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How people envisage integration and its opposite lies at the heart of the immigration discussion in this country. It is the pivot between immigration and national belonging. The big story about integration changed dramatically in the aftermath of the London bombings. Since 2005, multiculturalism has been deemed a failure in many quarters. Policy, goes the argument, has encouraged groups of people to lead separate lives and not become part of the national community. So this is the backdrop to how our interviewees, in areas that have below average proportions of BME residents, talk about integration (1). I will present two aspects of the way this integration frame is constructed, with different logics applied to different people, and one example of how these logics sometimes come apart.
Who is integrating into what, and what is at stake in the integration frame?
