21 minutes and integration

Out of a comment form Michel Klijmij, I remember that at least in this weblog, I have never written what I understand as “integration”. Obviously my readers know that I don't care that much about integration-as-writing-in-Dutch. And from my previous post it is clear that, at least for me, integration is not emancipation, nor emancipation is integration. So: what is integration?

I must recognize that my idea comes from a meeting that occurred in De Balie, say four years ago. There was then a day organized around migration. Speakers from academia were invited, and eventually their work was published in the Journal of Population Economics, I believe. A scientific meeting for researchers from migration studies happened in the days before, and the event at De Balie was an open discussion with the public about their results. Of course, at some moment the researchers were debating what was to be understood by integration. Different opinions were exchanged, and surely the cultural view was discussed. Surely some scientists defended the view that an integrated foreigner is the person that shares a big deal of the culture of the country in which he lives. Then the scientist expend some time trying to figure out if such a thing as “the culture of a country” can be defined. Not surprisingly, that was a confusing discussion, without agreement. Finally, a Dutch researcher,with a PhD in Belgium and currently carrying research in Paris brought some order, or at least some sense, in the fuzzy discussion about culture: “integration should be measurable, and there are three areas of public policy that we can evaluate and measure. We can count how many people has a job, what are the education levels, and how is the situation in the housing market.” Simply said: how you work, where you live, and what's your education level.

Since then, I keep this criteria in mind at talking about integration. A person is integrated in a society if he or she studied, works and lives in ways that are comparable to the rest of the population of the country. If you want, call it fair participation: you are integrated if you fairly participate in the labour, educational and housing markets.

Ok. That was integration. Now, let's go back to the enquete 21 minutes. The NRC claims the saturday that integration is a concern of autochtonen, not of allochtonen. Would that be true? Indeed, if you compare the attention that integration gets in the autochtoon population, you get 29%, a high percentage indeed. Turks give this category 15% relevance, Marokans 21%. Let's assume that those percentages are indeed statistically different. Now... what about integration regarding work, housing or education? Are those issues relevant for the allochtoon population of NL? There the answer becomes fuzzier. Averaging, allochtonen care for education as much as autochtonen, 20%. Then, about housing, it looks like the black neighbourhoods issue is not really an issue: autochtonen care 6% and allochtonen care 7% about housing. But hey, werkloosheid does matter. Autochtonen think of it as a rather irrelevant problem, with 5% of attention, in the position 15 of a list of 17 issues. But allochtonen are concerned as much as 13%, putting this issue inside the top-ten concerns.

So what is here to be learned for groenlinks, and our priorities around “the allochtoon question”? Well, it is certainly a good choice to make discrimination at the working place the central issue in the campaign directed to young allochtonen, as the choice of our campaign is. Once again, a vague word such as integration does not raises the attention of people. But being out of a job, that matters. As the politicologist Jean Tilly has repeatedly said, the strive for integration should be focused on socio-economic questions, and not any longer on cultural assimilation. The cultural flag, a very right wing (and racist, with copyright to Tofik) flag, is not ours to rally for. Lets stay in track with our left agenda, and keep busy with labour. It is not emancipation, and it is not even the economy (stupid?)... it is your job.