ReROOT has the huge ambition to revolutionize the way we think about migration, and above all, the way we, as migration societies, ‘do’ migration. Two operations are central to the critical shift which ReROOT seeks to accomplish: (1) our entry point into migration is arrival while (2) it conceives of ‘doing’ arrival as ‘infrastructuring’. This novel take on migration has profound effects on the way we approach integration and position newcomers.

What are arrival infrastructures? “those parts of the urban fabric within which newcomers become entangled on arrival, and where their future local or translocal social mobilities are produced” (Meeus et al. 2019:1). They are "the place-specific socio-material constellations that mediate the migration arrival process." (Loomans, Lennartz, & Manting, 2023).

First, by focusing on processes of arrival, we want to direct attention to how and where people find some stability in order to move on.

Second, an infrastructural perspective on processes of arrival allows for a critical as well as transformative engagement with the position of the state in the management of migration. States have continuously produced new layers of supportive and exclusionary governmental infrastructures, funneling particular groups into “permanent arrival” and others into “permanent temporariness.” At the same time, migrants and various other actors incrementally build up sites or vantage points of temporary deployment with whatever is at hand, including parts of these governmental infrastructures.

The notion of arrival infrastructures hence emphasizes the continuous and manifold “infrastructuring practices” by a range of actors in urban settings, which create a multitude of “platforms of arrival and take-off” within, against, and beyond the infrastructures of the state.


Arrival
Surprisingly perhaps, we see ‘arrival’ less as an endpoint than a point of departure. Arrival in ReROOT’s understanding is a condition of (always temporary but possibly quite long-term) settling/inhabitation that allows one to prepare for the future while reassembling the past. ‘Present’, ‘past’, and ‘future’ refer to times as much as to spaces and social circles where these ‘times’ take place. Arrival is thus a time-space patchwork of relatively stable surroundings enabling as well as limiting and orienting people to (re)connect and re-source, or what we could refer to as ‘reroot’. This ‘rerooting’ should not only be understood as taking place within a (pre- existing) situation but also as building or transforming these surroundings in a process of collaboration and interaction with a wide range of actors.

Infrastructure 3.0
We call the interactive process of migrants’ building and transforming their arrival situation, is what we call infrastructuring. That is a broad term which transcends ‒ in a double move ‒ what is habitually designated as ‘infrastructures’ (‘1.0’): roads, trains and other mobility provisions or water, gas, electricity and other resource distribution systems.

1. ReROOT’s vision of infrastructure covers what is often called ‘social infrastructures’ (‘2.0’): education and health institutions, employment agencies and a wide range of social services. All these may either be meant specifically for newcomers ‒ think, for instance, of language or ‘integration’ courses ‒ or address the population at large ‒ public transport, health provisions, public administration, etc ‒ to which migrants, depending on their legal and residential status, have some degree of access.
2. ReROOT ventures beyond the rather formalised, institutionalised hence standardized ‘social infrastructures’, and engages a range of more informal, often not very publicly visible, perhaps more ‘autonomous’ yet (trans)locally regulated (‘normed’) practices. Infrastructuring 3.0 takes place in ‒ as well as co-shapes but at the same time answers to the norms prevailing in ‒ families and diasporic networks of kin and acquaintances, settings of work, trade and consumption, religious and cultural associations, grass-roots activism, leisure, etc. Navigating these ‘surrounds’, migrants realise their social existence and aspired mobility. More than just presences, the sharing and caring, exchange and communication that constitute ‘infrastructuring’ contain vectors of change: they orient people’s future lives.
3. As can be guessed from the above characterisation, the choice of ‘infrastructure’ and ‘infrastructuring’ is motivated by the fact that it enables us to grasp the richness and complexity of the newcomer’s worldbuilding practices and environments. Moreover, infrastructure/ing galvanises two more general critical characteristics: (a) its socio-material nature and (b) its relative stability.

The Socio-Material Nature of Infrastructure
In spite of its clear material overtones, infrastructuring involves seemingly ‘non-material’ things such as a wealth of legal arrangements (ranging from human rights to residence and labour regulation laws) which are informed by (dominant but often implicit) discourses of diversity, inequality and racialisation. These discourses operate in everyday speech as much as in media use; they distinguish allochthones from autochthones, or deserving from undeserving migrants, ventilate stereotypes of national characteristics or racialisations of cultural or religious identities, etc. By incorporating all these ‘representations’ into infrastructure, ReROOT insists on the fact that these ideas also always exist in some material or social form or other: in objects and built environment, practices of violent policing as well as everyday caring and the albeit elusive messaging in social media. One of the more recent instances is the different ways in which the arrival of Ukrainian refugees and refugees from East Africa and the Middle East has been ‘infrastructured’. A plethora of analysts looking into that contrast have demonstrated the articulation of differential ‘representations’ and legal arrangements in very concrete reception centre initiatives, emergency education programmes, health care practices, etc.

