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IN-DEPTH
ANALYSIS ON
“POTENTIAL AND
CHALLENGES OF
EVOTING IN THE
EUROPEAN UNION”
THE INTEGRATION OF
MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES
An EUI Forum on Migration,
Citizenship and Demography
Editors:
Rainer Bauböck
Mile n a Tripkovic
is work has been published by the European University Institute,
Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies.
© European University Institute 2017
Editorial matter and selection © editors 2017
Chapters © authors individually 2017
doi:10.2870/30835
ISBN:978-92-9084-460-0
QM-02-17-060-EN-N
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THE
INTEGRATION
OF MIGRANTS
AND REFUGEES
An EUI Forum
on Migration,
Citizenship and
Demography
Editors:
RAINER BAUBÖCK
MILENA TRIPKOVIC
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE 1
Rainer Bauböck and Milena Tripkovic
THE INTEGRATION OF MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES – A EUROPEAN SYNOPSIS 7
Rainer Münz
SECTION 1: CITIZENSHIP AND LEGAL STATUSES 23
CITIZENSHIP AND LEGAL STATUSES IN RELATION TO THE INTEGRATION OF
MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES 24
Maarten Vink
CITIZENSHIP, DIVERSITY AND MOBILITY 48
Kees Groenendijk
TOWARDS A LIFE COURSE PERSPECTIVE ON NATURALISATION FOR REFUGEES 51
Ines Michalowski
BEYOND THE NATION STATE? GLOCAL CITIZENSHIP AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
FOR INTEGRATION 57
Barbara Oomen
SECTION 2: EDUCATION 61
NO LOST GENERATION? EDUCATION FOR REFUGEE CHILDREN: A COMPARISON BETWEEN
SWEDEN, GERMANY, THE NETHERLANDS AND TURKEY 62
Maurice Crul, Elif Keskiner, Jens Schneider, Frans Lelie and Safoura
Ghaeminia
EDUCATION OPPORTUNITIES FOR RECENTLY ARRIVED MIGRANTS 80
Michael Teutsch
SECTION 3: LABOUR MARKET INTEGRATION 87
REFUGEE AND MIGRANT LABOUR MARKET INTEGRATION: EUROPE IN NEED OF
A NEW POLICY AGENDA 88
Klaus F. Zimmermann
EUROPE AND THE ‘REFUGEE/MIGRATION CRISIS’: STARTING POINTS FOR POLICY
DEBATES ABOUT PROTECTION AND INTEGRATION 101
Martin Ruhs
‘FROM REFUGEES TO WORKERS’: WHAT CHALLENGES? 105
Iván Martin
WHERE AND WHEN TO START THE INTEGRATION PROCESS? 109
Alessandra Venturini
SECTION 4: CULTURAL INTEGRATION 115
INTEGRATION AND CULTURE: FROM ‘COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE’ TO ‘COMPETENCE
IN PLURALITY’ 116
Ruth Wodak
FROM EASTERN ENLARGEMENT TO JIHAD: THE DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR MIGRANT
INTEGRATION IN EUROPE 138
Anna Triandafyllidou
THE CULTURAL INTEGRATION OF IMMIGRANTS AND REFUGEES: SHIFTING NARRATIVES
AND POLICIES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION 144
Tamas Szücs
SECTION 1
CITIZENSHIP
AND LEGAL
STATUSES
24 SECTION 1: CITIZENSHIP AND LEGAL STATUSES | CITIZENSHIP AND LEGAL STATUSES IN RELATION TO THE
INTEGRATION OF MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES ~ Maarten Peter Vink
CITIZENSHIP AND
LEGAL STATUSES
IN RELATION TO
THE INTEGRATION
OF MIGRANTS AND
REFUGEES1
Maarten Peter Vink
Maastricht University
European University Institute
1. Introduction
In European migration-receiving countries, the
integration of migrants and especially refugees has
traditionally been based on the assumption that
their stay is temporary rather than permanent. As
a result, integration policies have been ad hoc at
best and have lacked a focus on the comprehensive
immersion of migrants in the host societies.
One of the best ways to become a full and equal
member of society is by securing a route towards
citizenship through naturalisation. Citizenship is
an important measurement of integration because
it extends rights to unconditional residence and
political participation, and because naturalisation
represents a deliberate choice by immigrants to
link their future with that of the host country.
Nevertheless, citizenship acquisition rates in
Europe remain relatively low – with signicant
variation between countries and between migrant
groups – and policies outlining comprehensive
1 e research discussed in this paper draws on ongoing
collaboration within the European Union Democracy Observatory
on Citizenship (EUDO CITIZENSHIP) and within the Maastricht
Centre for Citizenship, Migration and Development (MACIMIDE),
in particular with Floris Peters and Hans Schmeets. e paper also
outlines a research agenda for a new ve-year project ‘Migrant
Life Course and Legal Status Transition’ (MiLifeStatus), funded
by a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council
(grant no. 682626). See https://macimide.maastrichtuniversity.nl/
milifestatus/.
pathways towards citizenship are the exception
rather than the rule. “Citizenship policies remain
a major area of weakness for most European
countries,” concludes the Migrant Integration
Policy Index (MIPEX). “e highly discretionary
and costly path to citizenship oen discourages
rather than encourages immigrants to apply and
succeed as new citizens.”2
Recent comparative research on citizenship for
immigrants has focused on issues such as the
conditions for acquiring the citizenship of the
host country, how they dier between countries,
how they change over time and how they
distinguish various classes of would-be citizens.
Recent research has also examined the overall
eect of citizenship and naturalisation policies
on various integration indicators (Bauböck et al,
2013; OECD 2011). e available evidence on the
‘citizenship premium’ for integration provides a
mixed picture, across domains, across migrant
groups and across countries. Generally, however,
permanent residence and ultimately citizenship
are seen as crucial opportunities, especially for
those migrants who are most in need of a secure
legal status and those who face the greatest hurdles
along the way towards building a new life in the
host society.
Regarding the long-term status of refugees that are
currently entering Europe, the more immediately
relevant question is that of what kind of legal statuses
and protection the new refugees are oered. In this
chapter, I reect on the relevance of citizenship
acquisition – and legal status transition more
broadly – for migrant integration. Aer reviewing
the literature on citizenship and integration, I
present and discuss existing evidence with regard
to three questions. First, what do we know about
the variation in requirements for citizenship
acquisition across European countries? I focus
especially on ordinary naturalisation procedures
and compare them with those providing facilitated
2 Quoted from http://mipex.eu/access-nationality
[accessed 16 September 2016].
25
access to citizenship for refugees. Second, what
do we know about the extent to which migrants
actually acquire citizenship? I present the available
statistics and key ndings from the literature with
a focus on cross-national variation. ird, what
do we know about how citizenship matters for
integration? I present and discuss the key ndings
from the literature and identify some notable gaps.
I conclude the chapter with a reection on how
these ndings can be used to contribute to current
policy debates and on some key theoretical and
empirical challenges.
2. Citizenship and immigrant
integration
For foreign-born residents and their children,
obtaining citizenship in the host country
confers membership, rights and participation
opportunities, and encourages a sense of
belonging (Bloemraad 2006). However, whether
and especially under which conditions citizenship
stimulates integration remain open questions.
Both immigrant naturalisation rates and the
associated integration outcomes are characterised
by signicant heterogeneity. To put it simply, not
all migrants have an equal interest in acquiring
destination country citizenship, and even when
they naturalise this new status does not bring the
same consequences for all.
Citizenship is a legal status and a relationship
between an individual and a state that entails
specic legal rights and duties, such as the right
to reside without restriction in the territory of the
state of citizenship, the right to vote in elections
and the right to hold public oce or be employed
in selected public sector jobs.3 If migrants hold
the citizenship of the country where they reside,
3 See, e.g., the EUDO CITIZENSHIP Citizenship Glossary
at http://eudo-citizenship.eu/databases/citizenship-glossary/
glossary#Cithip [accessed 13 September 2016]. In some countries,
the status may be called ‘nationality’ rather than citizenship and
persons holding the status are referred to as nationals rather
than citizens. For the sake of consistency, I refer to ‘citizenship’
throughout the paper, except when citing legal documents that
directly refer to ‘nationality.’
this is commonly viewed as the most advanced
legal status they can obtain. However, a range
of alternative legal statuses may be available to
them, either related to the grounds on the basis
of which they have been admitted to the territory
of the state, such as residence permits related to
work, study, family reunication or humanitarian
grounds, or a residence status proving the right to
permanent residence, such as the Green Card in
the US or the permit in the EU for so-called ‘long-
term resident third-country nationals’, i.e. persons
without the citizenship of one of the EU member
states “who have resided legally and continuously
within the territory of a member state for ve
years immediately prior to the submission of the
relevant application” (Directive 2003/109/EC, art.
4, under 1).4
In this chapter, I understand integration in a broad
sense as the process by whichimmigrantsbecome
accepted into society, both as individuals and
as groups (Penninx 2003). is denition
deliberately views integration as a process rather
than as an endpoint and is also deliberately open
as to what precisely determines the acceptance
of immigrants in a society, which may aer all
vary from one receiving society to another. In a
formal sense, the acquisition of citizenship itself
may be viewed as the ultimate form of integration
as naturalised migrants acquire a status that
provides (nearly)5 equal rights to those of the
majority population, such as the right of abode, of
diplomatic protection, of political franchise and of
access to public sector jobs that are restricted to
citizens. In a practical sense, citizenship may not
‘matter’ much, if naturalised immigrants continue
4 Citizens of EU member states do not need a residence
permit and have the right to move and reside freely within the
territory of the member states, within the constraints set by
Directive 2004/38/EC.
5 In some countries, the rights of naturalised immigrants
may be restricted in that some selected high political oces are
only open to ‘natural born’ citizens. Countries may also apply
denaturalisation rules, which allow deprivation of citizenship
within a certain time period aer naturalisation (e.g. for being
convicted for major crimes or terrorist activities), which in practice
leads to a form of conditional citizenship.
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26
to face discrimination – e.g. in the labour market
– or they lack the human capital to make full use
of their newly acquired status. For some migrants,
the security of residence and access to the labour
market tied to permanent residence may provide
sucient legal security and opportunities, without
them seeing a need to naturalise.
Investigating the relationship between citizenship
and integration poses methodological challenges,
as better-integrated immigrants are also more likely
to naturalise (OECD 2011). A key limitation of
existing studies is also that they mostly investigate
these relationships within only one societal
context. is is problematic if one assumes, as I do
(building on Yang 1994; Dronkers and Vink 2012;
Vink, Prokic-Breuer and Dronkers 2013; Peters
and Vink 2016; Peters, Vink and Schmeets 2016a,
b), that:
• migrants have dierent motivations to natu-
ralise and these are partly associated with
origin factors and the individual life course
– hence demographic contexts and family
situations matter greatly;
• pathways into citizenship are conditioned by
the institutional contexts in both origin and
destination countries with regard to accept-
ance of dual citizenship, length of required
residence, language and integration require-
ments and the socioeconomic context; and
• the potential ‘integration premium’ associated
with naturalisation is conditioned by the tra-
jectory into citizenship – especially the time
to naturalisation.
