Immigrant integration is high on most governments’ agenda. Following declarations in the early years of the new millennium that multiculturalism had failed, integration became a highly politicized field, resulting in policy debates that increasingly framed integration as an individual migrant responsibility.

At the same time, critical scholarship has challenged both integration policies and the academic use of integration as an analytical concept. Critics argue that policy-driven approaches risk producing flawed research, reinforcing racialized, gendered and postcolonial hierarchies, and framing migrants through a deficit lens. Others have criticized integration for its conceptual vagueness and proposed alternatives such as inclusion or incorporation to better capture power relations, lived experiences and translocal connections.

More recently, new perspectives have highlighted the growing complexity of contemporary societies. Taking these complexities as the foundation for this issue's special section, and acknowledging the need for timely, empirically grounded insights into these evolving dynamics—as well as critical engagements with them—the contributions in this issue of Current Issues in Migration Research reconsider conceptualisations and examine the dynamics of integration within the broader context of migration and diversity.