The production of “evidence” for migrant integration policy in the European Union

Abstract

The European Union (EU) is at the forefront of advancing a science-for-policy paradigm, developing resources and infrastructures where “evidence” in various forms can be produced, collected, and applied into policy. This article investigates the production of “useful” knowledge in the policy area of migrant integration, in a system of research–policy configurations mediated by EU institutions. The article asks: What kind of structures are set in place to support migrant integration governance with “evidence,” what counts as “evidence,” whose expertise is sought out, and what are the implications for wider debates on mobility and diversity? First, I map and classify the key channels for research–policy collaboration at inter- and supranational levels, where researchers, policymakers, and practitioners interact to produce, exchange, and disseminate various forms of knowledge on migrants and their integration. I then explore the nature of said knowledge, analyzing the various data, statistics, and indicators that are the result on such research–policy collaboration. This article finds that the EU-level ecosystem of evidence production both makes social scientific knowledge indispensable for migrant integration governance and produces ‘integration’ simultaneously as a measurable and manageable (objective) social issue, and a common European problem. I discuss possible implications of this “policy-relevant” knowledge production and propose a research agenda for an in-depth exploration of its effects on the governance of migranticized and racialized populations.

1. Introduction

The European Union (EU) has increasingly been trying to take a leading position in regulating matters of border control, mobility, citizenship, and the governance of settled immigrant populations, issues that have historically been reserved for (nation)states. Though it has little competence to directly regulate migrant integration regimes, since the 1990s, the EU has been gaining more leverage in national immigrant integration governance. A set of legal and policy instruments, recommendations, and guidelines, as well as funding schemes to support national integration measures, now comprise the EU framework on the “integration of migrants and EU citizens with a migrant background”¹ (see, e.g. Barbulescu 2015; Dodevska 2023). As I show elsewhere (Dodevska 2023), the framework both rhetorically challenged and practically enabled the controversial “civic integrationism” turn in the 2000s, that saw the Europe-wide adoption of aggressive and coercive integration measures with a strong emphasis on “national values,” such as civic integration courses and citizenship tests (see also Triadafilopoulos 2011). In parallel, under the slogan “science for policy”—or “knowledge for policy” (European Commission et al., 2023)—EU institutions have been at the forefront of developing resources and infrastructures where data, statistics, and other “knowledge” can be harvested in order to promote “evidence-informed” policy in various areas, from climate governance to security. In recent years, a policy area that has seen much activity under the auspices of such slogans has been Migration and Home Affairs, including migrant integration, where a veritable ecosystem of science–policy collaboration has sprouted. Among other examples, EU institutions act as (co)patrons of research–policy initiatives, such as the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) and OECD/EU indicators of integration, and have been playing an active role in planning Europe-wide research, largely through their successive Framework Programmes, where important resources are being dedicated to migration-related research. Investments in producing evidence for policymaking reflect the growing “migration knowledge hype” (Braun et al., 2018), as states, international organizations (IOs), and civil society scramble to gather statistics and other data that will enable prediction and control of cross-border mobility.

In turn, this “hype” increased the demand for experts and arguably impacted the research agendas in the social sciences and humanities, shifting the focus toward policy relevance that leads researchers to adjust their work to policy needs (Bakewell 2008). In research on migrants, this has had an impact on an epistemological level, as (often essentializing) categories from the registers of national politics become analytical concepts in research with little discussion as to the theoretical implications therein (Dahinden 2016; Stierl 2022). Concomitantly, the hyper-production and usage of data (and, more recently, “big data”) increasingly shapes the way migration is visualized, imagined, and controlled (Horvath 2019; Slootweg, van Reekum and Schinkel 2019; Stielike 2022; Stierl 2022), for instance through the power to render visible particular (ethnicized or racialized) groups (Plájás, M’charek and van Baar 2019). Yet, there is still a lack of attention in migration studies to this strong research–policy relationship and to scholarship’s implications in co-constructing the discourse on migration. This is found, by Scheel, Ruppert and Ustek-Spilda (2019), to be astonishing to the extent that “from an epistemic point of view, migration does not exist independently of the concepts, definitions, methods, statistics, visualizations and other data practices” mobilized in producing knowledge for purposes of migration “management.”

This article contributes to the objectives set in this Special Issue by focusing on a political economy perspective of knowledge production on migrants, exploring notably the role of EU institutions in regulating the production, collection, curation, dissemination, and utilization of “evidence” for policymaking. Specifically, it investigates the production of evidence in the context of the EU framework on migrant integration by looking at the extensive network of knowledge infrastructures (Geddes and Scholten 2015) and boundary arrangements (Hoppe and Wesselink 2014), which I situate as part of the wider migration industry and the global migration data apparatus (Stielike 2022). These include formal or informal and permanent or ad-hoc bodies, infrastructures, networks, and other types of science–policy configurations that bring together policy-oriented knowledge workers and policymakers keen on involving expertise in addressing policy problems. Building primarily on previous critical and reflexive research on the role of scientific knowledge in the governance of those categorized as migrants (e.g. Boswell 2009; Schinkel 2017; Scheel, Ruppert and Ustek-Spilda 2019; Favell 2022; Stielike 2022) and inspired by Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches (e.g. Jasanoff 2006), the contribution of this article is as follows. First, it presents a comprehensive mapping of the extensive inter- and supranational landscape of research–policy co-production of “evidence” for migrant integration governance, the full extent of which has not been examined thus far. The second contribution is to the wider body of “reflexive” research on migration, which has knowledge production on “migrants” as its central focus. While much has been said here on the important questions of the positionality of researchers and of (un)reflexive usage of policy categories, very little attention has been paid to the structural, material conditions of knowledge production, such as funding flows that drive research agendas (Dodevska and Nimer forthcoming, in this Special Issue).

In what follows, I begin with reviewing the relevant literature and outlining the conceptual framework, followed by a section on the data and methods. I then proceed with an overview of the key research–policy configurations set by or with the involvement of EU institutions for the purpose of evidence-informed policymaking in the area of migrant integration, discussing also the relationship between the various stakeholders involved. Next, I explore what counts as “evidence,” analyzing the design and usage of various data and indicators for the measurement of integration undergirding the EU policy framework. In the final section, in lieu of a conclusion, I explore the possible implications of this arrangement and propose a research agenda to look more in-depth into the effects of research–policy collaboration on the wider discourse that sees “integration” as the only option for governing diverse societies.