Hence, citizenship does not matter in the same
way when it is acquired by a young immigrant
of working age aer only a few years of residence
in the destination country as when it is acquired
by an older immigrant near the end of her or
his working life aer having already lived in the
country for years. Immigrants naturalising to
secure citizenship for their children, as is oen
necessary in Europe, also tell a dierent story
to that of educated immigrants in the US whose
native-born children are already citizens since
birth and who seek better employability in the
public sector.
From this perspective, the ambiguous ndings in
the literature on the consequences of citizenship
are hardly surprising (cf. Peters and Vink 2016).
For example, whereas some nd evidence of a
positive association between citizenship and
labour market integration (Bratsberg et al 2002;
Steinhardt 2012; Helgertz et al 2014), others
nd no such eect (Chiswick 1978; Bevelander
and Veenman 2006; Scott 2008). Remarkably,
however, these varying outcomes are oen seen as
undermining the overall signicance of citizenship
for migrants, with some scholars and decision-
makers arguing for the existence of a citizenship
premium and others against it, especially in the
context of labour market integration. However,
rather than focusing on whether immigrant legal
status transitions matter, especially those from
being a foreigner to being a citizen, I argue that
the focus should be on why, how and for whom
such transitions matter.
ere are two key implications of this view of
naturalisation, which builds on recent applications
of the sociological life-course paradigm to the
literature on migration and integration (Wingens
et al 2011). First, we should think about the
relevance of legal status transitions from a double-
context perspective: the relevance of naturalisation
depends both on the institutional context under
which citizenship (or alternative legal statuses)
is made available; and on the personal context of
the country of origin and the life situation of an
individual migrant. Second, viewing the relevance
of legal status transitions within the life-course
trajectory of migrants also means that we should
think less of citizenship acquisition as a one-o
transition from foreigner to citizen, and more as a
pathway or a ‘road to citizenship’ (Aptekar 2015).
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27
Whereas most of the literature is focused on
the citizenship premium in the labour market,
or on citizenship and political participation,
there is additional – though patchy – evidence
on how legal status transitions matter for living
conditions, mobility trajectories and educational
outcomes among migrant children, among other
things (see Bloemraad 2017 for a broad overview).
e remainder of this section will briey review
the state of the art in these various domains.
Citizenship and socioeconomic
integration6
Given the structural challenges immigrants face in
the labour market (Algan et al. 2010), citizenship
provides the potential to mitigate some of these
disadvantages as it removes restrictions on public
sector jobs, increases employment opportunities
and lowers the administrative costs of hiring
and retaining a migrant (Bauböck et al 2013).
However, the sociological life-course approach
points to a hypothesis, which has not yet been
systematically tested, that the impact of citizenship
acquisition on labour market outcomes is
conditioned both by the institutional setting of
the destination context and by the demographic
composition of its migrant population. Sweden,
for example, houses a relatively large number of
refugees who are highly motivated to naturalise
in order to reinforce their legal position in the
host country. However, refugees are particularly
disadvantaged in the labour market (Krahn et
al 2000), which may go some way to explaining
ambiguous ndings on the relationship between
citizenship and labour-market integration in
Sweden. Understanding the potential impact
of a life event such as naturalisation requires a
biographical perspective. For example, Steinhardt
(2012) nds that naturalisation oers no wage
benet to women, which may be understandable
from the perspective that women who have
chosen to remain highly active in the labour
6 is section builds on Peters and Vink (2016).
market in spite of alternative life-course patterns
(part-time work or leaving the labour market) are
positively selected. e challenge is thus to identify
how the impact of naturalisation is mediated by
factors (being married and having children, and
contextual factors that facilitate integration in the
labour market) which in themselves inuence
the propensity to naturalise. In other words,
while recognising that naturalisation is a selective
process and may be reversely inuenced by labour
market performance, both individual-level and
contextual factors are expected to mediate this
relationship.
Citizenship and political
participation
Beyond work and income, citizenship is closely
tied to democratic participation, as naturalisation
gives access to rights that are oen, though not
always, exclusive to citizens. Besides voting,
however, citizenship may encourage political
participation in a broader sense. Examples of
non-electoral forms of political participation
include conventional acts (such as contacting a
politician or government ocial, participating
in a political campaign or becoming a member
of a political party) and ‘unconventional’ types
of political activity (participating in protests
and boycotts, and signing petitions). In liberal
democracies, these forms of non-electoral
participation are, at least theoretically, equally
open to natives and immigrants (whether citizens
or non-citizens) alike, yet one would not expect
all residents in a country to be equally active.
A number of individual resources are typically
viewed as prerequisites for political participation
– time, money, civic skills, civic engagement and
language skills – and dierences would in the rst
place be expected on the basis of socio-economic
background, especially educational attainment.
In addition to such factors, immigrants oen
come from countries with dramatically dierent
political cultures to those of the countries of
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28
destination. For them, participation in political
activities, especially those that go beyond the
act of voting, requires additional eort and is
less self-evidently possible than for natives. It is
sometimes argued that citizenship, as the most
secure legal status provided to immigrants and as
it includes a set of entitlements providing access
to co-determining political decision-making in a
country, may encourage immigrants to engage in
political activism beyond the exercise of surage.
Previous research, however, has produced mixed
results. Some North American studies (e.g. Verba
et al. 1995; Barreto and Muñoz 2003, Levin 2013)
have found little correlation between citizenship
status and participation, while others (e.g. Leal
2002) have found the opposite. In Europe, some
single-country or limited multi-country studies
suggest the existence of a positive relationship
between citizenship and the non-electoral political
participation of foreign-born residents (e.g. Giugni
and Passy 2004; Bevelander and Pendakur 2011).
On the basis of a larger comparative study, Just
and Anderson (2012) reveal a positive relationship
between citizenship and non-electoral political
participation among foreign-born residents, but
nd that citizenship is a statistically signicant
determinant of political action only among those
respondents who arrived from less democratic
countries, and only for non-institutionalized
political acts. De Rooij (2012: 469) draws similar
conclusions, determining that the eect of
citizenship on unconventional participation is
only signicant for non-Western immigrants.
Citizenship and living conditions
Employment and income are evidently crucial
to the societal incorporation of immigrants and
reect the relative success of migrants in this regard.
However, labour market outcomes only tell part
of the story. One important area that has received
some attention in the literature, although mostly in
the American context, is the role of citizenship in
relation to immigrants’ living conditions. e key
indicators in this area are, among others, quality
of housing – measured in terms of the physical
quality of accommodation and its location – and
levels of home ownership. Research consistently
shows better outcomes among naturalised
immigrants (Borjas 2002; Hutcheson and Jeers
2012). However, doubts have been raised as to
whether citizenship status can overcome the
broader phenomenon of residential crowding,
net of increased employment opportunities and
income premiums associated with naturalisation
(McConnell 2015). Improvements in living
conditions are likely to signicantly depend on
demographic background, life-course stage, the
economic resources of individuals and contextual
conditions, such as public sector involvement in
housing (Arbaci 2007). Based on these previous
ndings, it is expected that most upward mobility
in terms of living conditions can be explained
by positive selection into naturalisation and, for
selected groups (e.g. highly educated immigrants),
by a citizenship premium in the labour market. For
home ownership, which requires interaction with
nancial and legal institutions, one may expect
an additional positive impact of naturalisation
for these groups. ese hypotheses have so far
not been tested systematically in a cross-national
context with appropriate longitudinal data.
Citizenship and out-migration
While a legal status transition from foreigner to
citizen may be viewed as full assimilation in the
destination context, transnationalist theories point
to a more complex reality where migrants do not
either settle in the destination country or return
to their country of origin but may share intensive
interactions in both contexts (Faist 2000). Rather
than resulting in the stable settlement of migrants
in the destination contexts, naturalisation may
encourage return migration to the country of
origin or out-migration to another destination.
In this light, having dual citizenship provides
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29
opportunities for circular mobility (Alarian and
Goodman 2016). Return migration can be viewed
as part of an optimal life-cycle residential location
sequence (Borjas and Bratsberg 1996). However,
the naturalisation literature is almost completely
focused on the single transition from foreigner
to citizen rather than viewing this as part of a
larger life-course trajectory. One exception is a
paper by Kuhlenkasper and Steinhardt (2012),
who nd that out-migrants are less likely to be
naturalised German citizens and on average
have spent fewer years in Germany than their
counterparts who stay in the country. e study
demonstrates the need to consider heterogeneity
among immigrants, as this ‘negative mobility’ only
applies to non-Turkish immigrants. It is unclear
whether these ndings can be generalised beyond
the German context and, if so, whether the timing
of naturalisation and/or having children with
destination country citizenship matter for these
out-migration decisions.
Citizenship and the life course
of migrant children
Citizenship also plays a crucial role in the lives of
children, either directly through their citizenship
status or indirectly through that of the parent(s).
Granting citizenship at birth is ‘likely to exert an
eect on children’s human capital because it raises
the likelihood of a future in the host country and
thus parents’ expectations about returns on specic
host-country human capital investments (Saurer
and Felfe 2014: 8). In contrast, growing up in a
country without being formally recognized as a full
member of society can adversely aect assimilation
processes in a context where socioeconomic
background and racial discrimination already
challenge modes of incorporation. Nevertheless,
the role of citizenship in the life course of native-
born descendants of immigrants (2nd generation)
and children arriving in the destination country
before adolescence (1.5 generation) has so far been
largely overlooked in the literature. Especially in
Europe, citizenship is predominantly attributed by
descent from citizen parents (Vink and De Groot
2010). As a result, children of second or even
subsequent immigrant generations only acquire
residence country citizenship at a later age, if at all.
e most signicant policy change in recent times
has been in Germany, where since 2000 children
born in the country automatically receive German
citizenship under certain conditions. Studies show
a positive impact of this introduction of birthright
citizenship on educational attainment (Saurer
and Felfe 2014). However, comparative research
is scarce. Kilpi-Jakonen (2014) demonstrates
that, aer controlling for the higher propensity
of immigrant children whose parents have higher
education to have citizenship, second-generation
students with Finnish citizenship are more
likely to choose general rather than vocational
upper secondary education compared to their
peers without Finnish citizenship. Given the
potential occupational and earnings opportunities
associated with citizenship, the naturalisation of
parents also impacts the educational attainment
of migrants’ descendants (Bean et al 2011). ese
hypotheses lack systematic comparative testing so
far.
3. Access to Citizenship
According to international convention, states
are sovereign in determining their constituent
populations, which entails that within certain
limits set by international law they can exclude
populations inside their territory from citizenship
or include others beyond their borders. As a
result, there is signicant variation between states
with regard to both the rules governing access to
citizenship and its loss (see Vink and Bauböck
2013; Vink 2017).
For access to citizenship, on the one hand we
can distinguish between ascriptive membership
conceptions, mostly applicable through the
acquisition of citizenship at birth, and voluntary
membership conceptions, which imply a degree
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30
of openness in terms of individual choice, both
regarding acquisition (e.g. through ordinary
naturalisation) and loss of citizenship (e.g. through
voluntary renunciation of the status). Most states
in Europe prioritize descent-based transmission
of citizenship but use territorial access to
citizenship to prevent what is generally accepted
as the undesirable phenomenon of statelessness,
as in the case of new-born babies whose descent
cannot be established found in the territory of
a state (Vink and De Groot 2010; cf. Vink and
De Groot 2016). In contrast, other countries –
such as most states in the Americas – prioritize
territorial access to citizenship but simultaneously
maintain rules allowing citizens residing outside
the territory of the state to transmit citizenship to
their ospring, with varying restrictions. In the
sense that citizenship for most people is tied up
with the mere fact of being born to citizens or in
the territory of the ‘right’ country, there is a strong
degree of arbitrariness in the way in which welfare
entitlements associated with citizenship are
distributed among the world population (Shachar
2009).
