The Importance of Subjectively Constructed Meaning: Integration Viewed From the Perspective of Immigrants

In political discourse, as much as in social studies, the term integration is commonly viewed in the context of migration. On the basis of ‘objective’ indicators and statistical analysis, the level of integration is measured and assessed as ‘low’ or ‘high’, ‘sufficient’ or ‘insufficient’. This is the perspective of the receiving countries (not migrants), which clearly dominates in this field of study. Seeing this perspective as partial, we decided to ask migrants themselves what integration means to them. The analysis of the narrative interviews conducted with Ukrainian, Srilankese and Senegalese men and women living in the South of Italy has demonstrated that integration for them is more related to the notion of ‘good life’ than to a desire of becoming ‘one of us’.2 Our interviewees’ approach to integration is very pragmatic as pursuing their own life projects, even if they turn out to be relatively modest, is after all their main concern. From their narratives emerges an idea of integration as acceptance and satisfaction, but without aspirations for equality, participation and full social and political rights, which calls for more active integration policies.

The scope of this paper is to present the processes of integration from the bottom-up perspective rather than provide a detailed literature review on migrants' integration as it has been done elsewhere (Kindler et al. 2015;Penninx 2007; demonstrating that the concept of integration is highly normative, based on contradictory assumptions and ambiguous as it is understood differently by various users (Anthias et al. 2013). In order to focus in our analysis on the subjective perspective of immigrants, we con- This diversity is linked to nationality, gender, class, cultural capital and the age at the moment of arrival.
All of our interviewees had a residence permit (in one case, there was also an Italian citizenship obtained through marriage). All those differences have been analyzed and published before (Spanò & Domecka 2014) in a book summing the project findings. Here, we present an overview of our major results, focusing more on the similarities we found out than on the differences. The choice of the autobiographical narrative approach was meant not only to provide time and space for our interviewees to share their experiences, to 'give them the voice' but also to facilitate the expression of their agency: their reflexivity, their concerns and their projects as they are defined in the context they live in. We recognize the fact that in the autobiographical narratives the levels of agency and structure are linked as individual projects are presented in broader social and institutional contexts, where they can be facilitated, suspended or blocked.
In the paper we present the results of the analysis of collected narratives, which point first of all at a pragmatic approach towards integration, deeply rooted in the migrants' life projects. To our initial surprise, and in contrast to the significant presence of integration discourse in the public sphere, the topic of integration was not picked up easily by our interviewees. The word itself was not familiar to our narrators and the concern about rights and citizenship would not have been a part of their everyday reflection. As our interviewees did not have any ready-made definitions of integration at their disposal, they had to construct it while narrating their life experiences. Therefore, instead of the notion of integration as we know it from migration studies or from political discourse, our analysis found an idea of integration as 'good life'. To be integrated, according to our interviewees, means to have a job, a decent place to live, a status regulated with residence permit, to be surrounded by family and friends, to feel satisfied by accepting the constraints and by feeling free and accepted by others.
The relative modesty of these expectations may be explained by temporarization: migration tends to be viewed as a transitory phase of our interviewees' lives. Temporarization makes the limitations encountered in the country of destination easier to accept and the discussions on rights and citizenship less relevant. The main reference points of the people interviewed were not here and now, but their past (often marked by poverty thus the current satisfaction and emphasis on 'good life') and their future in an unknown destination or in their countries of origin (thus the concern about Italian citizenship less pronounced).
In the paper we also demonstrate how much the meaning of integration differs if we take it as a theoretical construct, a social policy goal and a lived experience of the immigrants. Viewed from the bottom-up perspective, integration has first of all a pragmatic character as it is not that much a matter of becoming 'one of us', but it is about the possibility of realizing the projects of 'good life', where individual agency and structural context play equally important roles.
silence, to have their voices be heard. However, 'giving the voice' is not enough as the real point of qualitative research is not only to gather the information on the lived experiences but to facilitate the expression of agency, which means to listen carefully to the narrations, evaluations, argumentations, and interpretations people build over their experiences, the contexts they live in and their interdependence.
The idea is to conduct research with people rather than on people.
One of the best ways of capturing agency is the one through autobiographical narration. Following the classics, we can say that "the self-biography is the highest and most instructive form in which the understanding of life is confronting us" (Dilthey 1962(Dilthey [1924) as it links the level of individual experiences and the level of structurally given circumstances, enabling us to relate life projects to the contexts where they can be defined and realized and vice versa, to establish a connection between structural possibilities and impossibilities and the projects developed. The construction of a life story is a way of presenting those aspects of one's past, which are relevant for the current situation, as well as for the future projects guiding the present actions (Kohli 1981). Therefore, in the narration, the processes of migration and integration are contextualized, incorporated in the life histories and in the agency of narrators. By agency we mean the capacity of changing one's own projects in relation to the context and making a difference in the context in the light of one's projects. The projects play here a crucial role as they are oriented towards the future, but come from the past and condition the present. Narrating one's life also means doing biographical work (Strauss, 1987;Schütze, 2008), which can be described as an effort of re-reading of, reflecting upon and eventually integrating one's past experiences. Biographical work undertaken during autobiographical narration means that different interpretations of one's life course are taken into account and struggled with.
It is a self-critical effort meant to evaluate one's biographical development in order to establish a plausible version of one's life (and one's identity) with its many contradictions, impediments (both internal and external), turning points and the paths considered, but never taken. In this particular research project, we looked at biographical work as the capacity of evaluating one's choices and linking one's dreams, hopes and projects to the existing opportunity structures, as well as the capacity of changing the context in order to make their subsequent steps possible. Biographical work, conceptualized in this way, plays the role of a crucial resource in the integration process.
In order to understand what integration means to them, we asked all our interviewees to share with us their experiences not only of migration but also their lives before and after this turning point. We chose the autobiographical narrative approach 4 as we 4 The initial research design assumed conducting autobiographical narrative interviews as developed by Fritz Schütze (2005) followed then by a list of questions directly related to the project objectives. As in some cases it was possible to conduct autobiographical narrative interviews, in some others, due to language difficulties (not all the interviewees were fluent in Italian and no interpreters and written translations were available because of very limited budgeting) and due to the lack of experience with this particular method of some of the interviewers (researchers coming from different disciplines), our approach had to be modified. The result is that some of the interviews conducted do not contain a long autobiographical narrative part, but consist of the answers to the questions asked, which then enabled the reconstruction of the life course. knew from our previous research experiences that conducting life story interviews gives us a chance to approach people in their world of everyday life and to be offered not only a story of events, decisions and turning points but also their reflexive elabora-

