Discourse and racial integration of migrants: how Polish migrants become ‘integrated’ members of the white English majority

Critiques of integration discourse highlight its top-down, state-driven nature and tendency to frame minorities as perpetual outsiders. This article examines how migrants construct racialised discourses of integration to position themselves as part of the white majority. Introducing discursive integration, it argues that through everyday talk, migrants actively perform belonging. This process operates via a dual strategy: Polish migrants construct the white English majority as a positive reference group, claiming racial similarity, while constructing non-white minorities as a negative reference group from whom they distance themselves. In doing so, they strategically subordinate Polishness to whiteness, discursively transforming from minority into majority members – they integrate through race. Drawing on qualitative research with Polish migrants in Bristol, England, the article uses reference group theory to show that participants compared themselves favourably to a normative white English majority while portraying non-white minorities as lazy, culturally incompatible, and threatening – embodying ‘failed integration’. Through this mechanism, Polish migrants discursively became part of the white majority. While situated in England, the findings offer a transferable model for understanding migrant integration in other racialised societies. The study argues that integration is a racialised project where claiming whiteness expands majority belonging – at the expense of more marginalised groups.