In addition to regulations determining citizenship
at birth, states also maintain a variety of rules
regarding the acquisition of citizenship aer birth,
such as by ordinary naturalisation or by facilitated
naturalisation for the spouses of citizens, persons
with a cultural anity to the political community
or refugees. Not only do rules on the acquisition
of citizenship vary between states but so do rules
on the loss of citizenship too. Due to limitations
of space, I focus here exclusively on rules on
the acquisition of citizenship aer birth, and
in particular provisions related to ordinary
naturalisation and facilitated naturalisation for
refugees.7
7 See http://eudo-citizenship.eu/databases/modes-of-
acquisition and http://eudo-citizenship.eu/databases/modes-of-
loss for a comparative database of the existing regulations on the
acquisition and loss of citizenship in 77 countries.
Ordinary naturalisation
Ordinary naturalisation is a mode of acquisition
aer birth of a citizenship not previously held that
requires an application by the person concerned
or his or her legal agent. Whereas naturalisation
was traditionally conferred with a discretionary
act granting citizenship by a public authority,
countries in Europe are increasingly adopting laws
that provide for the nearly automatic acquisition
of citizenship by a person who evidently fulls
the eligibility criteria and is thus entitled to such
acquisition upon application. However, only 7
of the 28 EU member states currently have such
an entitlement to citizenship in their ordinary
naturalisation procedures.8 Hence, in most
countries the acquisition of citizenship remains
based on a discretionary decision usually made by
administrative ocials.9 Such discretion reects
a contractual view of citizenship, where explicit
consent is required, both by the person applying
for citizenship and the community granting it
(Orgad 2017).
Apart from the legal uncertainty deriving from
discretionary application procedures, a key
implication of the contractual view – which
seems widely held among the politicians and
electorates designing these procedures – is that
the way in which the eligibility requirements for
naturalisation and other procedural requirements,
such as fees, are designed is structurally biased
towards the ‘supply side’, i.e. the state ‘supplying’
citizenship.10 In other words, certainly in the
8 See http://eudo-citizenship.eu/databases/modes-of-
acquisition, mode A06 [accessed 15 September 2016]. Also see
Goodman (2010) for a comparative report on naturalisation
policies in Europe.
9 Until recently in Switzerland, some municipalities used
referendums to decide on the citizenship applications of foreign
residents. Hainmueller and Hangartner (2013), using an original
quasi-experimental design, demonstrate that discrimination on the
basis of applicants’ origin-country characteristics had a signicant
impact on naturalisation rates among immigrant groups.
10 A further consequence, which I do not elaborate on
here, is that a contractual view implies conditional allegiance by
both parties to the contract: ‘allegiance and protection are the quid
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31
economically most developed states in Europe,
naturalisation policies reect a seller’s market
where there is much demand but limited supply,
and ‘buyers’ of citizenship are at the mercy of what
‘sellers’ demand for it.11 Such asymmetry between
the interests of the citizenship-granting state and
the citizenship-requesting individual is at odds
with the ‘citizenship stakeholder’ principle, which
assumes that the interests of the community and
the prospective citizen are mutually constitutive
(Bauböck 2017a, 2017b). In this alternative view,
naturalisation policies should take into account
not just supply-side concerns but also demand-side
concerns and provide a pathway to citizenship to
newcomers and their children as part of a general
concern for democratic inclusion.
pro quo of a mutual contract in which each is given in return for
the other’ (Orgad 2017). e increasing popularity of citizenship
deprivation rules can be viewed as a consequence of such a view:
certain (criminal and terrorist) acts are seen as violating the
citizenship ‘contract’ and thereby constitute a legitimate ground for
ending the contract.
11 e ‘citizenship for sale’ or ‘golden visa’ provisions in
some countries reect a dierent scenario, where states seek to
attract economic investment through oering facilitated access
to citizenship or residence (Dzankic 2012; Schachar and Bauböck
2014).
e European Convention on Nationality (ECN),
signed by 29 states and ratied by 20, provides
‘that internal law should contain rules which
make it possible for foreigners lawfully and
habitually resident in the territory of a State Party
to be naturalised’ (Article 6, under 3). While the
ECN allows considerable discretion for states to
‘x other justiable conditions for naturalisation,
in particular as regards integration’ (ECN,
Explanatory Report, Article 6, paragraph 3), it
does set a maximum period of residence which
can be required for naturalisation, namely ten
years (before the lodging of an application). When
we look at the current residence requirements in
all 28 member states of the EU, we see that no
state exceeds the maximum of ten years, yet there
is considerable variation ranging from the most
common requirement of 5 years in 12 countries to
a 10-year requirement in Austria, Italy, Lithuania,
Slovenia and Spain (Figure 1). e average
residence requirement is 6.8 years.
Figure 1. Residency requirement for ordinary naturalisation in EU28 (in years)
Source: www.eudo-citizenship.eu (situation 1 January 2016)*
* Additional residence requirements may apply.
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e nominal residence requirements in citizenship
laws need to be interpreted with great care, as
additional residence requirements oen apply,
such as a need for the residence period to be
uninterrupted or the requirement of a permanent
residence, either at the moment of application or
even at the moment of starting to count the years
of residence (Goodman 2010: 8-9). For example,
although in Poland the citizenship law nominally
requires 3 years’ residence, persons need to be in
possession throughout this period of a permanent
residence permit or a long-term EU residence
permit, for which 5 years’ residence are required.
Hence the minimum residence requirement for
ordinary naturalisation in Poland is 8 years in total.
In Portugal, 6 years’ legal residence is required,
without any need to have permanent residence.
In Denmark, by contrast, 9 years’ residence is
required with a permanent residence permit at the
time of application. In Austria, by far the country
with the strictest residence requirements, 10 years
of continuous residence is required, of which the
5 years immediately before the application must
be with a permanent resident permit. In practice,
such additional residence requirements can have a
signicant impact on eligibility for naturalisation.12
Access to ordinary naturalisation is also
conditioned by the existence of, among other things,
a) language requirements, b) so-called integration
requirements, c) economic requirements, d) the
fees required to start the application procedure,
and e) a requirement to renounce one’s previous
citizenship. Regarding language requirements,
we nd that most EU member states nowadays
have a formalized language requirement, either
at level A2 (‘Can understand sentences and
frequently used expressions related to areas of
most immediate relevance’) or level B1 (‘Can
understand the main points of clear standard input
on familiar matters regularly encountered in work,
school, leisure etc.’) from the Common European
Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).
12 See EUDO CITIZENSHIP Observatory 2016 for a more
detailed measurement of ‘citizenship law indicators’.
Some states maintain high, but unstandardized
language requirements, as is the case in Hungary,
Italy, Malta, Romania, Slovakia and Spain (MIPEX
2015). Only two countries, Ireland and Sweden,
have no formal language requirements at all in the
citizenship law (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Language requirements for ordinary
naturalisation in EU28
Source: MIPEX (2015)
While having language skills enables a person to
participate in society, for example in the labour
market and in political decision-making (e.g.
elections), and thus ensures a basis for active
citizenship, overly high requirements may
also provide a signicant barrier to accessing
citizenship. e obstacles may relate both to literacy
requirements and to the costs associated with
acquiring such language skills, as in many states
it is up to the immigrant to arrange and nance
her or his own language training. According to
Goodman (2010), the number of countries with a
formal language test increased from six in 1998 to
sixteen in 2010.
Integration requirements also vary signicantly
between states. Such requirements demand
sucient knowledge of a country’s history,
political institutions and/or the habits and
traditions of its society and are oen seen as
part of a trend towards ‘fortifying citizenship’
(Goodman 2012).13 ey may be found either
13 How to categorise and measure such integration
requirements is subject to considerable controversy (Goodman
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as requirements for permanent residence or for
citizenship, or for both. Whereas the argument for
language skills is that they provide an important
basis for a migrant’s integration within society,
requiring migrants to obtain and reproduce such
‘civic knowledge’ has been much more contested
(e.g. Bauböck and Joppke 2010). According to
information from MIPEX (2015), in 2015 eleven
EU28 states required a formal citizenship test.
Two states, Belgium and Luxembourg, only
required applicants to have taken an integration
course, whereas in six states integration was
assessed in an informal interview. Nine states had
no formal integration requirement for citizenship
acquisition. Barriers to citizenship relate both to
intellectual requirements and the costs associated
with acquiring sucient knowledge, as in many
states it is up to the immigrant to arrange and
nance her or his own training. Only in two
countries where there is a formal test (Estonia
and Germany) does the state provide sucient
courses. In the other nine countries it is up to
the immigrant to arrange this for herself (MIPEX
2015).
Figure 3. Integration requirements for ordinary
naturalisation in EU28
Source: MIPEX (2015)
In terms of economic requirements, about half of
the EU28 states, mostly in Central and Eastern
Europe plus Austria, Denmark and Italy, require
applicants to demonstrate that they have a stable
2010; Michalowski and Van Oers 2012).
and sucient source of income, or some similar
type of requirement. Other states, such as the
Netherlands and the UK, do not have such income
requirements but instead require applicants to pay
a considerable fee. In the Netherlands, a single
application for naturalisation costs €855 and an
application for a family of two parents and two
children would amount to €1343. Note that these
fees are to be paid irrespective of the outcome
of the application and do not include additional
costs for language training and civics courses.14
In the UK, the fee for ordinary naturalisation is
£1236 for each adult applicant and £936 for each
child under the age of 18 (plus an additional £80 to
cover the ceremony fee if the child turns 18 during
the application process).15 According to MIPEX
(2015), the average fee in the EU28 is around €250
per person, yet there is considerable variation.
Only in 11 states are the application costs below
€100 per person, whereas in 17 other states the
fees exceed €100. In two states (Austria and the
UK) they even amount to more than €1000 per
person. is makes naturalisation prohibitively
costly.
Figure 4. Fees (in euros) for ordinary
naturalisation in EU28
Source: MIPEX (2015)
Additional procedural requirements may still
discourage immigrants from applying or may lead
14 See https://ind.nl/EN/individuals/dutch-citizenship/
costs-income-requirements [accessed 26 January 2017].
15 See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fees-
for-citizenship-applications [accessed 17 September 2016].
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to rejections for those who do apply. For example,
in the Netherlands the Research Department
of the Ministry of Security and Justice recently
investigated why so few migrants whose asylum
applications had been rejected but who had been
granted regular residence status as part of an
extraordinary regularization in 2007 had submitted
an application for naturalisation (only around
30% have naturalised). Not being in possession of
the right documents from the country of origin
was indicated as by far the main obstacle for the
respondents to a survey (71% indicated they did
not have the appropriate documents, even though
nearly all said they had tried to obtain them).
Whereas recognized refugees are exempted from
such identity requirements, as they cannot be
expected to return to the country from which they
have ed, these ‘regularized migrants’ had to meet
the regular identity requirements, even though
many cite opposition from authorities, diculties
traveling to the country of origin and the high
costs involved in trying to obtain the proper
paperwork as the main problems they encounter.