2. Knowledge production on migrants in the era of policy-relevant research

Poststructuralist and Marxist thinkers popularized the argument that state-building and modern techniques of governance are shaping the production of social knowledge (e.g. Foucault 1979). However, the link between knowledge and politics has arguably been reinforced since the utilitarian and instrumental turn in the early 2000s, where social research—beyond being merely shaped by political rationalities—was suddenly expected to be both useful and usable for solving political problems (Solesbury 2001). At the same time, European politicians and intellectual elites widely embraced the premise that all policy issues need to be informed by expertise, in what Young et al. (2002) call the “evidence-based policy movement.” This reflected a new technocratic paradigm of policy-making, increasingly seen as a purely rational process that takes all relevant information in consideration, free of emotion, personal interest, and ideological inclinations (Young et al., 2002). Weingart (1999) identifies two trends in relation to the link between science and politics, a simultaneous “scientification of politics”—the increased reliance in politics on ever-expanding scientific knowledge that now defines political problems—and the “politicization of science”—the political contestation of science once scientists assume a political role. This has led to the unexpected effects of a decreased legitimacy of science and a loss of authority for policy (Weingart 1999). Hence, the collaborations and links between governance and research on the issues of migration and integration need to be understood against the background of these rather recent and interconnected paradigms of evidence-based policy and policy-relevant research. Today, as Richard Jackson (2016) remarks, “it is nothing more than common sense that academic research should be ‘policy relevant’, and academics have a duty to make themselves available as ‘expert’ advisers to policymakers and practitioners.”

Proponents of evidence-based policy argue that evidence is needed to ensure that “proposals are based on facts rather than lobbying and purely political considerations,” as well as to include the views of different stakeholders (ICMPD 2019b). Yet, others contend that it is untenable to assume that scientific fact and political values can be clearly distinguished (Weingart 1999). Castles (2003) points out to the problem of circular reasoning in policy relevant research, in that it tends to “accept the problem definitions built into its terms of reference, and does not look for more fundamental causes, nor for more challenging solutions.” The literature of the political usages of knowledge (Weiss 1979; Boswell 2009; Boswell and Smith 2017) shows that the policy relevance paradigm is more likely to see scientific knowledge being used to lend legitimacy to government objectives, rather than as a problem-solving tool. When “evidence” is not used to support pre-given policy preferences (the “political model”), it can be used to delay decision-making, providing policy makers with some breathing space (the “tactical model”) (Weiss 1979). At the same time, the claim that a policy was built on evidence lends an air of neutrality or impartiality to otherwise highly normative questions, leading to depoliticization of rightfully contested sociopolitical issues (Parkhurst 2017).

Since the 2000s, the EU emerged as a leader in furthering the policy relevance paradigm and in establishing durable infrastructures for linking research outputs with policymaking. This is related to a general commitment to evidence-informed policy formalized in the Better Regulation agenda, a mechanism set in place to ensure that EU law is based on evidence and that citizens, businesses and stakeholders can take part in decision-making processes. Evidence-informed policymaking is not understood by EU institutions as just one of the ways to improve policy, but rather as a cornerstone of liberal democracy, where the aim is “to put knowledge and reason at the heart of political decision-making.”² “Evidence,” in the EU jargon, refers to multiple sources of data, information, and knowledge, including quantitative data such as statistics and measurements, qualitative data such as opinions, stakeholder input, conclusions of evaluations, as well as scientific and expert advice.³

In the policy area of migration and home affairs and amidst the crisis discourse of recent years, European institutions have turned toward such forms of “evidence” by launching various funding schemes, evaluation mechanisms, databases, consultative exchanges, and stakeholder networks that will be discussed at length in this article. Although controlling immigration and reinforcing the common European borders have always been more pressing issues for the EU, the integration of immigrants likewise became an important field of intervention, not least because some of its facets got detached from social and anti-discrimination policy and effectively folded into immigration control (Dodevska 2023). While the EU has no so-called exclusive competence in the area of migrant integration, recent decades have witnessed the “Europeanization” of integration policy, with the EU increasingly building its authority in this policy area, albeit mostly with “soft” measures (Faist and Ette 2007; Barbulescu 2015; Dodevska 2023). Following the arrival of refugees and the crisis discourse that ensued since 2015, scholars notice two parallel and interconnected trends. The first refers to an increasing role of EU institutions in managing the alleged crisis (for instance, through negotiating border externalization deals, or the expansion of Frontex; see Léonard and Kaunert 2022). In the area of migrant integration, the existing policy framework—most notably the 2004 Common Basic Principles and the 2005 Common Agenda for Integration—was amended with the 2016 Action Plan on Integration, in parallel to initiating major funding schemes intended to support (civic) integration measures in Member States. The second trend involves a renewed demand for “evidence” to help predict and control what came to be seen as a political urgency that, in turn, produced a “blossoming crisis scholarship” (Rozakou 2019). The demand was highest in three particular areas: migration flows, instabilities that drive refugee arrivals toward Europe (“migration drivers”), and the behavior of newcomers (notably their “integration”).

Several studies explore the relationship between this political demand for migration knowledge and knowledge producers who supply it in response. A few among them examine how this relationship has affected the form, content, and magnitude of scientific knowledge that comes as a product of policy demand. These show, for instance, that the increased demand for migration data prompted the Europe-wide proliferation of research infrastructures, academic programmes, government and EU funding, and research–policy collaborations dedicated to migration and diversity-related topics (Levy, Pisarevskaya and Scholten 2020). Such demand and generous targeted funding also helped consolidate Migration Studies into an institutionalized field (Pisarevskaya et al., 2019). More critical scholars have argued that the institutionalization of Migration Studies via its close relationship with the realm of politics “disciplined” the field (Garelli and Tazzioli 2013) and made migration researchers complicit in a nativist, neo-colonial politics of (non)belonging that maintains the (re)production of racial hierarchies (Schinkel 2018; Favell 2022).

The reverse effect—how the research–policy relationship has affected migration politics—has received comparatively more attention, notably focusing on how policymakers make use of migration knowledge. Overall, in spite of the massive increase in migration-related research, there seems to remain a substantial gap between this body of research and the policy response (Baldwin-Edwards, Blitz and Crawley 2019). When it comes specifically to migrant integration, the collaboration between research and policy has received some limited attention by a group of scholars that conceptualize the political uses of knowledge on integration as “science-policy dialogues” (Scholten et al., 2015). One of the key findings is that the politicization of migrant integration in various national settings increased the collaboration between integration researchers and the state (Scholten et al., 2015: 137). Importantly, the more the issue of integration is politicized, the stronger the dominance of policy frames over research concepts, and the weaker the influence of research on policy. In the case of the EU, they argue that while migration-related research largely addresses EU policy concerns, institutions such as the European Commission use such knowledge to develop and legitimize a greater role for themselves (Geddes and Achtnich 2015). Gathering evidence through science–policy collaboration has been argued to be particularly relevant for the EU (as opposed to Member States), in order to “compensate for the fact that the European Commission has only limited competences in this policy area, so that its credibility depends on its ability to mobilise relevant knowledge and instruments” (Scholten et al. 2015: 317). How EU institutions actually use that knowledge is less clear: Collett (2019: 174) argues that EU-level utilization of research and evidence has been haphazard and uneven, and tends to “begin with a justificatory framing that may exclude particular evidence in order to allow for expected recommendations.”

