The European Union’s discourse on migrant integration has been powerful in subtly steering national policies and public debates on the governance of migrant populations, yet remains understudied. This paper critically maps the EU framework on migrant integration, outlining the ruptures and continuities that have shaped EU’s integrationist paradigm in the past three decades. I propose a typology of the various (sometimes opposing) discourses that converge in EU policy, differentiating between neoliberal, egalitarian (welfarist), securitarian and boundary integrationism. I argue that while the early predominantly welfarist and neoliberal discourse on integration was only vaguely interested in questions of values and identity, the recent reformulation of the EU’s integrationist strategy represents a break from universalist ideas of a “European community”. In particular, the Commission under von der Leyen adopted a more nativist and securitarian discourse that frames integration as a wager in an alleged civilizationist clash between the liberal and the “illiberal” world. This shift had material effects also on reinventing the subject of integration. By including EU citizens with “migrant background” as policy targets for the first time, a nativist boundary was erected between those who are considered truly European and the outsiders that ought to “integrate”.

This article traces the idea of (“immigrant”) “integration” from its roots in classical political philosophy and the birth of the modern nation-state, to its current relevance in the European political agenda and, relatedly, its centrality in the newly consolidated field of Migration Studies. I examine the ontological (i.e., philosophical and sociological) and political rationales behind the idea that migrants need to “integrate into society”, and the different varieties of political solutions that are offered in this sense. The paper asks: How did the migrant come at the center of the idea of an integrated society? And how did integrationism become consolidated as the hegemonic idea of governing diverse societies in post-migration contexts in Europe? Employing an extensive list of secondary literature, documentary data, policy analysis of the EU-level Framework on migrant integration, and discourse analysis of integration-related research publications, I attempt a genealogy of the idea of “integration” as it traveled across the North Atlantic West and between academia and government. The paper shows how the production of the subject of integration—the misfit “immigrant” figure—is historically marked by a consensus across the learned and the governing elites that identifies the preservation of a homogenous national social order as a societal goal. I argue that the scientification of integration governance via the “evidence-based policy” paradigm (most notably promoted by EU institutions) normalizes, naturalizes and aims to depoliticize the otherwise highly normative and contested question of migrant integration.

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