Under current regulations in the Netherlands
it is dicult to prove that one cannot get the
documents needed and exceptions are rarely made
(WODC 2015).
Finally, whereas most states in the EU (and
Denmark as one of the most recent to do so in
2015) have now removed the somewhat outdated
provision of asking a naturalising immigrant to
renounce her or his previous citizenship, there are
still eight states (Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech
Republic, Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands
and Slovenia) that maintain such a renunciation
requirement.
Facilitated naturalisation for
refugees
e 1951 Refugee Convention requires that
‘Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate
the assimilation and naturalisation of refugees.
ey shall in particular make every eort to
expedite naturalization proceedings and to reduce
as far as possible the charges and costs of such
proceedings’ (Article 34). In his commentary on
the Convention, Grahl-Madsen (1963) emphasizes
that ‘[n]aturalization in a country of refuge is one
of the possibilities for putting an end to a person’s
refugee character’ (comment 1 on Article 34).
What is meant in Article 34 is in fact the laying
of foundations, or stepping stones, so that the
refugee may familiarize himself with the language,
customs and way of life of the nation among
whom he lives, so that he – without any feeling of
coercion – may be more readily integrated in the
economic, social and cultural life of his country of
refuge.
Language courses, vocational adaptation courses,
lectures on national institutions and social pattern,
and above all stimulation of social contacts
between refugees and the indigenous population,
are but some of the means which may be employed
for the purpose.
By facilitating “assimilation” the Contracting
State is to a certain extent also facilitating the
naturalisation of refugees: In the sense the word
is used in Article 34, “assimilation” is “an apt
description of a certain stage in the development
of the life of the refugee and of the general refugee
problem”; indeed it “clearly corresponded to the
conditions the refugee should full in order to
qualify for naturalisation” (ibid., comment 3).
Naturalisation may be facilitated in a number of
ways, for example by a ‘less rigid implementation
of nancial criteria’, by waiving the requirement
to be released from one’s former citizenship, or by
a shorter residence requirement. Grahl-Madsen
argues that Article 34 of the Convention requires
fair treatment of refugees, but no better treatment
than that accorded to other aliens if that treatment
is a favourable one (ibid., comment 4).
A comparable requirement to facilitate the
acquisition of citizenship for ‘recognised refugees’
can be found in the ECN (Art. 6, under 4(g)). e
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Explanatory Report claries this obligation as
follows:
In order to comply with this paragraph,
it is sucient for a State Party to ensure
favourable conditions for the acquisition
of nationality for the persons belonging
to each of the categories of persons
listed in the sub-paragraphs. Examples
include a reduction of the length of
required residence, less stringent language
requirements, an easier procedure and
lower procedural fees. States Parties still
retain their discretion to decide whether to
grant their nationality to such applicants.
Where the generally required conditions
are already very favourable (for example a
short period of residence for all applicants
for naturalisation), such States are not
required to take additional measures
(Explanatory Report to the ECN, Art. 6,
paragraph 4, consideration 52).
Looking at the existing regulations in EU member
states, it is remarkable that eight states have no
specic provisions related to refugees. In other
states, facilitation is minimal. In the Netherlands,
the only facilitation mentioned in the law itself
is a waiver of the requirement to renounce
one’s previous citizenship (additionally, the
naturalisation fee is lowered from €840 to €625).
In Denmark, the residence requirement is lowered
from 9 to 8 years. Overall, whereas the average
number of years of residence required for ordinary
naturalisation in the EU28 is 7 years, for refugees it
is 4.5 years. While this amounts to a considerable
facilitation, in 7 member states the residence
requirement for naturalisation by refugees is still
six years or more. One state (Lithuania) requires
the same extraordinary length of time (10 years)
for both ordinary naturalisation and that of
refugees. Such requirements clearly violate what
the UNHCR considers best practice ‘in order
to restore an eective nationality to refugees
and to enable their full integration into society’,
namely a residency requirement not exceeding
ve years (UNHCR 2009: 3). UNHCR is also
concerned that time spent by refugees prior to
determination of their application does not “slow
down refugees’ route to citizenship” (ibid.). In
Ireland, discretionary exemption from residence
and other requirements is possible and in practice
refugees are exempted from income requirements,
yet time spent in the country as an asylum seeker
is not reckonable for the purpose of making an
application, according to a High Court judgment
(Becker and Cosgrave 2013: 4).
4. Acquisition of
Citizenship
So what do we know about how many migrants
acquire citizenship in the EU? Overall, based
on statistics reported by the member states, we
know that on average around 850,000 persons a
year acquired the citizenship of one of the EU28
member states between 2009 and 2014 (Eurostat
2016).
In a population of over 500 million inhabitants,
that number is not very signicant (around 0.17
percent). Even when looking at the citizenship
acquisition rate among the resident foreign
population (a standard measure of the relative
societal impact of the number of naturalisations),
only 2.6 in a hundred resident non-nationals were
granted citizenship in one of the EU’s member
states in 2014 (Figure 5).
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Figure 5. Annual rate of acquisition of citizenship per 100 resident foreigners, 2014
Table 1. Cumulative rate of acquisition of
citizenship among foreign-born population in
EU15 (per cohort of years of residence), in %,
2008
Years of residence
6 to 10 11 to 19 20+
AUSTRIA 18.90 41.60 62.76
BELGIUM 24.07 50.40 55.52
DENMARK 14.36 52.13 61.86
FRANCE 18.54 36.91 60.55
GERMANY 28.72 56.97 46.38
GREECE 7.57 25.61 56.77
IRELAND 12.01 32.78 56.44
ITALY 7.98 17.66 60.19
LUXEMBOURG 2.05 8.22 19.61
NETHERLANDS 36.70 70.22 80.23
PORTUGAL 3.93 31.45 58.55
SPAIN 13.26 31.77 54.46
SWEDEN 60.94 85.40 79.18
UK 26.30 51.70 66.51
Mean 18.81 45.40 62.70
Source: Vink and Prokic-Breuer (2012)*
* Data from LFS Ad Hoc Module 2008. No data available for
Finland
Source: Eurostat (2016: Figure 5)
* ese numbers may include naturalisations both by persons resident in the territory of a state and by persons resident abroad.
More meaningful estimates of citizenship
acquisition rates among the foreign-born
population are available based on micro-data
from comparative surveys. For example, on the
basis of data from the 2008 Labour Force Survey
Ad Hoc Module on the labour market situation of
migrants and their descendants in the EU15, we
nd that an average of only 19% of the immigrant
population had acquired citizenship aer 10
years of residence (Table 1). Nevertheless, there
is signicant variation, with up to 60% of the
immigrant population having naturalised in
Sweden but only 2% in Luxembourg. Aer twenty
years of residence the average acquisition rate
increased to 45% (and 85% in Sweden). Among
the population resident longer than 20 years, on
average 63% had naturalised in the EU15. While
this is a signicant percentage, it still means that
there was a group of nearly 40% of immigrants
(and 80% in Luxembourg) who had not naturalised
aer residing over 20 years in a country.
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Analysing micro-level survey data also allows
a better understanding of the relevance of
individual-, origin country- and context-level
factors to the acquisition of citizenship by migrants.
e following paragraphs summarize the results
of a comparative study by Vink, Prokic-Breuer
and Dronkers (2013) on the eects of citizenship
policies in European countries on the propensity
to naturalise, taking into account not only
characteristics of individuals, but also their origin
country features. In particular, the study looked
at the relevance of destination country policies in
the context of origin country features, such as the
level of development of the origin country, and
dual citizenship policies. e study was based on
a sample of 7,489 foreign-born residents in 16
European countries collected by the European
Social Survey. e study was innovative because
where any comparative research had been done
on the eects of destination country policies the
conclusion had been that indeed ‘policy matters’
(Bloemraad 2002; Reichel 2011; Dronkers and
Vink 2012) but few scholars had investigated the
question of to whom citizenship policy matters
most (if at all).
Vink et al (2013) rst look at typical factors, such
as origin country and individual-level variables.
e level of human development of countries
of origin accounts for much of the dierence
among the propensity of immigrants to naturalise.
Immigrants in Europe coming from medium and
under-developed countries are on average 2.5
times more likely to have citizenship than those
originating from highly developed countries,
including EU member states and other OECD
countries. ese ndings are in line with the
literature and can be understood in terms of the
perceived payo attached to citizenship (Jasso
and Rosenzweig 1986: 303; Bueker 2005; Logan
et al. 2012). Acquiring destination-country
citizenship has a much higher potential pay-o
for immigrants originating from low-income
countries than for those coming from developed
and more prosperous societies.
Crucially, because large dierences exist between
immigrants in their motivation to naturalise, Vink
et al (2013) show that the impact of citizenship
policies varies for the above two groups (Figure
6). As discussed previously, the legal frameworks
set by the citizenship laws in destination countries
account for dierent naturalisation rates, but only
for immigrants from less developed countries.
In fact, not only are these immigrants twice as
likely to naturalise in countries with very open
citizenship policies, but they are also the ones
particularly aected by these policies.
Figure 6. e relation between citizenship policies and immigrant naturalisation rates, EU15 (by
level of development of origin country)*
* HDI = Human Development Index
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Vink et al (2013) demonstrate the relevance of
policy by introducing an indicator that captures the
openness of citizenship policy in the destination
countries for rst-generation immigrants with
regard to residency and integration requirements
for naturalisation (MIPEX Access to Nationality).
ey observe that an increase of 1 unit on the
MIPEX scale leads to a 2.4 percent increase in
the likelihood of having destination country
citizenship. However, only in the case of
immigrants from under-developed countries
do they observe a sharp increase in citizenship
take-up rates. In other words, immigrants who
are highly motivated to naturalise, in particular
refugees or migrants from politically unstable
countries more generally, are especially strongly
aected by restrictive access to citizenship. For
immigrants from highly developed and politically
stable countries the positive relation between
citizenship policy and naturalisation rates is
weaker and not signicant.
We nd a similar dierentiated impact of
citizenship laws on naturalisation rates when
looking in more detail at longitudinal data from
the Netherlands. In research with Floris Peters
Figure 7. Cumulative acquisition rates (proportions not naturalised or foreign) among migrant
cohorts 1995-1997 (a) and 2000-2002 (b), by political stability of origin country, in the Netherlands
Source: Peters et al (2016), Figure A1
and Hans Schmeets, we analysed population
register data from the Netherlands for the period
since 1995. In this analysis, we looked at foreign-
born residents in the Netherlands and included
statistical controls for the country of origin and
the individual characteristics of immigrants
(Peters et al, 2016a). We found that a restriction
of the Dutch citizenship law in April 2003 had
a signicantly negative impact on immigrant
naturalisation rates. Among immigrants who
arrived in the Netherlands in 1995, 1996 or 1997
on average 58 per cent were naturalised aer 10
years. However, among the cohorts from 2000,
2001 and 2002, only 42 per cent were naturalised
aer a similar period. ese dierences are even
greater if you look at the groups who are most
in need of citizenship, such as immigrants from
less developed countries or those from politically
unstable countries (Figure 7).