While these contributions are useful in shedding light to the exploitation of knowledge in the governance of migrants at EU level, a more wholesome picture of the mechanisms of producing “evidence”—and what that “evidence” is—is missing in the literature.

2.1 Conceptualizing research–policy collaboration

In this article, I use the term “science-policy configurations” to refer in a general sense to the various entities, networks, resources, and infrastructures, where evidence on migrant integration (or any policy issue) is discussed, produced, extracted, and “applied” into policy. I then build on the concepts of “knowledge infrastructures” and “boundary arrangements” to help me classify these configurations for an easier overview. Knowledge infrastructures connect or broker knowledge from the research community to policy communities, leading to specific types of political knowledge utilization, and also affect patterns of knowledge production within the research community (Geddes and Scholten 2015). As more informal forms of research–policy collaboration, boundary arrangements refer to a “wide variety of collaborative configurations that straddle and mediate the boundary between professional-academic networks and public sector or policy organizations” (Hoppe and Wesselink 2014). The role of boundary arrangements is to organize the productive interaction between science, policy, and politics, and once they are formalized, they become “boundary organizations” (Hoppe and Wesselink 2014), a good example of which are policy think tanks. Looking at boundary arrangements allows for exploring the fuzzy intermediate space between politics and science, and thus sheds light also on science–policy collaborations that are less rigid, formal, or evident. While Geddes and Scholten (2015) use “knowledge infrastructures” to refer to both formal and informal connections linking research and policymaking, I use them to distinguish between formally established permanent entities within EU institutions (infrastructures) and less formal configurations of a more flexible composition where EU institutions exchange with civil society, academia and businesses (boundary arrangements). Hence, the various science–policy configurations are here divided into (1) knowledge infrastructures as permanent facilities and basic structures located within EU institutions, and (2) boundary arrangements as configurations of interactive (and sometimes ad hoc) character where EU institutions participate alongside other stakeholders for the purposes of knowledge exchange (see Table 1).

Table 1

Classification of key EU-level research–policy configurations in the field of migrant integration

Knowledge infrastructures			Boundary arrangements
Research bodies and data depositories	Knowledge platforms	Funds	Advisory bodies	Science–policy events	Science–policy networks
JRC Science Hub: Migration & Territorial Development area	Handbooks on Integration (2004, 2007, 2010)	INTI Programme (2003–2006)	EESC Section for Employment, Social Affairs & Citizenship (SOC) and related Thematic group (IMI)	Ministerial Conferences on Integration (since 2004)	European Integration Network (ex NCPI) (2002–2016)
Knowledge Center on Migration & Demography (KCMD) and related Data Portal (Domain: Legal Migration & Integration)	European Website for Integration (EWSI) (since 2007)	European Fund for the Integration of TCNs (2007–2013)	Expert group on the views of migrants (since 2020)	European Integration Forum (2009–2014)	European Migration Network (EMN) (since 2008)
Eurostat statistics on migrant integration	European Modules on Migrant Integration (since 2011)	Asylum, Migration & Integration Fund (AMIF) (since 2014)	Ad-hoc scientific committees & expert groups	European Migration Forum (EMF) (since 2015)	Urban Agenda Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees (since 2016)
Eurobarometer (Special polls on attitudes toward integration: 2012, 2018, 2022)	Knowledge4 Policy website (since 2018)	Framework Programmes: H2020 Programme ‘Inclusive Societies’ (since 2014)		Ad-hoc events (“high level seminars”, etc.)	Cities and Regions for Integration of Migrants (since 2019)
					Consortia carrying out policy-relevant research (e.g. the MIPEX index)

Source: Own research.

Knowledge infrastructures and boundary arrangements in the realm of production of “evidence” for governing migrant integration can be understood as part of a broader network of migration knowledge, that links researchers, policymakers, civil society practitioners, and data practices that enact what we know about “migration” and “migrants.” Stielike (2022) uses the term “global data and migration apparatus,” described as “an emerging transnational network of international organisations’ data hubs, data researchers at universities, internet and technology companies and non-profit organisations involved in the big-data-based production of knowledge on migration.” As a leading funder of research and innovation, the EU is a “big player” in this global apparatus. The knowledge infrastructures at EU level and their output in the form of “evidence” can be argued to form an important part in the migration knowledge apparatus on a global scale, even if the emphasis on “big data” is less pronounced in the realm of integration, compared to immigration and border management.

Furthermore, considering how the research–policy collaboration in the field of migration prompts a commodification of migration knowledge and a reorientation toward lucrative research topics, the knowledge production on migration can rightly be seen as part of the migration industry, even if traditionally that literature has not focused on knowledge producers as relevant actors in the political economy of migration. “Migration industry” is generally conceived through private entrepreneurs and companies who profit on either facilitating (e.g. smugglers, humanitarian organizations) or impeding (e.g. private border guards, private detention facilities) cross-border mobility (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sørensen 2013; Cranston, Schapendonk and Spaan 2018). However, in this article, I follow the Special Issue Introduction (Dodevska and Nimer, forthcoming) in arguing that this industry extends into virtually any economic sphere that capitalizes on human mobility. This includes (semi)public actors such as universities and research centers, whose economic activities have significantly proliferated as their staff reorients research work toward the field of migration (Levy, Pisarevskaya and Scholten 2020), as well as policy institutes specialized in migration-related topics. The role of knowledge producers has been unjustifiably neglected in the “migration industry” literature, considering that research, data, and statistics related to those classified as migrants are in high demand. This is notably true in light of the incredible speed at which the field of migration studies has developed in recent years (Levy, Pisarevskaya and Scholten 2020), especially as governments seek to capitalize on booming technological advances that allow massive data—requiring expert knowledge to reveal patterns and trends—to be used for prediction and control.

3. Data and methods

The article is a result of a broader research project that investigated the development of the EU framework on migrant integration and the role of research–policy collaboration in shaping this framework. For this article, I build on an empirical analysis of documentary data collected from various resources related to thirty-five knowledge infrastructures (outlined in Table 1), including both formal and informal science–policy configurations. This includes EU policy documents, reports and policy briefs, background notes, minutes of meeting, research outputs, and funding documents—all pertinent to the EU framework on migrant integration and/or to EU policy on gathering statistics on migrants and third country nationals. Several large-scale and policy-oriented EU-funded research projects on integration are also examined for their goals, scope, and results. Importantly, the science-for-policy community set up by the EU is to an important extent maintained and represented online on various websites, platforms, and data depositories. These online spaces allow for policymakers, EU staff, experts from academia and civil society, and citizens to interact by curating, publishing, accessing and exchanging on various forms of “knowledge” pertaining to salient policy problems. Hence, the documentary analysis is supplanted by a qualitative observation and analysis of several key web portals. The analysis of web portals was crucial in mapping the full spectrum of EU-level science–policy channels for collaboration in the field of migration and integration that has thus far not been comprehensively discussed. Hence, this article represents an original empirical contribution to the literature that examines the science–policy landscape in the European context. The full list of sources is available in the Annex.

