another, both in terms of what is expected from the immigrant and what is expected of the host society. Integration is not an end in itself but, rather, serves other ends such as strengthening an economy through additions of labour, skills, entrepreneurship, or innovation to the workforce. Integration can serve the ends of social cohesion, of the preservation of historic national identities, national languages, religions, and cultures. Integration can enable to immigrants to find a more enriching life in their adopted country, a life free of poverty, of marginalization, of exclusion. Becoming an integrated member of a society allows one to assume the benefits of membership and the satisfaction of assuming its responsibilities and making a significant contribution to overall societal well-being. However, the specific initiatives that governments bring to integration must be tailored to the choices amongst these and other objectives underlying the drive to integrate. Common to most integration efforts are political leadership and legislative frameworks that establish expectations for both the host society and for the newcomer. Without either of these, the chances of success are greatly diminished.

As the wording of this interview question suggests, one expects different interventions according to whether the migrants are short-term, circular, or long term. In all cases, however, one would expect the institutions of society to be prepared to offer the protections of the rights and well-being offered to persons resident in the country regardless of immigration status with the exception of those that are reserved for citizens, the right to vote perhaps. Furthermore, one should be able to expect that working conditions for the migrants would mirror those of the citizen. But full integration into the host society seems inappropriate for those who are short-term temporary workers, at least if we are to understand integration as a matter not only of basic rights protection but of developing relations with the mainstream that would facilitate a long-term stay if not permanent residence leading to naturalization. Therefore, although it is always helpful for temporary foreign workers to understand local customs, cultures, and laws, expecting them to fully integrate into the host society seems not only unnecessary but even counter-productive to the intentions of their temporary worker status. Full integration can lead to an eroding of ties to the homeland, but, if anything, workers should be encouraged to maintain their home country and family ties and be enabled to send remittances to their families and communities back home. Short term temporary workers generally take on work elsewhere in order to provide more money for their families back home. The host state should facilitate the saving of money and its transfer to their workers’ families by offering access to bank accounts and low cost remitting.

One could say similar things about those expected to return home after a longer stay, those that are now often referred to as ‘circular migrants’. In addition to the protections that are referred to above for short term temporary workers, those expected to return after a lengthier stay should be offered effective incentives to return, perhaps through agreements between the sending and receiving states such that those who return would be allowed to re-enter for another period of work. Such an arrangement exists between the governments of Mexico and Canada for migrant agricultural workers and is well received by the workers. If circular migration is to have the development benefits that are often cited in its favour, many of these benefits will only be realized if the migrant actually returns home. These benefits, which are to go beyond returning with additional funds, include enhanced skills and information about the industries in which they work, enhanced language skills, enhanced networks, and perhaps a better understanding of effective organizational structures and management techniques. Technical transfer, in other words, is expected to be a result of circular migration and it is incumbent upon states that actively pursue policies of circular migration to ensure that the migrants are able to return bringing these and other benefits with them. Some of these benefits will accrue from a deeper integration and understanding of the workings of the host society and its institutions.

Long term migrants ought to be thought of from the point of view of nation-building, and integration efforts ought to be designed to achieve this specific objective. More specifically, in addition to offering the protections mentioned above, long term migrants should be integrated as permanent residents, offered remedial language training to further enable their participation in the host society and its workplaces, offered legal means of achieving permanent residence status and, importantly, offered the possibility of naturalization. Full societal membership ought to be the goal of integration for long-term migrants. Such an outcome requires a willingness both on the part of the migrant to adapt to the national culture, language, and legal mores and on the part of the host society to be welcoming, offering protection against discrimination, the possibility of full engagement in the institutions of society, and the option of becoming a full naturalized citizen. Long-term immigrants, once they have achieved the legal status of citizen, should be able to participate not only in the workplace and to be given the offer of the full range of health and social services, but should be able to vote in elections and to run for office. This requires a policy approach different in kind from that required for the short-term temporary worker where there is no expectation of full societal membership, either on the part of the migrant or that of the host society.