We compared immigrants from cohorts that could
still naturalise under the pre-2003 legislation and
those who could only do so under the stricter
2003 law. We found that for immigrants from
politically stable countries the propensity to
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Maarten Peter Vink
39
naturalise is virtually the same for the pre- and
post-2003 cohorts. However, for immigrants
from politically unstable countries the dierence
is signicant: immigrants from cohorts that fall
under the stricter 2003 legislation naturalise later
and less oen. In other words, we see that policy
does matter, especially for those immigrants who
are most interested in acquiring the citizenship of
the country in which they live. It is not just that
under the 2003 law these immigrants postpone
naturalisation, but they seem to be put o
altogether. As a result of the demotivating eect
of the restrictive measures, we expect that the still
high cumulative naturalisation rates measured in
the Netherlands in 2008 (Table 1) will gradually
decrease over time.
5. Pathways to Citizenship
and Socio-Economic
Integration
In this section I provide some brief evidence from
ongoing research with Peters and Schmeets on
the relationship between citizenship acquisition
and socio-economic outcomes, in particular
having paid employment, among migrants in the
Netherlands.
Anticipating citizenship (Peters
et al, 2016b)
Can citizenship improve the economic integration
of immigrants? In this paper we develop the
argument that migrants anticipate the rewards
of citizenship by investing in their human capital
development, such as by acquiring language
skills. In line with a life-course approach to
immigrant naturalisation (Peters and Vink 2016),
we hypothesize that this anticipation mechanism
is reected in improved labour market outcomes,
not so much – or certainly not only – aer
naturalisation, as assumed in most of the literature,
but already before the acquisition of citizenship.
To test this argument, we use micro-level register
data from Statistics Netherlands from 1999 to
2011 (N = 94,320). To analyse these data in
further detail, and in line with contemporary
studies in the literature, we use individual xed-
eects regression methodology (Bratsberg et
al. 2002; Helgertz et al. 2014; Steinhardt 2012).
e main reason for this approach is that it
addresses the potential bias resulting from self-
selection inherent in the naturalisation process by
controlling for dierences between individuals in
terms of unmeasured characteristics.
e results show that immigrants who naturalise
enjoy a one-o boost in the probability of
paid employment aer citizenship acquisition,
constituting an increase of 12 and 13 percent for
men and women respectively, everything else
remaining constant. However, consistent with
the notion of anticipation, their labour market
performance already improves before the year of
naturalisation and we observe a steep increase
in the probability of having paid employment as
migrants approach the moment of naturalisation.
Labour market performance peaks in the year of
naturalisation for male immigrants, and the year
aer naturalisation for female immigrants. At
that point, both male and female immigrants are
more than twice as likely to have paid employment
compared to more than three years prior to
naturalisation. is conrms that naturalisation
is attractive to immigrants who struggle in the
labour market.
ese ndings contrast with the traditional
causal theory of the citizenship premium in the
literature, where positive labour market outcomes
are assumed to be the direct result of citizenship
acquisition (OECD 2011; Helgertz et al. 2014:
344). e increase observed in the probability of
having paid employment in the period leading
up to the moment of naturalisation shows that
immigrants anticipate the reward of citizenship
and that employers recognize and respond to the
developing skills of potential workers, rather than
citizenship acquisition itself. As such, naturalised
immigrants enjoy an accelerated integration
process rather than a sustained long-term
advantage in the labour market.
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The faster, the better (Vink et
al, 2016)
In a second paper, we argue that the potential
positive impact of citizenship acquisition on labour
market outcomes is conditioned by the trajectory
into the acquisition of this legal status, and we
test the hypothesis that the longer the waiting
period the smaller the impact of citizenship (cf.
Bevelander and DeVoretz 2014). In line with
a life-course perspective on naturalisation, the
idea behind this hypothesis is that acquisition of
citizenship no longer positively aects the labour
market outcome aer an immigrant has already
resided in the destination country for a signicant
period. is is not to say that citizenship will not
have specic benets at that stage (e.g. it will oer
more exible mobility and may facilitate return
migration) but we would not expect it to aect a
migrant’s human capital development in the way
that it would if the migrant naturalised aer just
a few years of residence (when it may encourage
a fast-track integration trajectory through
anticipation mechanisms, as demonstrated above).
To test this argument, we use micro-level register
data from Statistics Netherlands from 1999 to
2011 (N = 197,245) and apply a logistic regression
method to analyse the probability of having
paid employment. We include a 1-year lagged
dependent variable in the module to control for
otherwise unobserved personal characteristics.
We show that the positive impact of citizenship
is especially visible in the early years of residence
in the new country, but that aer seven years the
rewards diminish signicantly (Figure 8). Migrants
who naturalise within ten years of having arrived
in the Netherlands have a higher propensity to
have paid employment. However, this propensity
is signicantly higher when migrants naturalise
relatively early on, especially in the fourth year
aer arrival (59 per cent for men; 47 per cent for
women).16 However, men who naturalise aer ve
years of residence in the Netherlands (thus in the
sixth year) still have a 20 per cent higher chance
of having paid work compared to those migrants
who do not naturalise at all; among women this
propensity is even 32 per cent higher. From the
eighth year of residence, naturalisation has a
much lower impact (9 and 8 per cent for men and
women respectively). From this perspective, there
is no empirical evidence to support the current
legislative proposal (approved by the Lower House,
pending discussion in the Senate) to increase the
residence requirement from ve to seven years (or
even to ten years, as some parties are proposing in
their current electoral manifestos). ese ndings
chime with evidence from Hainmueller et al
(2016), who nd that lengthy asylum processes
16 Under Dutch legislation, these will be migrants with
a Dutch partner, who are allowed to naturalise aer 3 years of
marriage or civil partnership. We include a statistical control for
having a Dutch partner, either foreign-born or native-born, which
has an independent signicant positive impact on having paid
employment.
Figure 8. Relative propensity of paid employment among naturalised immigrants in the
Netherlands, cohorts 1999-2002, by years of residence at the moment of naturalisation
Source: Vink et al (2016)
Graph based on analyses controlling for years of residence, age at migration, partner status (foreign partner, foreign-born Dutch, native-
born Dutch, no partner), having young children in the household, country of origin (EU vs. third country) and a 1-year lagged dependent
variable.
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INTEGRATION OF MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES ~ Maarten Peter Vink
41
decrease employment among refugees. For newly
arriving refugees, what matters for their societal
integration (through employment) is thus a clear
pathway toward inclusion, both through a speedy
asylum determination procedure and an accessible
trajectory towards citizenship.
6. Concluding reflections
How can these ndings inform targeted policy
decisions aimed at maximizing the settlement
success of immigrants and their children? Both
the studies discussed in the previous section
illustrate that citizenship status relates signicantly
to integration outcomes for immigrants, in this
case with regard to paid employment, but that
we should start thinking about the relevance
of legal status beyond seeing it as some kind
of ‘magical device’ that may provide struggling
migrants with, e.g., better access to the labour
market. Migrants actively plan their lives and
anticipate the potential rewards and opportunities
of naturalisation by investing in their own futures.
However, approaching citizenship as a ‘reward for
integration’, as is oen heard in political circles,
from this perspective is a self-defeating prophecy,
as integration is not a clearly dened end-state
but rather a process, and making citizenship
conditional on ever-stricter criteria makes
‘becoming more accepted in society’ an elusive
ambition instead of a realistic goal.
Analysing how and under which conditions status
transitions aect migrant life-course trajectories
allows us to better inform policymakers on the
outcomes of immigrant naturalisation policies.
ese policies have been characterised by two
developments over the past three decades: on the
one hand, citizenship has become increasingly
instrumentalised as part of a broader immigrant
integration agenda; on the other hand, these
policies have also become increasingly politicised
(Vink and De Groot 2010). ese two trends clearly
have contradictory eects in terms of whether
they make citizenship more or less accessible to
migrants and their ospring.
While researchers have provided signicant input
for evidence-based policy-making in this domain,
in Europe (OECD 2011) existing research does not
facilitate informing decision-makers for two main
reasons. First and foremost, by focusing research on
the binary question of whether citizenship matters
for immigrants, the literature overlooks signicant
heterogeneity and misses out on identifying why,
under which conditions and to whom citizenship
matters. In other words, whereas heterogeneous
outcomes are oen seen as undermining the
overall signicance of citizenship for immigrants,
scholars should recognize and communicate to
policymakers that what matters is the pathway into
citizenship, not just the acquisition of the status as
such. Researchers should also invest further eorts
not just in sophisticated methodological strategies
to deal with ‘the causality problem’ in citizenship
and integration, but also in theoretical models that
allow us to hypothesize these dierential pathways
in a broad range of life-course domains. e
examples presented in Section 5 illustrate such
an approach in the most commonly investigated
domain, of labour market integration, but as was
outlined in the literature review in Section 2, these
models can and need to be applied in other elds
too.
Second, partly driven by the high demand for
longitudinal data, the most advanced research
in the eld focuses on single countries or at best
includes limited comparisons. As a result, existing
research does not facilitate drawing conclusions
on the question most relevant to policymakers,
that of the variable impact of policies on
naturalisation outcomes. is is partly because
suitable longitudinal data are scarcely available
(although data derived from population registers
as in the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries
provide a promising starting point) or are under-
used (intra-country variation over time is not
currently optimally utilised to analyse the impact
of policy changes). Moreover, whereas much of
the research focuses on the symbolically – and
arguably in practice – most relevant legal status
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INTEGRATION OF MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES ~ Maarten Peter Vink
42
transition, i.e. that towards citizenship, there is
much less evidence on the relevance of other types
of legal status transitions, such as from asylum
seeker to recognized refugee, or from ‘dead-end’
statuses only oering temporary protection to
being an immigrant with permanent residence
and eventually a citizen of the host country. Again,
this is partly a reection on the available data (e.g.
in surveys and population registers information
on citizenship status is oen included, yet
information on other types of statuses is mostly
lacking). Whereas increasingly better comparable
data exist on citizenship and integration policies,
how such policies aect the relevant outcomes still
leaves much to be investigated.
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43
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CITIZENSHIP,
DIVERSITY AND
MOBILITY
Kees Groenendijk
Radboud University, Nijmegen
Maarten Vink’s paper clearly illustrates how a
new methodological approach to an old question
can produce new insights. Vink’s longitudinal
‘life course perspective’ and his combination of
information from dierent sources allow him to go
beyond the old debate about the causal relationship
between naturalisation and integration resulting
from the more limited data used in the traditional
binary approach to this issue. His research also
produces results that are highly relevant in the
current political debate in several EU Member
States. I mention two examples. His ndings
that the labour market participation of migrants
peaks before and not aer naturalisation is highly
relevant in the debate in states where politicians
propose extending the residence requirement for
naturalisation. In the Netherlands, a bill is pending
in the Senate which would extend the current ve-
year residence requirement (in place since 1892)
to seven years. In its electoral programme for the
March 2017 parliamentary elections, the largest
current government party (VVD) announced
plans for a further extension to ten years. e
justication for these proposals is that they
would support immigrant integration. e results
from Vink’s research illustrate that the extension
would have negative eects on the labour market
participation of those immigrants who are most
interested in acquiring citizenship. Moreover, his
paper makes it clear that ve to ten years aer
their arrival considerable numbers of refugees are
still living in the country of refuge, however much
both they and the receiving societies would prefer
an early return to their countries of origin.