4. Mapping research–policy configurations at the EU level

In order to comprehensively map the network of knowledge infrastructures and boundary arrangements relevant to the EU framework on migrant integration, I devise a typology of both former and ongoing key science–policy configurations to facilitate an overview of otherwise scattered initiatives. These are presented in Table 1, with dates of the start of activities marked where available. I organize the various integration-related knowledge infrastructures in several categories: (1) research bodies within EU institutions and (2) data depositories managed by them, (3) knowledge platforms, such as websites meant to aggregate in one place evidence from various sources, and (4) funding schemes that enable research that either directly targets policy concerns or is post-facto used as a resource in devising policy. Boundary arrangements are classified as: (5) EU-affiliated multi-stakeholder advisory bodies, (6) science–policy events, such as ad-hoc or regular forums, conferences, and meetings that gather representatives of EU institutions, Member States, IOs, academia, and civil society, and (7) science–policy networks, networks set up between various stakeholders to enable creation and exchange of evidence and promote integration as a policy goal. Below, I discuss these configurations in greater detail.

Knowledge infrastructures are located within and managed by EU institutions. The Joint Research Center (JRC), as the official research and knowledge service of the European Commission, is a key body tasked with providing “science for policy” through in-house research. It has a team dedicated to training scientists “to operate in the science for policy interface,” to train policymakers in member states on how to use evidence, and to maintain a network of “stakeholders active in the science for policy ecosystems.”⁴ In the area of migrant integration, the relevant knowledge service is the Knowledge Centre on Migration and Demography (KCMD) under the oversight of the Commission’s Directorate General of Migration and Home Affairs (DG HOME), that publishes “evidence” on the website Knowledge4Policy.

However, the vast majority of “evidence” the Commission seeks and uses comes from external research. Member States themselves are the biggest “clients” in the trade with migration knowledge, and some of the evidence-producing activities arose at their initiative. The European Migration Network is one of the earliest initiatives set to “provide the Community and its Member States with objective, reliable and up-to-date migration data.”⁵ Formally established in 2008, the work of EMN is coordinated by the National Contact Points on Integration (NCPIs) (in some cases composed of academics and civil society practitioners, but mostly of ministries responsible for migration) in each Member State. As a way of launching the Europeanization of integration policy through a development of a common framework, the NCPIs (later: the European Integration Network) acted as a kind of political committee whose task was to define—in dialogue with civil society and academia—what was to become the EU’s strategy on integration. In 2011, so-called European Modules on Migrant Integration were adopted at an EU level that defined three key areas of integration: “introductory and language courses, a strong commitment by the host society, and the active participation of immigrants in all aspects of collective life,” aiming to convey in this way the idea of integration “as a two-way process.”⁶ Modules are collections of “experiences across nation states” and “joint practices”⁷ intended to provide a common approach through knowledge exchange, and eventually steer national strategies of governance of migrants. The strong emphasis on courses and “active participation of immigrants” legitimized the introduction of coercive civic integration measures across the Union, that came to condition the access to rights and services with proving one’s “successful” integration (c.f. Bonjour 2014).

The European Integration Network, the Commission and a hired expert (the think tank Migration Policy Group) together published three consecutive editions of the “Handbook on Integration,” an important resource meant to guide policymakers and practitioners on the adoption and implementation of integration policies (covering topics such as civic integration programmes, the development of indicators, economic integration, and naturalization). The work around the Handbooks propelled the need for establishing, in 2009, a single knowledge platform on everything integration-related, the now well-known European Website on Integration (EWSI). EWSI was supposed to serve as the main hub to provide “integration at your fingertips” (Migration Policy Group 2011: 16). The “knowledge” gathered on the website is not limited to scientific research, databases, and statistics, but also to stories on practical measures and their success, as well as the experiences of practitioners from civil society who are engaged in integration programmes. All of this is meant to forge a representation of “migrant integration” not only as an objective social and political problem but also as a manageable issue, that policymakers can easily act on when armed with the proper tools in the form of palatable “at-your-fingertips” data and recommendations.

An even higher legitimacy is extended to civic integrationism by a number of high-level events dedicated to exchanging knowledge on migrant integration. Their diverse attendance—bringing together members from EU institutions, Member States, IOs, civil society, academia and, occasionally, businesses—is a statement to the wide cross-societal consensus on civic integrationism as a political strategy. A particularly important event was the European Integration Forum (2009–2014), which was crucial in fuelling the debate on integration directly at EU level (Arribas Lozano et al., 2014). In 2015, the scope of the Forum was broadened to cover wider migration and asylum policies in addition to integration, and it is now known as the European Migration Forum, co-organized annually by the Commission and the Economic and Social Committee (EESC).

Overall, there is a strong emphasis on collaboration, both between the EU, its Member States and IOs, and across sectors of society, including policy, academia, civil society, and employers—in the endeavor to produce evidence on integration to facilitate governance. This is illustrated in Figure 1, which shows the relationship between various stakeholders and their engagement in three different activities, namely: (1) knowledge production, (2) knowledge exchange, and (3) knowledge dissemination. Notably, the figure demonstrates the engagement of each stakeholder with some of the knowledge infrastructures and boundary arrangements identified in Table 1, as well as with specific types of “evidence.” Something we can immediately see is that, expectedly, scholars and practitioners from civil society, notably think tanks, are most involved in the creation of evidence, and this mainly in the form of fundamental and applied research, integration indicators and expert advice. They often do so in collaboration with each other as they are partners on most of the EU-funded consortia-led research projects. Member States are most active at the other end, as receivers of knowledge in various fora and networks, although they occasionally also contribute to knowledge creation by exchanging on best policy practices. EU institutions, on the other hand, are evidently the crucial actor when it comes to knowledge dissemination, being responsible for establishing and maintaining several durable knowledge platforms discussed above, where “evidence” on integration is accumulated.

Figure 1

Ecosystem of evidence-informed policymaking on migrant integration.

But in this they are aided by a crucial, yet fairly unexplored player in migration and diversity governance (especially on supranational level)—think tanks. Think tanks are—perhaps surprisingly—the most involved actors in the ecosystem of producing evidence on integration at the EU level. As a special form of interest groups, think tanks are organizations that seek to influence policymakers on various policy matters with recommendations based on research conducted in-house, and as such, are sites where the boundary between research and policy is blurred. As strong lobbyists, think tanks (sometimes called policy institutes) can wield significant power in the political arena while often remaining out of public view (Salas-Porras and Murray 2017). As shown in Figure 1, think tanks are more involved in mediating between research and policy on migrant integration than EU institutions themselves: they are the actor with the most links to all facets of knowledge production, from creating evidence to dissemination.

