Migrant Integration in Europe in the 2020s: Institutions, Discourse, Inequalities and Belonging

Dear Colleagues,

Migrant integration in Europe is undergoing a profound transformation in the 2020s, shaped by overlapping crises and structural changes, including the post-2015 migration context, the COVID-19 pandemic, digitalisation, labour market restructuring, and rising political polarisation. These developments challenge conventional approaches to integration, calling for renewed theoretical and empirical perspectives.

This Special Issue advances current debates by conceptualising integration as a multidimensional process shaped by institutions, policies, discourses, and everyday practices. It examines how integration operates across labour markets, legal systems, welfare institutions, educational settings, health systems, and identity formation processes. Particular attention is given to migrants experiencing multiple forms of vulnerability, including those related to gender, class, race, ethnicity, disability, age, and legal status, thereby fostering a genuinely intersectional understanding of integration in contemporary Europe (e.g., Anthias, 2013; Schinkel, 2017; Valluvan, 2018). It also addresses key gaps related to digital transformations, institutional mediation, psychosocial wellbeing, and the evolving dynamics of the 2020s.

We welcome contributions on governance and institutional transformations, migration discourses, and inequalities in labour markets and welfare systems, as well as studies on belonging, identity, and everyday integration practices, including psychosocial dimensions such as wellbeing and discrimination. Research addressing emerging contexts such as digitalisation, crisis dynamics, and “frontline” European regions is particularly encouraged.

To address these gaps, the Special Issue is structured around several interconnected thematic areas:

• Governance and institutions: Multi-level governance, migration and integration policies, asylum systems, and institutional mediation in welfare, education, and legal settings;
• Emerging dynamics in the 2020s: Digitalisation, post-COVID-19 inequalities, crisis contexts, and new forms of inclusion and exclusion;
• Discourses and knowledge production: Media representations, political narratives, evidence-based policy, and processes of categorisation, racialisation, and knowledge production;
• Inequalities and socioeconomic integration: Labour market participation, deskilling, precarity, education, discrimination, and structural inequalities;
• Belonging, identity and psychosocial integration: Identity formation, social inclusion, trust, discrimination, mental health, and intergenerational dynamics;
• Disability, health and inclusive integration: Disability and migration, inclusion of disabled migrants and refugee families, accessibility and institutional barriers, mental health and psychosocial wellbeing, health inequalities and access to services, intersectionality across disability, gender, ethnicity, class, religion and migration status;
• Mediation, language and communication: Language practices, interpretation and translation, institutional encounters (e.g., asylum interviews), and digital mediation;
• Frontline and peripheral contexts: Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, emerging migration destinations, and territorial inequalities;
• Gender, sexuality and intersectionality: Gendered experiences of migration, sexuality and asylum, and intersectional inequalities shaping integration processes (optional but recommended).

By bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives (sociology, political science, law, economics, communication studies, sociolinguistics, and social psychology and pedagogy), this Special Issue seeks to provide a comprehensive and critical understanding of migrant integration in contemporary Europe. It ultimately aims to contribute to debates on social inclusion, inequality, and justice in increasingly diverse societies.

Relation to the Existing Literature:

In particular, this Special Issue seeks to bring together interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives on migrant integration in Europe. We are particularly interested in contributions that combine migration studies (Sigona 2015; FitzGerald 2025) with other fields such as economics (Borjas 2001), social psychology (Portes 2020), political science (Ambrosini 2025; Boswell, 2018; Geddes & Scholten 2016; Scholten & Penninx 2016), law (Anderson 2024; Favell 2016), sociology (Garcés-Mascareñas & Penninx 2016), communication studies (Guild et al. 2025; Maryns 2014), and gender, class, race and disability studies (Anthias & Lazaridis 2020; Bonjour & Diepenmaat, 2025; Luibhéid 2022).