My rst question is whether by presenting
aggregate data the author does not underestimate
the diversity within the population researched.
e migrant population in his data is composed
of refugees, nationals of other EU member states,
spouses of nationals, economic migrants and in
some cases co-ethnics. e dierences within
and between these categories remain invisible in
aggregate quantitative data. For instance, the data
presented in Figure 8 of Vink’s paper result from
widely dierent behaviours between refugees
and nationals from other EU member states,
the former category having high naturalisation
rates and the latter generally having much lower
rates. Vink points to the large dierences in the
perceived payo from naturalisation between
the dierent immigrant groups. However,
within certain groups the payos and the actual
naturalisation practice also vary considerably.
In the Netherlands, the naturalisation rates of
nationals of southern and eastern Member States
are far higher than among EU nationals from the
northern and the neighbouring Member States.
Second, I doubt whether naturalisation generally
reects a deliberate choice by the migrant
to remain and integrate in the society of his
country of residence. In his introduction, Vink
presents naturalisation as “a deliberate choice by
immigrants to link their future with that of the host
country.” is image oen dominates the political
and public debate. It may be true for the majority
of applicants, at least at the time of naturalisation,
but the reality is more diverse. e paper mentions
out-migration aer naturalisation. Recent data on
the Netherlands give a rst impression of the size
and diversity of that out-migration. In 2009-2013
a total of 44,000 persons originating from nine
refugee-producing countries were naturalised.
Within two years of their naturalisation 14% of
these new Dutch nationals le the Netherlands.
Some returned to their countries of origin, while
others migrated to other EU Member States.
Within two years of their naturalisation almost 40%
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49
of the naturalised former-refugees from Bosnia,
Iran, Iraq and Sudan returned to their countries of
origin. Among former refugees from Afghanistan,
Sierra Leone and Somalia the return rate was
considerably lower (below 10%). e former
refugees, who used the right to free movement
within the EU attached to their new nationality,
migrated from the Netherlands primarily to the
UK (40%), to Belgium (9%) and to Germany (7%).
More than half of the 6,000 new Dutch nationals
who le the Netherlands within two years moved
to these three EU Member States.1 Naturalisation
enhances the mobility of new nationals, both to
their countries of origin and within the EU.
Apparently, refugees’ acquisition of the nationality
of their country of refuge enables their return to
the county of origin, because it reduces the risks in
returning through the protection attached to the
new nationality. It also grants the right to come
back to the country of the new nationality if the
country of origin turns out to not yet be safe or
the prospects of successful re-integration in that
country is not yet positive. From anthropological
research, it appears that out-migration to other
EU Member States may be triggered by various
factors: better labour market chances (perceived or
real), easier access to self-employment in the UK,
the presence of family members, or a larger and
stronger community of co-ethnics.2 Naturalisation
may be a liberalisation for those asylum seekers
who did not intend to migrate to the Netherlands
but were trapped in the Dublin system. In these
cases, naturalisation functions as a correction to
that system, which almost completely disregards
the well-founded wishes of persons seeking
protection to go to a specic country in Europe.
ese data indicate that it may be promising to
1 Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, Migatiegedrag van
personene met een specieke herkomst die in de periode 2006-2013
de Nederlandse nationaliteit hebben verkregen, www.cbs.nl, visited
27 September 2016, and B. Meindersma, Deel vluchtelingen wacht
op paspoort en vertrekt weer snel, http://nos.nl/artikel/2134178.
2 Jill Ahrens, Melissa Kelly, Melissa and Ilse van Liempt,
(2014) Free movement? e onward migration of EU citizens born in
Somalia, Iran and Nigeria, Population, Space and Place. ISSN 1544-
8444.
extend the life course perspective with a focus on
the labour market position of new nationals who
le the country during the rst few years aer
their naturalisation. Moreover, information from
longitudinal quantitative data should be combined
with the results of empirical research focussing on
the migrant perspective, rather than on the state
perspective that is implicit in the data collected by
government bodies.
In order to explain the naturalisation patterns of
immigrants, Vink’s paper looks both at variables
in the country of residence and in the country
of origin. With regard to the latter variables, the
focus is on the political stability and the stage
of economic development. But I would suggest
that nationality law and practice in the country
of origin may be another relevant variable
explaining the inclination of immigrants to
apply for naturalisation. In the 1970s and 1980s
the Dutch rule requiring immigrants who could
renounce their rst nationality to do so had the
eect that Moroccan immigrants applied for
naturalisation because they could not renounce
their nationality and thus were not obliged to do
so, whilst immigrants from Turkey rarely applied
because under the Turkish nationality law they
could renounce that nationality and were therefore
required to do so according to Dutch nationality
law. e dierence between the naturalisation
practices of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants
became even more pronounced when in special
broadcasts directed at Moroccan immigrants
the head of the naturalisation department of the
Ministry of Justice explicitly stated that acquiring
Dutch nationality did not imply that applicants
had to abandon their religion. Only aer the
renunciation requirement was de facto abolished
in the 1990s did large numbers of Turkish
immigrants start to apply for naturalisation,
causing a peak in the Dutch naturalisation statistics
in 1996. Naturalisation practice thus oen results
from the interplay between the nationality rules of
the two countries concerned.
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In the nal part of Vink’s paper it is rightly
suggested that much research focuses on the eect
on immigrant integration of transition towards
citizenship and less so on other types of legal
status transition, such as from asylum seeker to
recognised refugee or from temporary migrant
to migrant with permanent status. I would
suggest that the latter status transition is the most
promising focus for future empirical research.
e many legal barriers to integration attached
to the status of asylum seekers (limited access to
the labour marker, to language courses and to
family reunication) and their relatively short
length of residence in the country of refuge will
make it hard to identify the eects of granting the
stronger status that, on paper, allows free access
to the labour market. Empirical research on the
transition from temporary to permanent residence
status will oer a better possibility of identifying
the eects of status transition on integration.
Moreover, it will allow testing of the hypothesis
that the transition towards citizenship “arguably
in practice [is the] most relevant legal status
transition.” Here, I repeat my plea for longitudinal
quantitative research to be combined with
qualitative research focussing on the immigrant’s
perspective.3 When the focus of research is on
the eects of transition from one legal status to
another, we should not forget that a stronger legal
status does not always result in a better social
position. In her interesting comparative study
of dierent groups of Polish immigrants in the
Netherlands, Cathelijne Pool found that before
Poland’s EU membership immigrants with both
Polish and German nationalities, who due to their
status as EU citizens had the strongest legal status,
nevertheless in practice had a clearly less secure
labour market and social integration position due
to their lack of knowledge of a language that was
understood by the majority population (English
3 Jill Ahrens, Suspended in Eurocrisis: new immobilities
and semi-legal migrations amongst Nigerians living in Spain, Journal
of Mediterranean Studies (22) 2013 22, pp. 115-140. ISSN 1016-
3476.
or German)4, their reliance on family contacts
and their dependency on private employment
agencies.5 Legal status is only one among
many variables inuencing the integration of
immigrants.
4 For a long time Poles with German ancestry living in
Poland could acquire German nationality without being procient
in the German language.
5 Cathelijne Pool, Migration van Polen naar Nederland in
een tijd van versoepeling van migratieregels, Nijmegen 2011 (Boom
Juridische Uitgevers).
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Kees Groenendijk
51
TOWARDS A
LIFE COURSE
PERSPECTIVE ON
NATURALISATION
FOR REFUGEES
Ines Michalowski
WZB, Berlin
According to the life course perspective on
nationality acquisition developed by Maarten
Vink, naturalisation rates can be understood as
the outcome of interactions between national
citizenship legislation on the one hand and
individual decision-making based on a person’s
life course on the other. Drawing on Elder’s
(1974) sociological life-course paradigm, Floris
Peters and Maarten Vink (2016: 368) explain that
“trajectories are periods of time in life domains
or institutions, such as education, work or
health, in which transitions are embedded.” And
“since migration and integration are life-course
processes, the act of citizenship acquisition can
be perceived as an important transition – from
non-citizen to citizen – within this trajectory”.
e precise shape of these trajectories, they argue,
is inuenced by “societal institutions, such as
educational and occupational systems” (Peters
and Vink 2016: 367). us, the researcher’s rst
task when trying to predict citizenship acquisition
should be to identify the dierent life course
trajectories that a particular individual is engaged
in or has concluded. As Peters and Vink (2016:
367) argue, “e key assumption here is that there
is a temporal dynamic to life events, where past
experiences and resources, as well as opportunities
and ambitions for the future, promote or stie
certain choices and developments.” us, a person’s
citizenship acquisition may be more likely in some
moments of the life course than in others. e
researcher will have to identify these particular
moments where citizenship acquisition could
become a relevant transition within a trajectory,
while also dealing with less predictable “turning
points” in life and its social character, captured in
the notion of “linked lives” (Peters and Vink 2016:
368). us, the life course approach to citizenship
acquisition is able to relate the inuence of nation-
specic institutions to individual decision-making
that takes into account changes in the individual’s
life over time (Peters and Vink 2016: 365).
In what follows, I will start to think through a life
course perspective on the specicities of citizenship
acquisition by refugees. On average, refugees
dier from most other migrants in terms of their
higher naturalisation rates (e.g. for Germany, see
Statistisches Bundesamt 2016). e most obvious
explanation – which does not adopt a life course
perspective but rather a utility perspective, as
Peters and Vink (2016: 363) name it – is that
refugees’ citizenship of origin is of little value. For
example, it may be of little value for travelling to
the country of origin, where the receiving country’s
passport may be the safer choice (only, of course,
if the origin country respects the rule of law). For
refugees who oppose the political regime in their
home country, acquiring a new passport and thus
devaluing their origin country citizenship may
also be an act of political expression. Moreover,
in slightly more abstract terms, origin citizenship
may have less value for refugees because they
have fewer hopes of ever returning to their
home country than other groups of immigrants.
Whether these hopes are low or almost non-
existent certainly depends on the individual,
but it may also depend on the situation in the
country of origin, and specically on whether this
country is involved in an international conict, is
undergoing a long civil war, or has had an abrupt
and successful change of political regime. Hopes
of returning may also depend on the position that
a particular group of refugees has on a conict.
For example, attitudes may dier between those
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FOR REFUGEES ~ Ines Michalowski
52
eeing from a successful regime change (e.g.
the Iranian Revolution, or the unication of the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam) and those eeing
a civil war but harbouring at least some sympathy
for the independence movement (which may have
been the case for some Tamil refugees from Sri
Lanka). Hope of returning might also vary as a
function of the length and stage of the conict in
the country of origin. However – and this is where
Peters and Vink’s perspective comes in – if hope
for return materializes too late in the refugee’s life
course in the receiving country, the refugee may
decide to settle and acquire citizenship even if the
situation in the country of origin improves.
Generally speaking, and despite the fact that
naturalisation rates may vary across groups of
refugees as a function of these origin-country-
related dierences (dierent countries, or same
country at dierent moments in a conict), the
generally witnessed phenomenon is that refugees
are more likely than many other groups to acquire
host country citizenship. Given the above, this is
logical but it is also surprising if we consider that
citizenship acquisition is a somewhat demanding
process. us, the structural motivation for
refugees to acquire citizenship must be so much
higher than that of other migrants that they are
more likely to start and nish the naturalisation
process even though they may have fewer
resources at hand.