One among several involved think tanks particularly stands out in this regard: the Brussels-based Migration Policy Group (MPG). MPG are authors of all editions of the Handbooks on Integration published by the European Commission and they are notably active in producing integration indicators both through EU-funded research such as the MIPEX Index and within science–policy networks such as the Urban Agenda Partnership. Furthermore, the Commission’s DG HOME has outsourced the day-to-day maintenance and content creation of the European Website on Integration entirely to MPG since inception, giving them considerable control over the EU discourse on integration. Other highly involved think tanks include the Brussels-based Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS), the ISMU Foundation in Milan, and the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB). Perhaps we should also mention here the Vienna-based International Center for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), because even though they are technically an inter-governmental organization, they conduct in-house research related to migrants and integration and are important lobbyists for integration policymaking in EU institutions (as well as “effective” deportation measures, among other things; see ICMPD 2019a). Since most of these think tanks are specialized in migration-related issues, they strongly depend on EU funding targeted for “migration evidence” in the effort of making themselves indispensable experts in the political economy of migration governance. Hence, they stand out as beneficiaries in a significant number of migrant integration-related research projects funded under the Framework Programmes and Horizon 2020.

4.1 Research funding and its effect on research agendas

As is to be expected, all of this activity needs to be materially made possible with appropriate funding. The EU funding framework is the backbone of the apparatus of evidence production in many policy areas, including migration. Importantly, migrant integration was deemed such a high priority that it required two dedicated funding schemes: the INTI programme (18 million Euros for 2003–2006), and the Integration Fund (825 million Euros for 2007–2013), both at present integrated in the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF). All of these funding pots targeted newly-arrived migrants, as well as prospective migrants subjected to pre-travel integration requirements, meaning that they were meant to propel the proliferation of civic integration measures (e.g. integration tests and courses, language courses, vocational training) throughout Member States. One objective, however, relates to the exchange of knowledge, as well as monitoring and evaluating integration policies, and so these streams came to also finance the “science for policy ecosystems,” to use EU jargon.

However, when it comes to directly supporting research on migration and integration, a major factor is the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. As a major funder of European research, the EU has been releasing substantial funding for research into migration and integration issues through its consecutive Framework Programmes (1984–2013), Horizon 2020 (2014–2020), and the ongoing Horizon Europe. A recent study conducted by the European Research Council (ERC) analyzing all of the 6707 research projects funded since 2014 (through ERC only), found that research was highly relevant to Europe’s policy ambitions (ERC 2022). Crucially, “human migration” was the second most frequent topic researched, representing 6 per cent of all projects in the domain of Social Sciences and Humanities. Although programmes such as Horizon generally emphasize scientific excellence over policy relevance, excellent research is sometimes understood as research that “identifies solutions to current and future challenges.”⁸ Following the refugee arrivals in 2015, significant funds were dedicated, under H2020, to research aiming “to understand migration but also to develop effective policies for managing the influx and integrating migrants in the society and economy.”⁹ In addition, the entire third pillar of the Horizon 2020 programme, titled “Societal challenges,” was reserved for research that finds “potential solutions to social and economic problems” (including “demographic change” and “inclusive societies” under which migration-related research is classified).¹⁰ A recent example is a special call for projects on the topic Sustainable practices for the integration of newly arrived migrants into societies, whose purpose is notably “to extract policy implications from research findings”¹¹ from previous EU-funded projects on this issue, in an evident effort on the part of the Commission to ensure that past EU-funded knowledge can be made useful and exploited in governing “migrant” populations.

Unsurprisingly, and considering the generous funding packages and the prestige of the programme, Horizon sprouted an unprecedented number of research projects measuring the integration of migrants. Several large-scale EU-funded projects of recent years are interesting examples of how researchers seek to shape policy and to influence the governance of migrants in Europe. Abundant EU funding and the salience of the issue of integration have propelled numerous “policy-relevant” projects in the past several years.¹² Without exception, they are all implemented by multi-stakeholder consortia made up of university institutes, think tanks such as MPG, MPI, and CIDOB, and sometimes civil society and humanitarian organizations and (local) government agencies—a setup that on its own conveys the importance of the “real-life” applicability of research. For instance, a project called SPRING (Sustainable Practices of Integration) is in a way the embodiment of the evidence-based policy paradigm, as it brings together “some of Europe’s most well-connected integration researchers” to develop a platform that gathers relevant knowledge in order to “encourage evaluation and an evidence culture in integration practice and policy.”¹³ A similar example is the project KING (Knowledge for Integration Governance), carried out from 2013 to 2015 and co-funded by the Commission’s DG HOME. Described as “a translation into facts of the idea that knowledge should be the foundation stone of policy-making” in the field of integration,¹⁴ its findings were indeed “applied”, as they provided the basis for the Background Note of the 5th European Ministerial Conference on Integration in Milan in 2014.

The involvement of social scientists in the politics of migrant integration sometimes leads to the legitimization of existing controversial discourses on migrant integration, which have been argued to promote coercion, conditionality, assimilationism, racialization, and a neocolonial governance of migranticized and minoritized populations, rather than their purported “social inclusion” (Schinkel 2017; Favell 2022). For example, while the final report of KING recognizes the harmful paradigm shift where “integration” became a condition for acquiring rights rather than a means to counter social disadvantages (Gilardoni et al., 2015: 35), it also reproduces harmful allusions to the alleged backwardness and incompatibility of non-western cultures with what they call “acceptable cultural norms,” instructing that “wearing a hijab is generally acceptable, but female genital mutilation is not” (Gilardoni et al., 2015: 84). The report also promotes the neoliberal argument of migrant selection on the basis of their skills (Gilardoni et al., 2015: 29) that has been much criticized in the literature. A more extreme example of the legitimizing role of researchers is a “high level” seminar organized by the Council under the Dutch Presidency in February 2016 on the topic of EU Fundamental values, immigration and integration. The Dutch government invited a controversial anti-Islam scholar, Paul Scheffer, to substantiate before the Council the infamous discourse on the incompatibility of Islam with liberal values.¹⁵

It is worth clarifying here that, notwithstanding the harmful rhetoric that is sometimes (unwittingly) reinforced in research, it is likely that many of the researchers involved hope to use research-based arguments in the hope of pushing forwards a more rational and fact-based migration governance, which will presumably lead to more humane solutions. Research-informed policy can arguably counter value-laden emotional responses that see migration through the prism of cultural and/or economic threat, a view that has not been corroborated in research but is popular among politicians across the spectrum. However, this article does not strive to speculate on the individual motivations, but rather to ponder on the possible effects of producing “evidence” on the ways in which we imagine “integration” as the afterlife of cross-border mobility. While many of the research–policy collaborations and attempts to govern “integration” by evidence come from a good place (and in some ways might have some positive effects on the lives of those targeted by these policies), they nonetheless contribute toward cementing a discourse that, in political debates, is linked more strongly to restrictive, assimilationist and nationalist rationales than to equality-driven and anti-discrimination objectives. The harmfulness of that discourse is often brushed off rather than recognized in academic circles; too often integration researchers and practitioners push forward what they see as their egalitarian agendas without resonating with the wider debate on integration, ie, without tackling or even acknowledging the other, exclusionary side of the integration coin that has a much stronger public appeal. Arguably, this makes their efforts—no matter how focused on things like social inclusion and non-discrimination—easily co-opted by advocates of cultural assimilation, anti-Islam and anti-immigration, because they now have a vast scholarship to legitimize integration as a political programme. Such advocates know too well what many of the scholars and practitioners involved in this ecosystem never voice: that the strongest trait of “integration” is that it can serve as a vessel for all kinds of coercive, nativist, boundary-making policies and still retain vague allusions to social inclusion.