Ü Prof. Michael Keith: Integration and the rights of migrants emerges as a multifaceted policy concept at a particular time in history. It is located within particular moments of global economic and social change. The technological possibilities for people to travel more easily have correlated closely with the growth of economic labour demands that stretch the scales of markets across the globe.

In this context migration can be the driver of great social and economic good but also prompt some of the most acute social divisions, nationalist sentiments and political conflicts. Positively, the international movement of labour offers the potential to bring benefits to sending and receiving societies, help unlock the dilemmas of global economic development and promote the cosmopolitan sensibility that informed Immanuel Kant’s aspiration to a ‘perpetual peace’. Negatively, immigration raises dilemmas of migrant rights relative to those of other residents and emergent senses of belonging, national identity and entitlement; challenging receiving societies and on many occasions crystallising conflicts around welfare resources, labour market competition and cultural practices.

Migration consequently challenges both the weak systems of global governance inherited from the 20th century and the future of the nation state in years to come. So the challenge of the 21st century will be to maximise the economic and cultural benefits of global flows of people without provoking revivals of the exclusionary nationalist conflicts of the 20th. Within this framework the integration and rights of migrants emerge as one facet of debates around globalisation. The logics of globalisation create tensions between economic imperatives, social pressures and cultural dynamics.

There is a paradox at the heart of the regulation of flows of people across the globe that constitutes one of the greatest intellectual challenges to the way in which we conceptualise economic and social change. The logic of globalisation encourages the free flow of commodities, capital, information, ideas, cultures andpeople. However, in practice, the international movement of people is currently much more restricted than that of commodities and capital. The shares of world exports and foreign direct investment in world GDP both exceed 20 percent, while the share of migrants in the global population is only about three percent. Because international wage differentials far exceed differences in commodity prices and interest rates, the global efficiency gains of increased migration—most of which would accrue to migrants—are significantly greater than those of further liberalizing international trade and capital flows. The World Bank estimates that increasing the share of migrants in high-income countries by 3 per cent (about 13.2m people) would generate a global real-income gain of over $350 billion, exceeding the estimated gains from global trade reform by about 13 per cent. So, at a global level, there is a strong economic case for relatively free movement of labour that brings benefits to the economies of both receiving and sending countries; as well as a moral case arguing the ethical freedom of mobility for individual migrants themselves. International flows of migrant labour are consequently promoted by agencies such as the World Bank, the UN and in structures of global governance such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

And yet across the globe the national context of labour market governance and the political imperatives of popular sentiment render a significant liberalisation of international migrant flows problematic, particularly through the lens that juxtaposes ‘integration of migrants’ in receiving societies and migrant rights once they have arrived. Long term economic benefits are challenged by the welfare externalities of migrant arrivals in receiving countries; the impact of new arrivals on schools, health systems and localities of migrant concentration. And this juxtaposition of long term benefits and short term costs is complicated further when the cost-benefit analysis of migration invokes different geographical scales of analysis. Our paradox is compounded by international obligations reflecting ethical principles that demand universal human rights that are also mediated by national regimes of sovereignty and citizenship that limit the flows of labour migrants, family unification, asylum seekers and refugees that frequently impact most strikingly at the level of the sub-national region or the intra urban neighbourhood.

In the rising powers of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economic growth and the possible structural change in global power is linked closely both to the movement of labour and the integration of people to the new forms of life emerging in the metropolises (or ‘mega-cities) of the global south. So for example the opening up of China is consequently intimately linked to the generation of mega-cities, particularly along the southern and eastern seaboards in the Pearl River Delta (eg Guanzhou, Hong Kong, Shenzhen), the Yangzi River delta (eg Shanghai) and the Bohai rim (eg Tianjin), where historically the relationship with migrant hometowns is sustained and the citizenship rights (or hukou system) is premised on a clear distinction between rural belonging and the right to the city. Equally at the level of the single European market the flows of benefits of migrant labour might translate at the level of the nation when the costs of migrant impacts are impinging most acutely at a much more localised scale of analysis.