Integration as a Pragmatic Matter
The questions about integration (What does integration mean to you? What comes to your mind when you hear the word integration?) 5 were asked later in the in-terviews, after the narrative part where interviewees would share their experiences related to migration, their lives in their home countries and then in

Italy.
Our first finding about integration from the immigrants perspective is that, despite the fact that their integration appears frequently in the public discourse, it is not the word which is spontaneously used in immigrants' narratives. Unlike other elements of public discourse, such as the crisis, which perforated the interviewees' ways of talking and thinking, the very word integration is not a part of  On the contrary, for those who want to stay, the already worked out projects change the optics completely. In particular, for the children of immigrants, brought up in Italy, the new citizenship seems to be not only practical but also symbolically relevant, not considered only in practical terms but also in terms of identity resources, as identity statement and con- Applying for the residence permit, which gives access also to health insurance, is the first and final step taken by the immigrants as it is commonly believed to be sufficient for a 'good life'.
The same pragmatic attitude is expressed towards the language learning. Italian is treated as an essential tool for finding and doing work, but as it is explained by Yuri, language proficiency is not considered to be necessary:  6 The idea of integration as 'good life' appeared much earlier in the report on the migrants' integration in Italy (Zincone, 2000), where three different interpretations of integration have been distinguished, depending on the types of relations between immigrants and natives: (a) integration as equality (of rights and resources), (b) integration seen instrumentally, where newcomers are assessed on the basis of what they bring to the host society (workforce, tax contributions), (c) integration as the process of shortening the distance between natives and immigrants and becoming similar. On top of these three types, Zincone proposes a model of integration understood as integrity of a person: good life, as a positive interaction, as a peaceful coexistence. In this context, the migrants' integration is viewed not only from the perspective of newcomers but also the point of view of natives, whose concerns must be taken into consideration in order to build the conditions for successful integration (Zincone 2000). It can also be affirmed, in reference to the different dimensions, the concept of integration is usually made of (the economic, cultural, social and political ones) 7 , in case of all our interviewees there emerges the centrality of the economic dimension (work) and the social (relationships), and the importance 7 Lacroix (2010) shows how the "various dimensions, domains, levels or 'types' of integration have been categorized in many different ways, the most popular of which have been discussed under the groupings of economic, social, legal and cultural integration. Of course, none of these aspects of integration are isolated, and more often than not, one will influence the other. Insofar as this work is concerned, integration can be categorized into two major 'dimensions': (1) the structural, which includes all aspects of the social participation of individuals and groups into a larger society, including legal, political, labor, citizenship and so on; and (2) the affective, which refers to the processes of value orientation and identification (Lacroix 2010, p. 13 Discovering the similarities and differences on the personal as much as cultural level, mutual interest, showed by the native and the immigrant groups, as well as intercultural exchange lead us to the next dimension of integration strongly emphasized by our interviewees: integration as acceptance.