Overall, there appears to be a wide consensus across the realms of academia, civil society, and governance on the relevance of “evidence” for managing Europe’s diverse societies and their migranticized and minoritized populations. But what exactly counts as “evidence,” and what kind of knowledge is produced within the infrastructures and boundary arrangements in the EU? The following section addresses this question.

5. What counts as “evidence” when it comes to integration?

It is well-known that governance strongly relies on data, with statistics being a crucial governmentality technique in modern states, and the EU is no exception. The EU has its own statistical office, Eurostat, which, like national statistical bureaus, has a key role in the biopolitics of the European population. Efforts to gather statistics on migrants at the EU level date back to the 1970s, with the Council adopting Regulation No. 311/76 (1976) to mandate members of the European Communities to compile statistics on foreign workers. The Statistical Regulation 862/2007 mandated states to collect harmonized data on the population, including on country of birth, migration movements, acquisition and loss of citizenship, asylum, residence permits, as well as enforcement of immigration legislation. In the area of integration, some data (for example the so-called Laeken indicators for social inclusion) has been derived from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) as of 2003, as well as the EU Labour Force Survey with regard to basic employment indicators. Finally, since 2010 the EU began using the so-called Zaragoza indicators of integration measurement. As this section demonstrates, more than “evidence” for policy, statistics are what “makes” migration in the first place, as it is only through deploying concepts, definitions, methods, statistics, visualizations, and other data practices that what we think of as “migration” or “integration” are enacted (Scheel, Ruppert and Ustek-Spilda 2019). Figure 1 shows the positioning of different types of evidence within the eco-system of research–policy co-production of knowledge on integration. I now turn to a more detailed discussion of three examples of “evidence” related to the EU framework on “migrant integration”: integration indicators, Eurobarometer polls, and recent attempts to use “big data” in the governance of migrant integration.

5.1 Indicators of migrant integration

Among the efforts to quantify integration across the research–policy continuum, one invention particularly stands up: the “indicators measurement” paradigm (c.f. Favell 2022). Indicators refer to “a limited number of simple, quantitative elements indicating important developments within vital fields of integration policy.”¹⁶ The need to evaluate integration policies by measuring various achievements among the foreign-born was first stressed in 2004, in the Common Basic Principles for Integration. The Stockholm Program (2010) also prioritizes the development of core indicators “in a limited number of relevant policy areas (for example employment, education and social inclusion) for monitoring the results of integration policies, in order to increase the comparability of national experiences” (Article 6.1.5). In 2008, an expert meeting was organized by the Swedish Presidency in Malmö in December 2009, where government officials consulted knowledgeable scholars and other experts to identify European core indicators of “integration outcomes.” These indicators were then adopted by each member state in the Ministerial Conference on Integration in Zaragoza in April 2010, and approved by the Justice and Home Affairs Council in June 2010.

The declaration that compiled the conclusions for this Ministerial Conference—known as the Zaragoza declaration—remains the standard for EU-level migrant integration measurement. The Zaragoza indicators (presented in Table 2) differ from indicators we see in the scholarly literature in that they mostly cover sociodemographic data in the areas of employment, social inclusion, education, and “active citizenship,” excluding any identity- or value-related variables. However, the Zaragoza declaration contains a note that ministers consider “sense of belonging” as an indicator “which most or all Member States consider important to monitor (although comparable data is currently lacking).”¹⁷ The lack of “cultural” dimensions in the Zaragoza indicators was likewise lamented at the Ministerial Conference in Milan in 2014, where EU ministers made a note that:

[…] It is important to acknowledge that integration is a multifaceted process that needs to be covered in its entirety: in particular, all the different dimensions of integration—economic, social and cultural—should be adequately monitored by means of appropriate indicators.¹⁸

Table 2

Indicators for integration measurement adopted at Zaragoza Ministerial Conference

Policy area	Indicator
Employment	Core indicators:  • Employment rate  • Unemployment rate  • Activity rate
Education	Core indicators:  • Highest educational attainment (share of population with tertiary, secondary and primary or less than primary education)  • Share of low-achieving 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science  • Share of 20- to 34-year-olds with tertiary educational attainment  • Share of early leavers from education and training
Social inclusion	Core indicators:  • Median net income—the median net income of the immigrant population as a proportion of the median net income of the total population  • At risk of poverty rate—share of population with net disposable income of less than 60 per cent of national median  • The share of population perceiving their health status as good or poor  • Ratio of property owners to non-property owners among immigrants and the total population
Active citizenship	Core indicators:  • The share of immigrants that have acquired citizenship  • The share of immigrants holding permanent or long-term residence permits  • The share of immigrants among elected representatives

Source: Reprinted from Zaragoza declaration on Integration, Council of Ministers, 2010.

The selection of indicators is explained as a result of them being “based on existing and comparable data for most Member States; limited in number; comparable in time; productive and cost-effective; simple to understand and easy to communicate; and focused on outcome.”¹⁹ The “outcome” logic refers to acquiring tangible results from government policies; while most governments compile data on, say, naturalization rates, few governments do so for measuring “belonging.” This makes it difficult to gather comparative statistics across member states on less tangible indicators of integration. It is worth noting that “active citizenship” indicators are contested by some member states, as this could involve sensitive questions such as voting rights for non-citizens. Acknowledging that there is “no unified view” on this, the Council nonetheless postulates that this is “an important area of development, considering that the participation of immigrants in the democratic process as active citizens supports their integration and enhances their sense of belonging.”²⁰

The troubling question of who is the subject of measurement (who should be “integrated”?) emerged early on. As Favell (2022) notes, the vast majority of those who move across national borders—tourists, international students, transnational businesspersons, etc.—are never considered as migrants, nor are they ever the subject of integrationism. This question is therefore of crucial importance, as it has material effects on defining who shall be deemed insufficiently “modern, civilized, fulfilled and successful” (Favell 2022: 47). Being careful to acknowledge that “third country nationals are the target of EU cooperation in the area of integration” (which was true at the time, but since 2020 no longer is; see Dodevska 2023), the Zaragoza Declaration nonetheless broadens the scope of targeted groups, constructing many EU citizens as in need of integration, in addition to newly arrived migrants:

Recognising differences in target groups of Member States integration policies, and in order to maximise the added value of the indicators, data will be presented for either foreign born or third country nationals, and both where possible. […] Data on the descendants of foreign born nationals should also be presented when available. […] A distinction is needed between persons with both parents born abroad, often referred to as ‘second generation’, and persons with one parent born abroad, persons with a ‘mixed background’. (Annex: 13)

Finally, research–policy collaboration under the EU’s patronage gave rise to another type of indicators that measure not integration outcomes, but integration policies across countries: the widely-used MIPEX Index. The establishment of the MIPEX index is cited as a good example of a legitimizing usage of knowledge on the part of EU institutions because it monitors the compliance of Member States with EU policies, thus legitimizing EU intervention (Scholten et al., 2015: 325). Like the rest of the science–policy configurations, it seeks to make migrant integration a more tractable issue by defining it as a ‘problem of Europe’ (Geddes and Achtnich 2015: 307). In covering the policy areas of labor market mobility, family reunification, education, political participation, long-term residence rights, access to nationality, anti-discrimination, and health, it takes a “social inclusion” approach to integration that puts the burden on states. Yet such a frame, while legitimizing civic integrationism, obscures the ways in which integrationism is used to increase surveillance and monitoring of immigrant populations, control further migration (as in the case of pre-departure integration requirements; see Bonjour 2014), and reinforce a nativist vision of belonging (Kostakopoulou 2014; Rytter 2019; Schinkel 2018; Favell 2022).

5.2 Eurobarometer opinion polls on integration

A less relevant but telling source are also opinion polls, as they serve as testing grounds to feel the pulse of the general public. Since 1974, the Commission and the Parliament conduct opinion polls (outsourced to private companies) via the Eurobarometer, conceived as ‘a means to reveal Europeans to themselves’.²¹ Special surveys on attitudes toward the integration of immigrants were conducted in 2012, 2018, and 2022, and questions on integration are sometimes included in other surveys. The integration surveys are used, among other things, to test the extent of popular support for restrictionist and coercive measures, such as compulsory civic integration programs, pre-arrival integration measures, and emphasizing cultural values and norms in integration programs (e.g. QA12 Eurobarometer 2018).

Looking at how the surveys are designed also reveals how EU institutions imagine “integration” and how this idea is enacted through survey questions and reporting on results. Survey results convey an overwhelming popular support for EU measures on integration (even in countries where “integration” is not a household term). However, many of the pre-designed answers to the survey question of what constitutes “integration” are fairly universally applicable and highly positively framed, rendering a negative response on the part of respondents unlikely. For instance, quite unsurprisingly, 93 and 89 per cent among respondents agreed, respectfully, that “contributing to the welfare system through paying taxes,” and “having qualifications and skills that are sufficient to find a job” is beneficial for integration (Eurobarometer 2018). Integration surveys are, therefore, another interesting manifestation of the fuzzy and multi-layered meaning of the idea of “integration.” They are also a testament to how this deliberately broad meaning reinforces the appeal of integrationism when dressed in a discourse of civic duty and responsibility.

Therefore, surveys are not simple tools for “representing” whatever they purport to measure. They also have a productive role in establishing and cementing discourses, and themselves have the power to sway public opinion, via reporting “representative” findings. For instance, Slootweg, van Reekum and Schinkel (2019) show how the Eurobarometer surveys on racism and discrimination helped to fortify the idealized image of Europe as a tolerant, democratic region. Similarly, in the case of integration, the idea that all societies should strive to “integrate” their “migrants” is forged through surveys as a universal European goal, even though migrant integration is not as salient in newer member states (not least because of the absence of a sizable Muslim population as a primary driver of civic integrationism). Yet, Eurobarometer surveys seek to convey a common “European” opinion on an essentially Northwestern European idea that has been successfully escalated to EU level—in part through such surveys.

5.3 “Big data” for integration?

In recent years, calls on the part of states, IOs and the EU for better data on migrants have fuelled an increased activity in universities and public research institutions in the area of big-data-based research on migration and migrants (Stielike 2022). While the usage of big data in the area of integration remains limited, there are indications that the European Commission seeks avenues to exploit novel technologies in this area. One way is through the Joint Research Center, where in-house researchers explore ways to use data compiled by social media, internet and phone providers to monitor, for instance, migrants’ behavior and patterns of movement (Spyratos et al., 2019), or to identify “ethnic enclaves” (Tintori et al., 2018). Ideas also include building an “integration index” based on, among others, food-purchasing behavior of foreigners in a certain locality.²² Other efforts are made through the Horizon programme, which issued in 2018 a special call for the usage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve migrant integration, focused on gathering as much data on migrants as possible.²³

Occasionally, integration-related research projects are unexpectedly funded under security (rather than mobility or inclusion) funding programmes, as is the example with the project ITFLOWS (IT Tools and Methods for Managing Migration Flows) (2020–2023), that brings together scholars, think tanks, charities, and industry. This is a curious project in terms of its ambition, as it promises to find ICT solutions to all phases of the linearly imagined migration process, from deciding to migrate, to integrating upon arrival. ITFLOWS offers a big data-based tool (called EUMigraTool) for a “reliable prediction of migration movements,” but also for “optimising integration of refugees in the EU,” including by minimizing “potential risks of tension and conflict between migrants and EU citizens” though what seems to be a mobile application.²⁴ Hence, the potential of big data-based tools is rapidly being explored for migrant integration governance, and it remains to be seen how this will shape future policies, as well as concerns with surveillance and privacy that currently remain limited to the usage of data for immigration and border control.

6. The scientification of integration governance and its implications

This article mapped and visualized the wide network of science–policy configurations set or mediated by EU institutions, discussing the nature of such configurations and the kind of “evidence” they seek to produce for the purposes of migrant integration governance. Three findings stand out. First, the research demonstrates the importance of the EU as a key mediating actor, showing how actions on the part of EU institutions toward mobilizing knowledge production and facilitating policy evaluation leave a strong imprint on how (and to what extent) migration and diversity are conceptualized, studied, visualized, and debated. This imprint arguably well surpasses that of individual national governments, considering the sheer number of resources at the EU’s disposal, its strong role in knowledge production thanks to substantive funding schemes, and its dedicated campaigning for evidence-based policymaking.

Second, the increase in policy-relevant research that emerged in response was accompanied by a tendency—embraced across societal sectors—to direct the effort toward securing “evidence” in order to better regulate migration and societal diversity, in a technocratic spirit that privileges objective “facts” as the guiding principle in governance. The work done by the ensemble of science–policy configurations for producing evidence on integration opened room for “integration” to be seen not only as an objective fact, but as a common, European problem—one that is, however, manageable when armed with the proper knowledge. A notable contribution in this sense has been made by integration indicators as the most important type of “evidence” borne out of this arrangement. Indicators measurement involves merging political ideas of governing non-citizens and racialized populations with social scientific concepts of (“integrated”) society to come up with indicators through which EU institutions actively construct the subject of integration and the kind of social order they imagine for Europe.

