Sam Bidwell is a political commentator.

What is integration, really?

In the context of our national experiment with mass migration, we hear this world a lot. Whether it’s voices such as Fraser Nelson, lauding Britain’s “integration miracle”, or politicians such as Robert Jenrick, who have criticised our efforts to integrate immigrants into the British mainstream, this concept looms large in our public debate.

But should it? Is this really a useful way to think about our handling of migration – and are the outcomes desired by the integrationists even desirable in the first place? 

My contention is that we should abandon our drive for integration altogether, and instead pursue a migration policy which prizes assimilation. Though often merged for the sake of rhetorical convenience, there are real and meaningful differences between these two ideas.

The first of these ideas, integration, has been the stated policy of British governments, of both parties, for the last thirty years. It is a process of compromise, in which society is shaped to accommodate newcomers and the majority group affords concessions to minorities. The ultimate aim is not the maintenance of the base national culture, but the preservation of peace and orderliness, with conflict between groups kept to a minimum.

The idea of ‘British values’ is fundamentally an idea designed to encourage and enable this integration. By reducing national identity to a handful of politically expedient slogans, it becomes easier to ensure the buy-in of newcomers.

Never mind the fact that it requires the abandonment of a cultural understanding of what formed our nation in the first place. These modish values did not really shape Britain; they did not belong to Alfred when he fought the Danes at Edington, or William when he landed at Pevensey. They are not found in the Bill of Rights, or the Acts of Union, or Magna Carta. 

But that isn’t the point. The point is to provide a broad framework which allows groups to live side-by-side with one another. The ideal migrant, in the integrationist worldview, is a non-violent net contributor, who maintains a basic loyalty to the institutions of state. 

It is this integrationist ideology which has enabled some of the worst effects of mass migration. It inspired police officers and social workers to ignore concerns over Pakistani grooming gangs, for fear of “worsening community tensions”, and leads the Home Office to avoid publishing inconvenient statistics about crime or terrorism. 

Integrationism enables the devolution of society into a zero-sum contest over limited resources – even amongst high-earning migrant groups. We have also seen this play out in the political and institutional arenas, as different groups jostle for special treatment.

At the last general election, pro-Gaza candidates saw success in pandering to Muslim voters – but a number of Conservative candidates engaged in the same sectarian pleading to Hindu voters. Parallel court structures have been established to cater to a wide variety of different religious communities, while in recent years, various campaign groups have agitated for special legal protections against Islamophobia, Hinduphobia, and anti-Sikh hate. 

For the integrationist, this is an acceptable price to pay for the maintenance of peace, stability, and multiculturalism. 

By contrast, assimilation is a process by which newcomers to a society become indistinguishable from their peers. An assimilated migrant is not merely non-criminal and economically successful; they belong to the nation as a whole, fully adopting its customs, norms, and habits. The assimilated migrant will feel deep ties to the nation and its history, beyond the mere institutional loyalty expected under 

We have managed successful assimilation in the past. Few in modern Britain could identify which of their peers is descended from Huguenot refugees or Flemish wool merchants. These small, culturally compatible groups assimilated into the fabric of British society, adopting the customs, habits, and practices of the broader population. 

Even more recently, Britain integrated thousands of Irish migrants during the period of industrialisation, when rapidly expanding urban centres attracted labour from other parts of the British Isles.

Today, many of our urban centres, including cities such as Liverpool and Birmingham, are home to significant populations of Irish descent, who are largely indistinguishable from their peers. The Irish migrants who came to Britain in the 18th and 19th century have now largely assimilated – though not without significant difficulty along the way.

It is not impossible to imagine that such a process could take place again, with respect to a limited number of culturally=compatible migrants. Through close contact, individual effort, and intermarriage, we might expect to see a subset of the newcomers become fully assimilated over the course of a few generations.

But mass migration of the scale, pace, and diversity that we now face renders assimilation impossible – and our system is not designed with assimilation in mind. The millions who have come to Britain over the last few years cannot be expected to assimilate and, indeed, have not been compelled to do so.

The process of assimilating Irish migrants was made easier by the cultural similarities between new arrivals from Ireland and their British peers: hundreds of years of common history, common culture, and common language. Even so, that assimilation process was by no means seamless, with sectarian divisions between Irish Catholics and British Protestants persisting well into the 20th Century in parts of the country.

Assimilation is a higher standard than the simple test imposed by the integrationists. Perhaps this is why successive governments have chosen to abandon promotion of assimilation altogether. It expects more from those who come to this country, and forces confrontation with norms and practices which conflict with our own. This is not necessarily easy – but it is worthwhile. 

Preferring a policy of assimilation to a policy of integration also has upstream implications for our migration system as a whole. An assimilatory system should prefer migrants from culturally-compatible nations, and should preference those who come to Britain without bringing an existing family.

It should also maintain tight controls on the numbers of people allowed to come, whatever their background – assimilation is rendered impossible when people are surrounded by the similarly unassimilated. It relies on close proximity to British society, norms, and habits, a proximity which is made impossible when migrants are given the option to self-sort into communities which operate under a different paradigm altogether.

Abandoning the language of integration will be difficult for a political class which has spent so long extolling its values, but it is a worthwhile endeavour. The norms, culture, habits, and customs that built our society are worthy of protection and preservation. They are distinctly our own, and created one of the freest, safest, and richest countries that the world has ever seen.

I am unwilling to compromise on those norms for the sake of maintaining an illusory peace, and I am sure that this is a view shared by many millions across the country.

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