Going through the procedure of citizenship
acquisition may be more cumbersome for refugees,
rst because the life course of refugees is likely
to be more disordered than that of many other
individuals. Refugees oen come from countries
where the state does not function well and does
not provide an infrastructure that institutionalizes
educational and professional trajectories. If
refugees have engaged in educational and
professional trajectories, these are usually
interrupted by their ight. Without much doubt,
the ight and the events that force an individual
to leave his or her country can be classied as a
turning point aer which an individual’s life has
to be thought through and rationalized anew.
is reorientation of one’s life can be a long
and dicult process, and can be slowed down
further if psychological trauma is involved. Aer
arriving in a receiving country, refugees oen
wait for months without work and individual
housing. is waiting period also involves the
insecurity of not knowing whether refugee status
will be obtained, which Stewart and Mulvey
(2014: 1028-1030) aptly describe as a struggle by
refugees against a sense of temporariness. It does
not need much imagination to understand that
a long period of inactivity is detrimental to the
integration process, which is a necessary condition
for citizenship acquisition. Peters and Vink (2016:
368) also underline the relevance of the concept
of “linked lives” to citizenship acquisition. is
entails that naturalisation decisions are oen
taken collectively or in view of the collective (e.g.
to support children). In cases where refugees are
separated from family members, this could result
in increased eorts to integrate as the only activity
that can help to prepare for the arrival of the family,
but worries about the well-being of close family
members can also easily lead to a loss of focus on
the integration process in the receiving context.
Studies have shown that on average refugees are
less procient in the host country language than
labour and family migrants (Chiswick and Miller
2001; Van Tubergen and Kalmijn 2005) and a
study on refugees in the Netherlands found that
“language skills are better among refugees who
only lived in a refugee reception center for a short
while, who completed an integration course, who
received post-migration education, who intend
to stay in the host country, and who have fewer
health problems“ (van Tubergen 2010: 515). In
addition, aer arriving in the receiving country
refugees usually do not have a large amount of
money at their disposal. is may be necessary for
a costly integration and naturalisation procedure.
Moreover, their labour market integration is slow
– studies on Germany predict at least ten years
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FOR REFUGEES ~ Ines Michalowski
53
before the majority of the refugees arriving will
have integrated in the labour market (Brücker
et al. 2015). us, refugees will nd more value
in the acquisition of host country citizenship
as an important (since permanent) transition
into a new professional, educational and maybe
political trajectory in the receiving country, but
the particular diculties that they face as refugees
might slow down the process of settlement and
integration which is usually required for acquiring
citizenship.
Citizenship acquisition is a somewhat demanding
administrative act. Beyond the fact that the
candidate needs to be willing and able to go
through a long bureaucratic procedure, there are
many conditions that have to be met. Usually,
candidates need to have resided in the receiving
context for a certain number of years, sometimes
they need to have a specic type of residence
permit to request citizenship, and usually they
should have no criminal record. Candidates for
naturalisation may also have to meet income
requirements, speak the language and/or pass
a language test, pass a citizenship test and pay
naturalisation fees. Peters and Vink (2016: 365)
suggest that restrictive citizenship regulations
disproportionately aect citizenship acquisition
among more vulnerable groups. Similarly, Kibreab
(2003) nds that citizenship rights which are
oen granted to refugees in developed countries
increase the likelihood of refugees settling in these
countries, whereas the denial of such rights that
oen occurs in developing countries increases
the likelihood of refugees returning aer the end
of a conict. Maarten Vink examines the eorts
of EU member states to alleviate the citizenship
acquisition procedure for refugees by means of
special conditions. His ndings from the EUDO
Citizenship Observatory show that among the 28
member states eight have no specic provisions
for refugees (Vink 2016: 15) while facilitation
oen remains modest in the other cases. One of
the most substantial forms of facilitation in the
EU 28 is a reduction of the number of years of the
residency requirement from an average of 7 years
for regular migrants to 4.5 years for refugees. In
addition, some countries reduce naturalisation
fees or waive an income requirement for refugees.
Vink mentions no facilitations in terms of
integration requirements but Morillon (2001: 52)
found a French administrative directive asking for
benevolent treatment of refugees’ naturalisation
applications.
However, beyond these explicit facilitations
for citizenship acquisition, other institutional
conditions might also impact the citizenship
acquisition of refugees and interfere with their life
courses. Here, the contradictions regarding the
legal regulations for the reception and integration
of refugees come to mind. In Europe, refugees
usually arrive as asylum-seekers and until a decision
on their status is made it remains unclear whether
they will settle in the country or be obliged to
leave it. is is a dicult policy problem for liberal
democracies, since any achievement in terms of
social integration reduces the legitimacy of future
expulsions. Short procedures of a maximum
duration of three months would be the way out
but are not easy to achieve. And while states want
to impede the social integration of asylum-seekers
during the asylum procedure, they seek to foster
the social integration of recognized refugees. If
we think of the importance of social integration
for citizenship acquisition it might be relevant to
take into account how long an individual has been
maintained in ‘non-integration-mode’.
A look at the recent changes brought about by
the new German Integration Law of 31 July 2016
illustrates this trade-o between migration control
and social inclusion. e German government
has found a more rened answer compared to its
response to the last arrival of large numbers of
refugees in the early 1990s. In fact, some 20 to 25
years ago Germany, together with other European
countries, tried to deter asylum-seekers from
settling down permanently by denying all asylum-
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FOR REFUGEES ~ Ines Michalowski
54
seekers the right to work, the right to move freely
in the country and the right to participate in
publicly-nanced language courses. In the new
2016 law, the old logic of preventing the integration
of asylum-seekers whose claims might be rejected
and who might have to leave the country has not
disappeared. However, German law now ocially
distinguishes between asylum-seekers from
countries classied as producing asylum-seekers
who have good chances of acquiring a right to
stay (gute Bleibeperspektive) and those without
such chances, thereby anticipating its own asylum
decision, which is delayed by lengthy procedures.
It is current administrative practice that asylum-
seekers from countries with a previous recognition
quota of above 50% are considered to have good
prospects (ym 2016: 244). Since this group
receives privileges and is ocially “allowed to
integrate,” the non-inclusion of Afghani refugees,
whose previous recognition rate has been just
below the cut-o mark, has been the subject of
lively debate (e.g. Lehner 2016). An additional
diculty for this group is that in early 2016 the
average asylum procedure for them lasted for
over a year, meaning that those who were nally
allowed to settle in Germany were excluded from
any proactive state-funded integration measures
for the entire length of this period. is is easily
perceived as an injustice. On the other hand, in
2016, refugees from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Eritrea and
Somalia were allowed to participate in state-funded
integration measures even while their asylum
procedures were still ongoing. Nevertheless, this is
an important improvement in the legal framework
for refugees in Germany as compared to the 1990s.
In a way, one of the central beliefs that has been
introduced to European integration policies since
the turn of the century – namely the idea that
integration has to start as early as possible – has
nally made its way into regulations for refugees
in Germany.
Another element of 21st century integration
policies has also made it into refugee integration
measures: the work-for-welfare principle. is
was initially introduced into German integration
policy with the 2005 immigration law, which
obliged new immigrants in Germany to participate
in language and civic education courses that are
provided by the state (Michalowski 2009). us,
refugees who are considered to have a good
prospect of staying in Germany are oered 600
to 900 hours of language tuition plus 100 hours
of civic education (40 more hours compared to
those oered to other immigrants) even if their
asylum procedure is still ongoing. Because of their
lack of income, most refugees and asylum-seekers
are exempted from the contribution of €1.95 an
hour to the cost of these courses. Moreover, each
year 100,000 refugees can participate in a work
for welfare programme which is ‘remunerated’
at a rate of 80 cents an hour for a maximum of
30 hours a week and a maximum duration of six
months. ese measures are exclusively oered by
state-run organizations and are mostly located in
refugee camps, which raises questions as to their
capacity to transfer to the real labour market. If a
refugee fails to comply with the work for welfare
measures and/or language and civic integration
measures, the monetary support from the
government can be cut entirely and the state will
only guarantee for the individual to be able to eat,
wash, dress and live in a heated place. To further
facilitate the labour market integration of refugees,
most German federal states have abolished the
labour market test for refugees, but some of the
16 federal states have decided to impose a three-
year residency requirement even for recognized
refugees in order to better distribute the costs
associated with refugee reception. However, there
is an obvious trade-o in terms of the degree of
free movement that might be necessary for labour
market integration (Brücker, Möller and Wol
2016: 21). To address these concerns, a somewhat
bureaucratic system of discretionary case-by-case
decision-making has been introduced. Finally,
contrary to the 2005 regulations, permanent
residence can only be acquired aer a period of
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FOR REFUGEES ~ Ines Michalowski
55
three years if the refugee demonstrates German
language skills at the C1 level of the Common
European Reference Framework. To acquire
permanent residence aer 5 years, refugees need
language skills at the A2 level. Research ndings
from the UK suggest that even aer physical
safety is acquired, refugees long for emotional and
psychological safety and stability, which can be
undermined by future revisions of their residence
status (Stewart and Mulvey 2014: 1033-1034).
From a life course perspective, the German
example raises several questions. Does the
preferential institutional treatment of refugees
who are considered to have good prospects of
staying have a positive inuence on citizenship
acquisition? Here, a comparison of refugees who
fell under the two dierent regimes but were both
granted refugee status would be very interesting.
A comparison with the refugees from the 1990s
might also be of interest. To get closer to the life
course perspective, a very detailed analysis could
try to answer the question of whether specic
groups of refugees – e.g. according to marital status,
age, educational and professional background,
number of children, or duration of separation
from family members – are particularly aected
by a long waiting period aer arrival in terms of
later citizenship acquisition.
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References
Brücker, Herbert, Joachim Möller and Joachim Wol. 2016. IAB Stellungnahme. Integration von
Geüchteten. Nürnberg: IAB.
Brücker, Herbert, Andreas Hauptmann and Ehsan Vallizadeh. 2015. “Flüchtlinge und andere Migranten
am deutschen Arbeitsmarkt: Der Stand im September 2015“. IAB Aktuelle Berichte 14. Institut für
Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, Nürnberg.
Chiswick, Barry R. and Paul W. Miller. 2001. “A Model of Destination-Language Prociency Acquisition:
Application to Male Immigrants in Canada.” Demography 38(3):391-409.
Elder, Glen H. (Ed.). 1974. Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Kibreab, Gaim. 2003. Citizenship Rights and Repatriation of Refugees, International Migration Review,
37(1):24-73.
Lehner, Roman. 2016. “Gehen oder bleiben?” in VerfBlog, edited by Max Steinbeis.
Michalowski, Ines. 2009. Liberal states–privatised integration policies? Pp. 259-276 in Illiberal Liberal
States. Immigration, Citizenship and Integration in the EU edited by Elspeth Guild, Kees Groenendijk
and Sergio Carrera. Surren Ashgate.
Morillon, Anne. 2001. Les réfugiés politiques face à la naturalisation, no. 1234: 50-57.
Peters, Floris and Maarten Vink. 2016. “Naturalization and the socio-economic integration of immigrants:
a life-course perspective.” Pp. 362-76 in Handbook on Migration and Social Policy, edited by Gary P.
Freeman and Nikola Mirilovic. Northampton, Edward Elgar Publishing.
Statistisches Bundesamt. 2016. Bevölkerung und Erwerbstätigkeit. Einbürgerungen 2015. Fachserie 1
Reihe 2.1., Wiesbaden.