In these circumstances it is time to question some of the conventional distinctions between short term, circular and long term migrants. In the UK, many of the post-war generation of migrants from the New Commonwealth of the Caribbean and the south Asian subcontinent are entering their retirement years and may choose to spend part of the year in Britain and part in their place of birth. Their children may marry from peers in the UK (inside or outside conventional ‘ethnic’ boundaries), or from connections in their parental home place or with partners internationally. Marriage migration and the universal rights of family unification consequently have the potential to confound in scope and scale the models of global labour supply and demand.

But in a sense this challenge of defining ‘who is a migrant’ may be less the ethical starting point than the opening of the analytical solution to our dilemmas. Because once we start to place the actual and potential mobilities of 21st century humanity at the heart of our understanding of society then the lens of integration and rights of migrants begins to restructure some of the most basic ways we come to think about belonging, identity and sentimental attachment and the rational organisation of rights.

Ü IOM/Eurasylum: Building on research under way since a few years, proposals were tabled during the recent Swedish Presidency of the EU for the development of European ‘migrant integration indicators’. These proposals were driven by the fact that no clear targets, indicators and benchmarks are currently in place to measure the levels of integration and active citizenship of immigrants. Furthermore, there is a tendency to limit integration monitoring to the description of good practices, without any connection to general integration guidelines and common basic principles. In your opinion, how could the development of new monitoring frameworks and indicators be supported in the coming years, and should such instruments be region-specific or universal in their scope and applicability?

Ü Dr. Howard Duncan: A society that is serious about the integration of its immigrants will monitor carefully its achievements and its shortcomings. Without measuring outcomes, integration efforts can disintegrate into mere rhetoric, outcomes can become perverse, and scarce funding can be wasted on ineffective programs. Although the rationale for evaluation and monitoring is clear, it remains a neglected activity throughout the world and elusively difficult to carry out. Program evaluation is a complex and expensive business and especially so in areas of social policy where objectives are difficult to state precisely, where data collection is limited and expensive, and where programs are devolved to local or non-governmental authorities. Many long hours have been spent by governments around the world to develop ways to measure integration outcomes and to determine which outcomes constitute success to an acceptable degree and which outcomes are so disappointing as to call for specific remedial measures. Policy goals stated in terms of ‘integration’, ‘social cohesion’, and the like are vague, and identifying measurable phenomena that constitute success or failure and in greater or lesser degrees of either is a policy analyst’s nightmare. Nevertheless, it is important work, not only because of the societal stakes but especially now, with high levels worldwide of government debt resulting from stimulus spending directed at the 2008-09 global recession, because government spending will increasingly be restricted to programs that deliver measurable and tangible benefits to their people.

Defining policy and program objectives in measurable terms is the first step; difficult as it is, it is but the first and easiest step and is primarily a conceptual exercise. Far more difficult is collecting the data that will make possible the assessments of success or failure. In a multi-jurisdictional context such as the European Union or federal states such as the United States or Canada, one wants local and other sub-national data that can be aggregated on a national or multi-national scale. And this means that the data are collected in the same way to permit their aggregation. This is both expensive and complex. Consider something as simple as assessing the effectiveness of language training programs: one need only look at the language abilities of the students to determine the degree of success of the programs. But digging only a little reveals enormous practical complications for something as conceptually simple as language training. Few countries require exiting students to take a test at all. Few national jurisdictions have established standardized national testing procedures, let alone produced the tests themselves, hired examiners or contracted for their services, established processes for aggregating the results to develop a national assessment of success. Doing so is not only practically complex but extremely expensive. In most cases, standardized national testing would require a policy change in the form of a requirement that students be subjected to an “exit test”, something that could be politically controversial to say the least. And in the case of multi-lingual jurisdictions such as Canada or the EU, having multiple but comparable tests adds to the administrative challenges. Again, evaluating the relative success of language training is among the easiest of integration policy assessments. Establishing measures for social cohesion policy, anti-discrimination policy, workplace outcomes, education outcomes, and other social integration outcomes will be far more complex both conceptually (e.g., what to measure and how to establish causality) and administratively.

