Excerpt:
Integration courses, an integration summit, an integration barometer – the catchword "integration" is on everybody's lips and has replaced the concept of multi-culturalism. Discredit has been cast on the multi-cultural society. Reports which claim to provide evidence that integration has failed are more popular. Contemporary discourse on migration usually focuses on the problems of parallel societies, honour killings or forced marriages.
Sabine Hess, ethnologist at the University of Munich and co-editor of the collection of articles entitled No integration?! Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Integrationsdebatte in Europa (No Integration?! Cultural Studies on the Integration Debate in Europe), sees the book as an "attempt to re-establish the idea of adopting another standpoint".
One such change in approach would be, for instance, not to look upon immigrants primarily as people with deficits that have to be compensated for in "integration courses". The goal of integration must be equality of opportunity through participation in social, economic, political and cultural life. And that demands input from "non-immigrants" as well as from immigrants.