DukeEngage participant Mischa-von-Derek Aikman ponders the place and aims of organisations that champion integration in Irish society
Along with seven other students from Duke University, I was incredibly excited when I learned we would be working with various multicultural organisations in Dublin this summer. However, when I discovered that I would be interning with Dublin City Council’s Office for Integration, the initial wave of excitement morphed into one of uncertainty. This sense of uneasiness did not stem from any fear of being incapable of completing tasks that might be assigned to me; rather, it came from the fact that I wasn’t exactly sure what I would be doing at all. After all, what does an office for integration do?
You can imagine that my apprehension only strengthened as I was asked to draft a ‘map’ of what ‘integration’ looks like in an intercultural Dublin as a part of my work. While both integration and interculturalism were concepts I had previously encountered in a theoretical framework, I realised that academic debates only hinted at the richness of these concepts. More importantly, these particular terms were not categories through which myself and other Duke students actually viewed reality. I came to understand that in order for me to map what integration looks like, I had to try to grasp what integration meant and what it encompassed on the ground.
The very nature of the work I was doing with the Office for Integration exposed me to an extensive range of organisations and initiatives. Together these groups helped me to wrap my head around what was indeed happening at the grass roots. Constantly interacting with people from very different backgrounds allowed me to view the numerous facets that are involved in attempting to make immigration work.
Yet while every individual organisation confidently advanced its conception of integration, there was no correspondence between these definitions and those lived by other groups. For instance, one group might see getting national recognition as a necessary step in their work of integrating. While the intention behind this strategic step may have initially been something that had to be done in order for their efforts to be more effective, I worried that they risked losing sight of the ultimate goal. Perhaps striving to gain national recognition distorts their vision for integration, and consequently becomes their goal.
Having engaged with these different outlooks on integration, I am left wondering: what is the bigger picture? Can you have an integrated society or even a city made up of a host of distinctive conceptions of integration and the means to realise them? But then the tables were suddenly turned one day when one of my interviewees asked how America ensures that integration is present. I couldn’t give an answer, and that made me realise that the reason I felt integrated at home was because I was raised in what was already a relatively integrated society. Yes, we do have cultural institutions that ‘promote’ integration in America. But is my feeling that I live in an integrated society a result of what these organisations actually do? And if not, do they really do anything?
After much thought, I would argue that in both America and Ireland, they definitely do, but they often don’t in the way that we would typically measure a successful endeavour. There is no tangible quantifier that one can use to monitor a society’s degree of integration. These institutions do what they can do, and maybe what they should be doing given this fact. However, while ‘gaining national recognition’ may be necessary to become a more effective societal integrative factor, groups like this must ensure that such milestones don’t become the ultimate goal.
To be frank, I am of the opinion that the most important tool for integration is time. Just as I was born into a fairly integrated society, my children will perhaps be born into one that would be considered even more integrated, and so the cycle would continue.
In addition to the factor of time, Ireland does need the institutions it currently has in place to catalyse the process. Without groups that advocate for integration, we would not be forced to face issues surrounding such sensitive topics, and the social clock would move at a much slower rate.