In general, data collection ought to be made part of regular program operations and done both locally, at the site of service delivery, and nationally or regionally as in the case of the EU. But this will require program operations to be altered significantly to make such data collection an integral part of program delivery. Normally, those responsible for delivering programs or services are ill-equipped to manage data collection for the simple reason that their attention lies elsewhere, and their operations are designed for service delivery and not for evaluation. Therefore, those working in program operations will need to be offered data collection guidelines, materials, forms and so on that will not only be effective but easy to use. Furthermore, owing to the additional time that such data collection takes, the offices will need resources to take on this additional responsibility. This is no small matter. If useful and credible evaluations are to be the result, the data collection must be well-done; it must become a serious part of doing business and service providers will need to be sufficiently equipped to do so, otherwise data collection will become an impediment to business and therefore, neglected. The hard work of determining measurable objectives, stated as measurable outcomes, of developing measurement instruments for each of the “indicators”, and the broad objective of ensuring value-for-money spent will be lost if insufficient attention is paid to the collection of necessary data.

The EU’s Common Basic Principles for immigrant integration, although a significant achievement in themselves, are but the starting point for determining whether immigrants to Europe are integrating or not. The nitty-gritty hard work remains.

Ü Prof. Michael Keith: New monitoring frameworks should definitely be region specific. But this can only take place within settings that are nationally regulated and continentally compatible.

We need to understand the development of new monitoring frameworks in the context of the mutualisation of risk that lies at the heart of models of the welfare state. The core principle of welfare state legitimacy rests on a sharing of both the benefits of contemporary society and a collective response to its perils. In the last three decades across the globe this has been challenged by both the individualisation of these costs and benefits generated by the inadvertent impact of factors such as the ageing of affluent societies (and the consequent pension time bombs, costs of looking after the elderly and the refigured proportions of working and retired populations) and the deliberate impacts of some economic policies to increase the responsibility of individual people for their own welfare (in flexible labour markets, restricted access to welfare programmes, increased focus on personal savings and pensions plans). If the latter is sometimes identified as ‘neo-liberal’ economic orthodoxy, it is the former that (coupled with migrant mobilities) also challenges the ways in which we think about welfare systems that prioritise ‘membership’ and those that prioritise criteria of universal ‘social need’.

Welfare systems that prioritise welfare needs will inevitably favour migrant populations, those that favour ‘membership’ will always disadvantage them. In this context the problematic of the integration and rights of migrants needs to be thought through in terms of the parallel dynamics of social change; the forces of ‘place shaping’ and community building that emerge in areas of migrant settlement. The economic benefits of liberal labour markets and the social and cultural benefits of cosmopolitan diversity need to be set against the challenges and insecurities of rapid social change. When we return to the different geographical scales at which these dynamics operate there is considerable evidence that it is at the level below that of the nation state that these changes and challenges are most profound.

So for example it becomes important to understand the dynamics of regional labour demand that attracts migrant labour to particular parts of the United Kingdom in the early 2000s; to some new destinations of rural migration and not just to some cities and not to others but also to some neighbourhoods and not others. And the separation of workplace and home place mean that new migrant concentrations may serve labour markets operating at one geographical scale whilst focusing costs on the particular neighbourhoods in which they cluster. On the streets of inner East London in 2010 each morning coaches pick up migrant workers at 5am and move them to the sites where there is demand that day; casualised labour working as far away from London as rural east Anglia or the south costs hotels, but returning at the end of a very long working day to the same set of ‘hostels’, rental accommodation and neighbourhoods a few hundred metres apart from one another. The way to make sense of these sorts of complex pattern is to understand their dynamics in order to generate monitoring frameworks that are both analytically meaningful and ethically transparent.