Third, I brought to light the role played by an actor that normally stays behind the scenes in similar investigations. If the political economy of migration, with its high demand for data, has attracted many researchers to measure integration, this is even more true for practitioners specializing in trading knowledge in this area, particularly those from migration think tanks. Their involvement, notably in two spheres—controlling the discourse on integration by managing public content under the EU logo and developing indicators for integration measurement—makes them crucial players in constructing the discourse on “integration” at inter- and supranational levels.

What can we make out of this dense supranational landscape of producing evidence for integration governance at the EU level? The analysis above points to several possible implications that would benefit from being further explored in future research. Knowing the extent of the research–policy collaboration when it comes to migration and diversity governance, as well as the nature of the “evidence” produced in science–policy configurations, we are now well equipped to go on examining the more important question: what does this mean for the governmentality of difference (Anthias 2013)? What are the effects of the close relationship between researchers and policymakers on the way newcomers and long-settled migranticized populations are governed? How is the knowledge borne out of this relationship shaping the discourse on migration and diversity and the lives of those affected by it?

In light of what we know, I propose several avenues that are worth further pursuing in greater depth to uncover the effects of research–policy collaboration in governing those classified as migrants:

1. The scientification of integration governance: As I argued, the measurement of contested, politicized and normative questions—or any social question for that matter—is certainly far from a sterile, neutral, or “scientific” exercise. On the contrary, it is always simultaneously constituted by and constitutive of power struggles over discourse and reflects a worldview on how society should look like and how the different segments of the population should behave. Yet, that is precisely what the evidence-based policy paradigm negates, arguing that using social research will make for rational, value-free policy. Evidence-based policy efforts arguably lead to what we might call the scientification (Weingart 1999) of integration governance. Scientification does not refer to the actual impact of the broader scientific community on political debates, but rather to political elites utilizing what is construed as “scientific evidence” to gain an upper hand in defining the problem as they see fit, in this case as objective, measurable, tangible, and solvable. This could alter the terms of discussion on that problem; for instance, instead of asking whether we need migrant integration policies or what “integration” involves, the discussion is limited solely to how to enforce these policies and how to evaluate their effectiveness.

2. The politicization of integration research: I showed how the rise of integration on the (EU) political agenda geared research agendas toward researching integration, often without acknowledging the political contestations around it. The dominance of the evidence-based policy paradigm leads to more pressure on researchers to adjust their work to policy needs (Bakewell 2008), co-opting researchers in complex political processes that “evidence” can often hardly alter. What happens when researchers study politically defined problems through a largely positivist paradigm, treating it as part of “normal science” (c.f. Favell 2022)? How does such politicization of research legitimize political responses, and how does it affect the wider discourse on migration and diversity?

3. The depoliticization and normalization of discourses of difference: Any claim to “evidence” in regulating controversial social matters can arguably only dilute the controversy by depoliticizing what is often rightfully subject to contestation. To the extent that integration debates tend to racialize and expose populations that are seen as unfitting with the liberal mold as numerous scholars have argued (Korteweg 2017; Favell 2022; Blankvoort et al., 2023; Manser-Egli 2023), the pursuit of “evidence” in integration and migration governance—both on the demand and supply sides—may do more to legitimize the coercive implications of civic integrationism, than to improve the lives of migranticized and racialized populations. Thus, it is important to examine the extent to which the empiricist problem-solving logic behind evidence-informed policymaking risks depoliticizing the question of migrant integration—and thus normalizing one of the most salient discourses of difference in present-day Europe.

Notes

1

Action Plan on Integration and Inclusion 2021–2027, COM(2020) 758.

2

‘Knowledge for Policy Website’, https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/projects-activities/understanding-our-political-nature-how-put-knowledge-reason-heart-political_en, accessed 17 Nov. 2022.

3

Better Regulation: Joining forces to make better laws (COM/2021/219), p. 4.

4

‘Knowledge for Policy: Concepts & Methods Unit, Knowledge4Policy Website’, https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/evidence-informed-policy-making/about_en, accessed 12 Oct. 2022.

5

Council Decision of 14 May 2008 establishing a European Migration Network (2008/381/EC).

6

DG HOME, European Commission, European Modules on Migrant Integration, Final Report, 2014.

7

DG HOME, European Commission, European Modules on Migrant Integration, Final Report, 2014, p. 3.

8

MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships, Call 2022. Source: Funding and Tenders Portal, European Commission.

9

Source: European Commission, http://www.h2020.md/en/commission-invest-%E2%82%AC85-billion-research-and-innovation-2017, accessed 23 May 2021.

10

Horizon 2020—The EU’s New Research and Innovation Programme. Memo. EC, 2013, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_13_1085, accessed 11 Nov. 2022.

11

Topic Migration-10-2020. Source: https://cordis.europa.eu/programme/id/H2020_MIGRATION-10-2020

12

Other similar projects include: SIRIUS (Skills and integration of migrants, refugees and asylum applicants in European Labour Markets), NIEM (National Integration Evaluation Mechanism), and UPSTREAM (Developing Effective Strategies for the Mainstreaming of Integration Governance).

13

‘SPRING Website’, https://integrationpractices.eu/, accessed 23 Nov. 2022.

14

‘KING Website’, http://www.king.ismu.org/, accessed 22 Nov. 2022.

15

Presidency non-paper for the Council (General Affairs) on 24 May 2016 - Rule of law dialogue (8774/16), Annex, p. 7.

16

Zaragoza Declaration on Integration. Council of Ministers, 2010, p. 12.

17

Zaragoza Declaration on Integration. Council of Ministers, 2010, p. 16.

18

Draft Outcome of Proceedings, European Ministerial Conference on Integration (Milan, 5 and 6 November 2014), p. 5.

19

Zaragoza Declaration, p. 14.

20

See, e.g. Council document 9248/10.

21

Eurobarometer website, ‘About Eurobarometer’, https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/about/eurobarometer

22

Summary report on workshop ‘Big Data and Alternative Data Sources on Migration: From Case-studies to Policy Support’, organized by JRC and IOM, Ispra, 30 November 2017, https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/migration-demography/big-data-alternative-data-sources-migration_en#results.

23

Topic DT-MIGRATION-06-2018-2019. Source: https://cordis.europa.eu/programme/id/H2020_DT-MIGRATION-06-2018-2019.

24

Funded under Programme H2020-EU.3.7. Secure societies—Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens. Project website: https://www.itflows.eu/.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bojan Savic, Maissam Nimer, Stefan Manser-Egli, Wegahta B. Sereke, Nadine Blankvoort, Sandra King-Savic, Falk Daviter, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript (while all responsibility for the text remains mine).

Conflict of interest

None declared.

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission’s H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action under Grant number 812764.