Relational integration: a response to Willem Schinkel

In this essay, I respond to Schinkel’s recent statement that ‘any claim and practice that concerns ‘integration’ should be the object of research, rather than the project of research’ (2018, p. 8). Although I agree with Schinkel that there are problematic practices of integration research, I do not agree that integration cannot be used as an analytical concept with heuristic value. In his critical analysis of how ‘integration’ is (ab)used as a political project, Schinkel seems to claim that there is no way to think of integration outside this problematic discourse. I argue that the concept of relational integration enables us to do just that by solving the most fundamental conundrum presented in his critique: that the concept of integration exempts ‘non-migrants’, and places migrants outside society.