“Useful” knowledge and Immigrant Integration: Mapping the European Union’s Science-Policy Knowledge Infrastructures

How does the usage of “evidence” in policymaking shape the production of knowledge on migrants and reinforce dominant discourses that essentialize “migrants”? And what role do EU institutions play in this? This paper reflexively investigates these questions by looking at the extensive network of knowledge infrastructures set by the EU to support policymaking in the area of immigrant integration. EU institutions are strongly investing in developing resources and infrastructures where knowledge on integration can be produced, harvested and “applied” into policy targeting third-country nationals and EU citizens with “migration background”. These structures entirely depend on the collaboration of social scientists, both from within and beyond academia. Critically mapping these infrastructures and the knowledge they aim to produce enables us to see how the spheres of policy and research converge or diverge, influence each other’s agendas and co-produce the dominant discourse on “migrants” and their “integration”. I demonstrate how a network of science-for-policy initiatives, platforms, databases and events arranged or supported by the EU has notably contributed to the scientification of integration governance: a process that is succeeding to take “migrant integration” out of the realm of political contestation and into the realm of a technocratic governance of observable, quantifiable social “facts”. A notable focus on “integration indicators” involves merging political ideas of governing non-citizens with social scientific concepts of (“integrated”) society to come up with indicators through which EU institutions use “evidence” to actively construct both the subject of integration and the kind of social order they imagine for Europe. Through communitarianizing integration – an otherwise nationally defined issue – as a “European problem”, the EU has sought to create a greater role for itself, to a large extent through mobilizing research against the backdrop of an increasingly important paradigm of “evidence-based” governance.