The Process of Migration and Integration: A Theoretical Inquiry

Migration has been in the past and will be in the future a main concern for European societies. This subject is important especially because Romanian migration has exploded in the last decades and our country faces the repercussions of this phenomenon more and more often. That is one of the reasons why in this study we analyze this topic. Migration is linked in complex ways to class, gender, generation, ethnicity and other social cleavages, which are embodied in hierarchies of power and social status, in positions in home and host communities, in work and relationships- all of which may be transformed in the course of migratory process. This article is more than a theoretical inquiry on the process of migration; it is a classification of different approaches in the field of migration theories in an attempt to bring some order to the theoretical space. Several analyses of international migration have resulted in the publishing of numerous studies about integration. This paper analyses the process of migrants’ integration relying on several researches from different authors. This article ends with a brief outline of a critical realist approach to migration theory and with a discussion about migrants’ integration in host countries.