The particularities of both labour markets and settlement patterns mean that change at the level below the nation state is becoming increasingly significant across both Europe and the world more generally. We will have to come to terms with changes that are increasingly rapid, that challenge the old structures of government to produce meaningful measures of ‘stocks’ and ‘flows’ of migrants and to consolidate good practice around ‘integration’. Consequently, new monitoring frameworks should support local government across the continent in developing intelligence, good practice and innovative policy mechanisms in this area. However, this cannot be the municipal machinery of old style city government; it needs an active engagement between the mutating labour markets of the post recession era, a complex understanding of the configuration of transnational civil society and a responsiveness on the part of state structures that was not characteristic of mainstream local government in the liberal democracies in the 20th century. The phenomena of integration consequently demand a new thinking about what local government is and how it works alongside a sense of the importance of monitoring frameworks and indicators.

Ü IOM/Eurasylum: Integration policies entail the participation of a range of actors including governments (at central and local level), NGOs, employers, the media, public opinion and the immigrants themselves. How can a balance of responsibility and partnership be established to devise fair and effective integration policies, particularly in today’s recession-hit host societies?

Ü Dr. Howard Duncan: By definition, immigrant integration is not something that any organization, let alone a government, can straightforwardly deliver. It is not a matter of decision as is the setting of national interest rates or establishing levels of social welfare. It is not a matter of delivering a social good such as primary education or health care. In these sorts of case, there is a clear decision or service to be delivered and there are established authorities to do so. But immigrant integration is a social condition, not a good, not a decision. Achieving integration, therefore, is a matter different in kind from many other policy areas. Not being achievable by fiat, integration policy must take very seriously the conditions that underlie successful integration, and for the most part this means conditions underlying the development of certain kinds of social relations.

The most important contribution of government is to establish a framework of policy and legislation that sets the society’s expectations of citizens and migrants with regard to integration. This can be done in constitutions and codes of rights and obligations, in immigration legislation that clearly governs the conditions under which foreign nationals can enter and remain, in policy prescriptions that describe the nature of the welcome accorded to newcomers such as Canada’s multiculturalism policy and legislation that makes it clear that Canada is a multicultural society and that citizens are to respect the cultural differences that accompany the arrival of immigrants. Governments should enact clear anti-discrimination policy and legislation that articulate what is and is not acceptable treatment of foreign nationals by the institutions of society and what are the expectations of individual citizens. In other words, the most important role for government is to create the policy and legislative environment within which integration can take place. This is clearly not sufficient for successful integration, but it is an essential first step. These frameworks of expectations must be communicated to the public and institutions of the society by political leaders to establish their legitimacy and to signal to the public the importance that governments place on these policy prescriptions. Political leaders must make it clear that immigrants have a rightful place in the society and that in order for the society to function cohesively and prosper, these expectations must be adhered to, if necessary with the risk of legal sanctions for infringements such as discrimination in the workplace, the school system, in housing, and so on. Equally important are the expectations that the immigrants will adhere to the laws of their adopted country, will learn the language of the society, and come to participate with the intention of making the sorts of contributions to societal well-being that the societal mainstream does.

This is all at the level of a framework to guide action and attitude. But for a framework to actually work in practice, the institutions of society must be engaged as must individual citizens and immigrants. This cannot be achieved by government action alone, for we are here talking of individual attitudes, behaviours, and decisions. For the framework’s principles to be promulgated throughout a society and become part of its culture and that of its institutions, partnerships with these institutions are more effective than communications directly from government alone. For a central government’s social policies to be effective requires that they be accepted by society’s institutions as their own and interpreted in the way intended by the government. In the case of immigrant integration it is especially effective for immigrant-run organizations to be partners with governments in the integration effort whether that be in terms of delivering integration services or in communications about the policy and legislative framework of expectations mentioned at the outset. The effectiveness in partnerships between immigrant communities and the mainstream society as represented by its government can be exceptional because integration becomes an objective that is mutually shared and understood by both newcomer and the established society. If all can see that mainstream and immigrant are working in tandem towards a common goal, the chances of friction between the two is reduced and those of success greatly enhanced. Partnership arrangements can build trust much more quickly than unilateral government action and, arguably can yield more effective programs given the close ties to the grassroots that result. Implicit in these arrangements, however, is that there are some areas of policy implementation where direct government intervention is more appropriate than in others. Governments, to work well in partnerships, need to understand where to stand aside and let others take the lead, and it is through formal partnerships that governments will be able to have the confidence required to do so.