Understanding How Stability is Infrastructured
More than the seemingly stable, entrenched, if not fossilised terminology of ‘infrastructure’, ReROOT’s use of ‘infrastructuring’ in its more active mode, above all tries to grasp the relative stability both in time (temporary) and in space (dynamic) of the migrant’s worldbuilding. Concomitantly, infrastructuring tries to grasp the bottom-up dynamic of continuous moulding and constraint with the top-down movement of ‘sedimentation’. Sedimentation refers to processes of gradual routinisation over time, through repeated action and constructing, repairing and reworking of built environment. Because of their ongoing stabilisation, these sedimentations constrain and control but also channel and orient practices and representations taking place within the arrival infrastructure.

Overall, two positions can be discerned when it comes to integration: either it is up to the migrants (newcomers) to adapt to, try to fit or find their place in, the new environment they are entering or the main challenge lies with the receiving society that needs to open up, suppress mechanisms of exclusion and xenophobia and make social and physical space for new arrivals. In practice, opinions and regimes of reception can be situated along the continuum between both extreme positions.

In response to this potentially polarising situation, ReROOT suggest two innovations.

The first is an exploratory innovation. While trying to get rid of the normativity underlying the above continuum, we look at integration as what people in a banal way do in society: they make do in the social environments they are operating in; they are always somehow integrating in a dynamic ongoing negotiation of their own aspirations and the spaces for their realisation their social environment is willing to give shape to. These negotiations are eminently complex and composite, because migrants and non-migrants alike socialize/integrate not just in one (abstract) society or even community but in a multitude of ‘circles’ in different relationships and capacities ‒ as mother or colleague, as churchgoer or employee, as pupil or client, etc. Exploring and describing these integrational negotiations, their sites and relevant actors, is what ReROOT researchers have been engaging in over the last year.

Moreover, this exploratory work prepares for a second ‘normative’ innovation. In the pluriverse of circles where people ‘integrate’, there are norms and values, regulations and ideologies at work. These require mapping and reflection since the relative successes and failures, gratifications and frustrations of this dispersed, non-contiguous ‘integration labour’ will depend on them. Underlying the reflexive and interactive way in which ReROOT researchers try to unpack these multiplex normativities, is the conviction that such local integration is only rewarding/productive if participants, oldcomers and newcomers, are engaging in making ‘integration’ work, through a process of common worldbuilding.

In order to distinguish itself from other more mainstream views of integration, ReROOT speaks of ‘minor integrations’ referring to the two ‘innovations’ presented above: the everyday and the polycentric ‒ the ‘banal’ practices of making do in society and the small-scale, local normativities at work and brought to bear on these locales by the people constituting it.

Regimes of diversity and mobility are the broader ‘contexts’ related to forms of regulation and control informed by e.g. local and national policies and practices on migration and integration. They represent models of coping with diversity related to mobility and migration, e.g. defining who is included in or excluded from the nation state. Furthermore, regimes of diversity and mobility inform ideologies of integration (Favell 2016, Olwig & Paerregaard 2011, Rytter 2018) in defining who is ‘integratable’ and how. These regimes consist of a reflexive process of external ascription – attribution of legal status, racial or ethnic profile, cultural or religious identity, etc – and self-identifications – the double process of subjectification (Fassin (2011) that affects migrants´ social mobility and aspirations in important ways. The regimes lead local lives and co-constitute the site-specific arrival infrastructures.

ReROOT seeks to move beyond the strong, almost obsessive focus on the ‘we-they’ division when it comes to migrants and, above all, newcomers. Fifty years after Europe began closing its doors for the migrants it had so eagerly invited in after WWII, the mirage of closable borders has become internalised by large sections of the population and has been deeply entrenched in mainstream policies. In spite of manifold attempts by migration scholars to denounce the selectivity of closed borders for people as nativist, xenophobic and racist in nature, the ‘closed-borders-are-possible’ discourse is widely established and has found its ultimate target in focusing on ‘the newcomer’.

Generally speaking, the idea of ‘newcomers’ is nourished by sharpened anxieties over their strangeness, their unfamiliarity with the new environment, and the unpredictability of their intentions or aims. ‘Recent newcomers’, the term ReROOT uses in its title, is the even more radical variety of this and is a key term in the dominant crisis discourse when it comes to recent migrations. Since at least 2015, but in fact since the gradual closing of Europe for more or less organised, regular migration in the early 1970s, Europe and the EU have been operating in a crisis mode, inspired by the idea that it can close its borders. Remarkable is the wilful ‘surprise’, time and again, over the fact that people keep on migrating into Europe in smaller or larger numbers on the rhythm of political and violent conflicts, economic debacles, and increasingly, ecological/climate emergencies mainly, but not exclusively in the global south.