Integration as Acceptance
The perspective emphasizing the importance of acceptance for successful integration, was found in all the interviews conducted. Integration was described as 'good life', the condition of "being fine", "leaving peacefully", "feeling at home", for which mutual acceptance was needed. The acceptance was understood as on the one hand, the condition of being accepted, being treated by others as a fel- He is critical about the way Italians treat the immi- The feeling of not having the same weight on the social scale is a sign of the failure of integration policies.
The low expectations immigrants have towards institutions may suggest that they did not encounter any tangible help from them. The discourse of equal rights did not penetrate the level of everyday life and equality has never become reality for them. Our interviewees are stigmatized and then also stigmatize themselves as those 'naturally' occupying lower positions. As a result, they do not aspire for anything better than the immediately available niches left by the Italian majority society.
There are also other reasons given, implicitly, for the low expectations and the general acceptance of the status quo. First of them is the economic crisis and the resulting difficulties to find and keep a job, the second one is the vision of migration (and life in Italy) as a transitory phase and the third one is the overall satisfaction our interviewees feel about the shape their current lives have taken.

The perception of crisis
The immigrants, who shared their life stories with us, are fully aware of the existing segregation in the labor market. They know that the work available to them are those jobs that Italians don't do. Our narrators perceive also the phenomenon of over-education The perceived opportunity structure is so restricted that any change in employment, any improvement, becomes 'unthinkable'. Better jobs are thought to be so scarce that they become defined as 'not for us'.
This mechanism leads our interviewees to give up any aspirations as thinking about any significant improvement is readily labelled as unthinkable or 'stupid' (an exception here is Liliana who took the risk of leaving her job of a domestic worker and opening a shop together with her husband).

The transitory character of migration experience
The tendency to view the migration as a transi-

The overall satisfaction
The acceptance, understood by our interviewees as To the feeling of satisfaction contributes also the There is one more element that works as a tranquillizer, helping the immigrants to accept all the constraints. It is the frequent help of the natives. In the system that often turns out to be slow and in- It is important to note that those narrators have better life conditions (in respect to work, income and housing) than others we interviewed. Their dissatisfaction is closely related to their aspirations (much higher than in other cases) and the meaning constructed of their migration, which is experienced here as a failure. sion of our interviewees the opportunity to achieve a 'good life' cannot be separated from the natives.
Not surprisingly, the positive experiences as much as the negative episodes are always centered around the natives (employers, neighbors, classmates and teachers), who for better or worse, seem to have a great influence on the overall evaluation of life experiences of our interviewees. 9

Conclusions
Our study on the integration viewed from the perspective of immigrants was motivated by our observation that there is much ambiguity over the concept to aspire arises in the present because in order to feed the aspirations there must exist a "minimum basis of objective possibilities" (Mandich 2012). It is also self-evident that the context devoid of opportunities that does not provides the adequate resources, undermines the capacity to aspire to a better future, making people trim their life projects according to the existing constraints. It needs to be recognized and emphasized that the project of a more integrated society requires also the agency, the motivated social actors capable of creating new opportunities and making use of the existing ones. The traditional top-down perspective of policy-making needs to be therefore overcome and complemented by a variety of alternative approaches. Moreover, it needs to be emphasized that if integration is to be a multi-sided process, it clearly does not involve the immigrants only but all the society members, from whom effort, acceptance and responsibility is expected.