Pull up the roots: response to Dahinden, Goodman, Statham and Schinkel on The Integration Nation: Immigration and Colonial Power in Liberal Democracies (Polity 2022)

A rejoinder to the critical reviews of The Integration Nation: Immigration and Colonial Power in Liberal Democracies by Janine Dahinden, Sara Wallace Goodman, Paul Statham, and Willem Schinkel. The Integration Nation lays out a manifesto for critical migration studies, that builds on a critique of the mainstream literature and its normative linear notions of immigration, integration and citizenship. Two readers see the argument and its conceptualization of the field as almost self evident, while two read it as a frustrating provocation that elicits a strong, critical reaction. The rejoinder responds to these reflections, and reiterates the book's goal of laying the foundations of a new political demography. Conventional thinking on international migration, minorities and diversity, it argues, sustains the colonial power of advanced liberal democracies in the North Atlantic West, built on vast global inequalities in citizenship status, and mechanisms of selection, extraction, exclusion and effacement of non-national populations.