This Special Issue critically engages with the literature on migrant integration, traditionally focused on national models, economic participation, and social cohesion, while addressing key gaps. It conceptualises integration as a multidimensional process, highlighting areas such as psychosocial wellbeing, institutional mediation, and digital communication. Drawing on critical, Foucauldian, postcolonial and disability studies perspectives, this Special Issue examines integration as a mechanism through which opportunities, rights, recognition and inequalities are distributed. It pays particular attention to the experiences of migrants facing intersecting forms of marginalisation, including disability, racialisation, precarious legal status, gendered vulnerabilities and socioeconomic disadvantages.

Contributions have to follow one of the three categories of papers (article, conceptual paper or review) of the journal and address the topic of the Special Issue.

Online Reference List (Supplementary Bibliography)

Anderson, B. (2025). The Nation and its others. Comparative Migration Studies, 13(1), 41. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-025-00458-8

Anthias, F. (2013). Intersectional what? Social divisions, intersectionality and levels of analysis. Ethnicities, 13(1), 3-19. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796812463547

Anthias, F., & Lazaridis, G. (Eds.). (2020). Gender and migration in Southern Europe: Women on the move. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003085447

Ambrosini, M. (2025). The populist far right paradox: The identification of the enemy and its exceptions in the immigration policies of the Meloni government in Italy. Comparative Migration Studies, 13, Article 17. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-025-00438-y

Bonjour, S. (2026). The Migrant, the Family, and the Rule of Law: On Migration Politics and Authoritarianism. In Citizenship in Nativist Times (pp. 65-78). Leuven University Press.

Bonjour, S., & Diepenmaat, S. (2025). Doing Family before the State. Does recognition of de facto families lead to more inclusive migration law practices?. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 32(3), 537-559.

Borjas, G. J. (2001). Does immigration grease the wheels of the labor market? Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2001(1), 69–133. https://doi.org/10.1353/eca.2001.0016

Boswell, C. (2018). Migration in europe. In Politics of Migration(pp. 91-110). Routledge.

Favell, A. (2016). Philosophies of integration: Immigration and the idea of citizenship in France and Britain. Springer.

FitzGerald, D. S. (2025). The limits and possibilities of segmented assimilation theory. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 48(8), 1633–1641. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2024.2445083

Garcés-Mascareñas, B., & Penninx, R. (Eds.). (2016). Integration processes and policies in Europe: Contexts, levels and actors. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21674-4

Geddes, A., & Scholten, P. (2016). The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe. SAGE Publishing Inc.

Guild, E., Mitsilegas, V., & Vavoula, N. (2025). From Digitalization to Algorithmization in European Border Management: Automation, Artificial Intelligence and the Rule of Law. In Lawless Borders (pp. 190-218). Bristol University Press.

Luibhéid, E. (2022). National citizenship, migrant deportation and gender/sexual logics of home. Citizenship Studies, 26(4-5), 556-564.

Maryns, K. (2014). The asylum speaker: Language in the Belgian asylum procedure. Routledge.

Portes, A., & Zhou, M. (1993). The new second generation: Segmented assimilation and its variants. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 530(1), 74–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716293530001006

Schinkel, W. (2017). Imagined Societies: A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316424230

Scholten, P., & Penninx, R. (2016). The multilevel governance of migration and integration. In Integration processes and policies in Europe: Contexts, levels and actors (pp. 91-108). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Sigona, N. (2015). Campzenship: Reimagining the camp as a social and political space. Citizenship Studies, 19(1), 1-15.

Valluvan, S. (2018). Racial entanglements and sociological confusions: Repudiating the rehabilitation of integration. The British Journal of Sociology, 69(2), 436-458. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12284

Dr. Roberto Moreno López
Prof. Dr. Fabienne Baider
Dr. Sviatlana Karpava
Guest Editors

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• migrant integration
• Europe
• inequalities
• belonging
• migration governance
• discourse
• labour market integration
• social inclusion
• migration policy
• identity
• digitalisation
• superdiversity
• disability studies