Belonging and Democracy: What Im/Migrant Integration Reveals about the Common Good

Immigrant integration and belonging can offer a critical lens through which to interrogate the current state of democracy and competing visions of the common good. This roundtable engages the conference theme by centering im/migration as a site where the boundaries of democracy and inclusion are constructed and contested. Amid ongoing national debates over birthright citizenship, the limits of legal inclusion and the political violence of detention and deportation, fundamental questions persist about immigrant belonging within a U.S. democracy that is often idealized as liberal and inclusive.

At stake are deeply social and political questions: Who is recognized as part of the common good, and on what terms? his session examines two democracy, integration and belonging through two distinct yet interconnected dimensions: the social and the political. Across the presentations, integration emerges as dynamic processes shaped by the interplay of political forces such as, policy, legal frameworks and political discourse, alongside everyday social practices of recognition, networking and organizational and civic commitments.

The first presenter examines how executive regulations and orders discursively enforce exclusion and redefine citizenship in a U.S. context. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of the second Trump Administration’s immigration policies, she finds that narratives of national security, resource protection, and racialized deservingness legitimize dehumanizing, restrictive policies that limit migrants’ rights.

The second presenter demonstrates how deeply embedded social networks construct belonging beyond the boundaries of formal citizenship. These networks reveal how immigrants are recognized as part of the common good through everyday relational practices, while also surfacing both the potential to challenge exclusionary policies and the limits of state protection.

The third presenter examines how federal and state resettlement policies, alongside discourses of economic self-sufficiency and "healthy families," shape regional and local implementation in ways that structure integration. These frameworks often minimize certain forms of social inclusion while producing gendered and racialized modes of inclusion.

The fourth presenter highlights refugees’ relational and interpersonal terms and priorities to describe integration. Research participants emphasize social connections, particularly with host communities, while also revealing tensions between maintaining cultural identities and pressures to conform.

Bringing a global perspective, the fifth presenter examines the connections between in/exclusion, belonging, and political moral injury among migrants who left Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and U.S. veterans of the war in Afghanistan. She shows how moral injury is inherently political, shaping individual's relationships to the state whose actions precipitated it, producing complex experiences of belonging and exclusion.

Building on this, the sixth presenter explores how political moral injury among Russian migrants in Baku, Azerbaijan gives rise to new forms of community. While social support is contested and uneven, it simultaneously enables connection and constrains access to resources, highlighting how shared experiences of political rupture may foster emergent networks of belonging.

This session positions social work research as an active intervention that not only interrogates exclusion but also advances more inclusive, participatory, and equitable visions of the common good.