The demands of integration: implications of different management areas: education, culture, health, housing, employment and social services

Abstract

The Commission of Experts on Intercommunitarian Relations sponsored by the European Council recommended a policy for the integration of immigrants which would consider these as groups of communities rather than look on them only as individuals, and which would also involve the native population of the host countries. It expressly mentioned the need for these to turn into multiethnic and multicultural societies. This requires changes in the social body as a whole (natives and immigrants) as well as attending not only to discrimination based on xenophobia (intentional), but also to the structural discrimination which is produced inadvertently because of cultural differences. The theoretical difficulties which this proposal presents are considered (we have no idea of how a multicultural society would function). On the practical level, treatment is given to the adjustments required at the administrative level of the social services. Several aspects of these readjustments are examined more specifically.