Who has a ‘duty to integrate’?

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Who has a ‘duty to integrate’?

Gareth Mulvey

We are in a political moment of obsessive focus on questions of migrants integrating into British society, with the far-right mobilising around these issues at present and ‘mainstream’ politics absorbing rather than confronting them.  

Tony Blair set some of this in motion by declaring that immigrants have a ‘duty to integrate’. Integration though, is seldom defined, and has two fundamental assumptions: that there is a single coherent whole which people are supposed to integrate into; and that ‘British people’ are fully integrated into this whole in a uniform way. 

Evidence for this is scant and contested. However, if we refocus attention to elites, using the measures often applied to migrants, we see a complete lack of integration. And the evidence suggests that the lack of integration among elites is purposeful. Elites choose to segregate, but that choice is quietly normalised. To provide some examples.

Residential segregation is on the rise, not based on migration status or ethnicity, but on social class. In other words, elites are seeking neighbourhoods occupied by people ‘like them’. In its most extreme form this can be seen in the form of gated communities, but even milder versions of wealthy neighbourhoods lead to less, rather than more, class based social interaction.  

This self-segregation then plays out across other aspects of elite lives. People in this group will likely have attended private schools, and their children will do likewise. About 7% of the UK population go to private schools, and the wealthier you are the more they become the norm. This educational inequality has ongoing impacts on social mobility and cannot be corrected by simply allowing a few non elites into private schools.  

Such schools are designed to ensure privilege. Why else would wealthy parents send their children there? They gain access to elite networks and are then part of a funnel towards the most prestigious universities. Private schools teach pupils how to access these universities - indeed many have institutional links with them - and they teach them that they belong there.  

And once in these universities, the corridors and lecture theatres are dominated by people from similar backgrounds. This is ‘helped’ by the fact that state school pupils are filtered out, less likely to apply, even with the required grades, and less likely to be accepted if they do. Thus, this potentially key site of social interaction between classes does not happen, and this segregation subsequently transfers to the employment market where, for example, the ‘golden triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and elite London institutions creates its own social stratum. The dominance of the privately educated in all high paid professions, business, politics, the media, law, medicine and finance is evident across research and is again indicative of a self-segregated population.  

This segregation impacts health and wellbeing too. Health inequalities in the UK are on the rise and are reflective of wider inequalities. Not only are lifestyles different, allowing greater focus on health for those that can afford it, but access to quicker healthcare through the private sector removes elites from the equalising measure of the NHS. It also means that elites - those making key decisions about public policy - are comfortably distanced from the impacts of their decisions.  

This is a group who cut themselves off from many aspects of British society, who work closely with people from similar backgrounds, who live in areas with people from similar backgrounds, who have attended private schools and elite universities where they interact mainly with people from similar backgrounds and where they are prepared socially and culturally for their societal positions, and who then reproduce that process all over again with their own offspring. In a society that has practically no social mobility, this is a stable population who are able to reproduce self-segregation among their children. 

Politicians and their media allies contribute to this segregation by never questioning it. Instead, they focus an inordinate amount of attention on complaints that there are non-elite populations who are not sufficiently ‘like us’ – such as migrant communities.  

This raises significant questions as to the purpose of integration and debates about it. Policy seems to only be concerned with integration to the extent that it can shrink cultural differences between some groups and the imagined national whole, or else it is weaponised against migrants. The present ‘debate’ presents migrants as a homogenous blob who threaten all aspects of our lives, it does not concern itself with class inequalities or with wider conceptions of social cohesion. Inequality apparently does not really matter. 

I am sceptical about integration as an aim of public policy as my recent article suggests. However, if it is deemed important and is pursued by policymakers, and if the media are really interested in the broader cohesion of society, then Tony Blair’s ‘duty to integrate’ has to also apply to this most segregated group, and that would include Blair himself.

(Image credit: "multicultural" by zoetnet is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)