The recession of 2007-09, which has affected most of the developed countries in the world, has been hard on immigrants owing to the common occurrence that they are the first to lose their jobs and the last to regain them. In some societies, attitudes towards migrant workers and permanent residents harden in conditions of economic decline, with the mainstream blaming the presence of immigrants for their own job losses. Governments need to be particularly vigilant in protecting the interests of immigrants, not only to ensure that they are free from mistreatment but that the long-term interests of the society, which may well include a need for immigrants and short-term workers, are upheld and not sacrificed to short-term political interest. This recession will end and with that, employment will grow to the point that again immigrants and temporary workers are needed. In countries that see clearly what their long-term interests are, the job of attracting and integrating newcomers does not end with the arrival of recessions.

Ü Prof. Michael Keith: We need to be clear about what we mean in our definition of integration, our sense of expectation and our calculus of rights in the new Europe.

At a global level the recent finance led recession questions many of the institutional forms of global governance that have emerged in the post war era. More particularly the economic model of growth that has characterised the orthodoxies of the World Bank and the WTO, most commonly known as the Washington Consensus, is challenged by growing pressures of labour market mobility and a diminishing sense of commitment to a national polis demonstrated in falling electoral participation rates in most parts of the world.

It is in this context that a new settlement between state and market might emerge from the recession and a new challenge to both national identity and occasional nationalisms needs to be set alongside each other. For whilst there have been attempts to rebuild the ‘imaginary community’ of the 19th century nation state to make it fit for purpose in France or the UK it is also true to suggest that our complex migrant mobilities render the problem of integration and belonging too easily translated into new exclusionary nationalisms and reactionary sentiments in some countries across the world that are challenged by the integration of migrant settlement. In this context it is essential to consider the lessons that might emerge from the experiences of the recent past in making the dilemmas of integration transparent in the post recession era.

In the United Kingdom a sense of the disporpotionality of costs and benefits have led to a protest movement on behalf of local government authorities that believe that the nation state has failed to register or understand both the increased complexity of home place / workplace relations and the plural geographic scales that structure the realities of migrant integration. The London Borough of Newham asks why official national statistics suggest the borough’s population is falling in 2010 when demand in the schools exceeds 15 new classes of children a year and it is difficult to register with a local doctor because the waiting lists have sometimes been closed because of excessive demand. They argue that it is because the national measurement of migrant numbers cannot pick up on the realities of 21st century life where people arrive, stay for a while and then move on much more quickly than would have once been the case.

In these circumstances we need to synthesise new forms of intelligence with new forms of governance; both new ways of knowing the demos and a new architectures of the polis. The former requires drawing together expertise that sits inside and outside the state. The latter involves thinking about the structure and working of the state itself.

In order to draw together market intelligence, recruitment trends, jobless rolls and mobility we need partnerships between private employers, community organisations and local governance that can share intelligence and respond rapidly to evidence based analysis of patterns of social change. In order to respond meaningfully to this pace of change integration policies need to draw together the deliberative wisdom of different stakeholders whilst sustaining a meaningful transparency of democratic accountability. In the United Kingdom there is currently an attempt to do both of these things through the development of strategic migration partnerships that work at the regional level, although a healthy scepticism might demand first a candid evaluation of where they succeed and where they have found challenges.

In such structures there is a danger that a euphemistic language of ‘partnership’ invokes a Panglossian deliberative world, displacing or failing to address some of the incommensurabilities in the rationing of welfare resources or the liberalisation of labour markets. But in whatever structures that emerge there is a need for a clarity of institutional architecture, an imperative to situate but also to separate the intelligence based interests of all, the deliberative differences between the constituent elements of the stakeholder democracy and the ultimate accountabilities of democratic form. Only when function dictates form in this way can such partnerships devise fair and effective integration policies, particularly in today’s recession hit societies.