Stewart, Emma, and Gareth Mulvey. 2014. “Seeking Safety beyond Refuge: e Impact of Immigration
and Citizenship Policy upon Refugees in the UK.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40(7): 1023-
1039.
ym, Daniel 2016. “Integration kra Gesetzes? Grenzen und Inhalte des „Integrationsgesetzes“ des
Bundes.” Zeitschri für Ausländerrecht und Ausländerpolitik 8:241-51.
Van Tubergen, Frank. 2010. “Determinants of Second Language Prociency among Refugees in the
Netherlands”, in: Social Forces 89(2): 515–534.
Van Tubergen, Frank and Matthijs Kalmijn. 2005. “Destination-Language Prociency in Cross-National
Perspective: A Study of Immigrant Groups in Nine Western Countries.” American Journal of Sociology
110(5):1412-57.
Vink, Maarten. 2016. “Citizenship and Legal Statuses.” in e Integration of Migrants and Refugees,
edited by Rainer Bauböck and Milena Tripkovic. Florence: European University Institute.
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FOR REFUGEES ~ Ines Michalowski
57
BEYOND THE
NATION STATE?
GLOCAL
CITIZENSHIP AND
ITS CONSEQUENCES
FOR INTEGRATION
Barbara Oomen
Utrecht University
European University Institute
In September 2016, the mayors of Paris, London
and New York wrote an op-ed in the New York
Times calling on “world leaders assembling at the
United Nations to take decisive action to provide
relief and safe haven to refugees eeing conict
and migrants eeing economic hardship, and to
support those who are already doing this work.”1
In making this plea for inclusivity, they set out
how they were already doing their part, providing
services and programmes to all those residing
in their cities, including diverse immigrant
populations. One example put forward was that of
the municipal ID programmes in Paris and New
York, which provide every city dweller – whether
undocumented, homeless or otherwise – with
certain rights and access to services. is instance
illustrates the central point that I wish to make in
response to Maarten Vink’s paper on citizenship
and legal statuses – the importance of considering
the role of local authorities as well as the nation
state in shaping citizenship, and thus the type of
integration that citizenship status leads to.
Vink’s insightful analysis of why, how and for
whom citizenship transitions matter adds nuance
to citizenship studies but departs from a relatively
binary understanding of citizenship – as a door to
pass through to have access to full social, economic
1 De Blasio, B., Hidalgo, A. & Khansept, S. (2016, 20
September 2016), Our Immigrants, Our Strength., New York Times.
and political rights. is point of departure does
not recognize the degree to which citizenship
as a legal status with specic related rights and
responsibilities is increasingly given its formal
content within other polities than the nation-state
alone.2 ere is the ‘world community,’ which
bestows rights upon all individuals via an ever-
expanding system of international human rights
treaties and monitoring mechanisms, thus giving
meaning to cosmopolitan citizenship. ere is the
European Union and European citizenship, with a
wide variety of rights attached that it has formally
created and which makes the added value of
national citizenship dier considerably for those
who do or do not possess it. Additionally, although
this has received less recognition in the literature
to date, local authorities increasingly formally
bestow rights upon those living within their
borders, creating a type of urban citizenship. All
this leads to an interplay between local, national,
regional and international layers of government
in dening and recognizing migrant rights. is
is called ‘multilevel constitutionalism’ by lawyers
and ‘constitutional pluralism’ by anthropologists,
adding a spatial dimension to citizenship that
is critical to understanding of its relation to
migration.3
Of all these polities shaping citizenship, the focus
here will be on local authorities, such as cities. Over
the recent years, cities have increasingly been given
and have claimed formal powers to both recognize
and give meaning to the rights of those residing
within their boundaries, resulting in a wide range
of divergent practices impacting directly upon the
main markers of integration set out by Vink – the
2 See, among a wide range of literature on the topic, Isin,
E. F. & Nyers, P. (2014), Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship
Studies: Routledge; and, for instance, Benhabib, S. (2008),
Investigating Citizenship., in E. F. Isin, P. Nyers & B. S. Turner
(Eds.), Citizenship between Past and Future (pp. 18-35), Abingdon:
Routledge.
3 Pernice, I. (2015). Multilevel Constitutionalism and
the Crisis of Democracy in Europe., European Constitutional
Law Review, 11(03), 541-562; Walker, N. (2002). e Idea of
Constitutional Pluralism., Modern Law Review, 65(3), 317-359.
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58
labour market, education, political participation
and access to housing. e following sections will
briey discuss the rise of local authorities as self-
acclaimed key players in the eld of integration,
and will subsequently set out how this also aects
the legal status of migrants and their integration.
One interesting aspect of this development is the
interplay between cosmopolitan and local norms
– leading to a type of glocal citizenship. is leads
to a nal reection on how these developments
could and should be taken into account in research
on citizenship and migration.
CITIES AS KEY ACTORS IN
INTEGRATION
Over recent years, policy makers, scholars and –
most importantly – cities themselves have come to
recognize and explicate their key role in welcoming
and integrating migrants. Where it concerns
refugees, for instance, movements all over Europe
such as the International Cities of Refuge Network,
the Cities of Sanctuary, the Save Me campaign
and the Eurocities network specically assert the
independent role and responsibility of cities in
welcoming refugees. e Global Parliament of
Mayors, initiated by Benjamin Barber, author of
the widely inuential If Mayors Ruled the World,
explicitly chose the notion of ‘Cities of arrival:
Migration and Refugees’ as the theme for its rst
plenary session during its inaugural conference in
September 2016.4 More widely, the policy network
of Cities for Local Integration Policies (CLIP)
unites 30 European cities working on the social
and economic integration of migrants.
e reasons for this rise of local authorities in the
eld of migrant integration are manifold. One
is that a general trend towards decentralization
has led to more local government autonomy,
and more direct responsibility for a variety of
social and economic challenges heightened by
austerity measures. As for cities as such, there
4 Barber, B. (2013) If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional
Nations, Rising Cities., Yale: Yale University Press.
is also the general inux of urban population.
Currently, more people live in the city than in the
countryside, and cities are more diverse than ever.
Scholars have also come to emphasize the degree
to which cities are best suited as loci for migrant
integration, be it because of the pragmatism of
local policy-making (the local pragmatist thesis)
or because of the dierences between localities (the
localist thesis).5 In all, recognition of the relevance
of local authorities in migrant integration has led
to a general local turn in migration studies, and a
departure from ‘methodological nationalism.’6
One key nding in this general literature on
local governments and migration is the degree
to which local governments seek to depart from
national policies, a ‘decoupling’ between national
and local policies.7 As national migration policies
throughout Europe become more and more
restrictive, cities oen have both principled
and pragmatic diculties with such policies
and seek ‘room for manoeuvre’ to steer towards
more inclusive policies.8 Simultaneously, other
local authorities witness protests against migrant
inuxes, particularly involving refugees, and yield
by, for instance, refusing to take part in refugee
reception. One result of the way in which local
authorities increasingly claim the autonomy to
make these choices is a variation in the degree to
which migrants can meaningfully access political,
social and economic rights, irrespective of their
legal citizenship status.
5 Emilsson, H. (2015) A national turn of local integration
policy: multi-level governance dynamics in Denmark and Sweden.,
Comparative Migration Studies, 3(1); Scholten, P. & Penninx, R.
(2016) e Multilevel Governance of Migration and Integration.,
Integration Processes and Policies in Europe (pp. 91-108): Springer.
6 Schiller, N. G. & Çağlar, A. (2009), Towards a comparative
theory of locality in migration studies: Migrant incorporation and
city scale., Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 35(2), 177-202.
7 De Graauw, E. & Vermeulen, F. (2016), Cities and
the politics of immigrant integration: a comparison of Berlin,
Amsterdam, New York City, and San Francisco., Journal of Ethnic
and Migration Studies, 42(6), 989-1012.
8 Gebhardt, D. (2016). Re-thinking urban citizenship
for immigrants from a policy perspective: the case of Barcelona.,
Citizenship Studies, 1-21; Eurocities (2016), Refugee reception and
integration in cities., Brussels: Eurocities.
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An illustration of the variation in access to
the labour market, to housing and to safety in
general between local authorities is oered by
the ‘migration location index’ put together by
the Economist.9 e index is based on an equal
weighting of job, housing and safety data from
dierent German local authorities, and thus
identies the localities most suitable for newly
arriving refugees. Whereas the jobs, houses and
general security available to migrants in a given
location result from a variety of factors, it is safe to
assume that local policies pertaining to migration
partially determine the variation that is revealed.
THE FORMAL DIMENSION OF
LOCAL POLICIES
Cities thus form the space in which the citizenship
that “gives substance and meaning to legal
standing” practically takes shape.10 Additionally,
9 e Economist Migration Location Index, “Refugees
might be seeking asylum in the wrong places”, published on 25 April
2016, http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/04/
daily-chart-8
10 Staeheli, L. A. (2003), Cities and citizenship. Urban
there have been more and more recent examples of
cities actually expanding the rights that come with
a particular legal status, for instance by granting
refugees certain rights before formal recognition
of their status. e city of Utrecht, for instance,
seeks to connect asylum seekers to the city from
the day of arrival.11 By oering them language
lessons, lessons in entrepreneurialism and general
education, the city departs from the general
Dutch policy of only oering education to those
who have already received a formal status. e
city of Münster, to give another illustration, has
rejected the notion of centralized asylum centres
and immediately provides decentralized housing
to those waiting for formal status.12
Even more far-reaching are developments towards
the creation of a formal urban citizenship explicitly
destined to all living in the city, thus breaking
down the divide between citizens and non-
citizens. Paris, for example, recently introduced
a carte citoyenne which gives all Parisians access
to municipal services, and which “carries the
values of Paris, liberty, diversity and tolerance and
connects Parisians to municipal life.”13 e card
is modelled on the NYCID, the New York City
ID card that is recognized for interactions with
the police (such as reporting crimes), for opening
bank accounts, and that gives all city dwellers
– including undocumented migrants and the
homeless – access to public services and also to
museums. New York is only one of the ‘cities of
sanctuary’ in the US that through such practices
enable those without citizenship status to still
exert political, social and economic rights.14
Geography, 24(2), 98.
11 Huisman, C. (2016). Utrecht: asielzoeker direct binden.
De Volkskrant, 27 April 2016.
12 http://www.stadt-muenster.de/zuwanderung/startseite.
html
13 “Paris lance une carte de citoyen”, Europe 1¸ 10 February
2016, http://www.paris.fr/cartecitoyenne
14 Lippert, R. & Rehaag, S. (2012), Sanctuary Practices
in International Perspectives: Migration, Citizenship and Social
Movements., Routledge. See, for instance, www.citiesofmigration.
ca
SECTION 1: CITIZENSHIP AND LEGAL STATUSES | BEYOND THE NATION STATE? GLOCAL CITIZENSHIP AND
ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR INTEGRATION ~ Barbara Oomen
60
GLOCAL CITIZENSHIP
One interesting aspect of the way in which cities
shape citizenship, also in a formal sense, is the
degree to which they oen refer to cosmopolitan
norms, such as international human rights law,
in setting out and defending their positions. e
mayor of Palermo, for instance, is a strong advocate
of the recognition of mobility as an inalienable
human right.15 Palermo’s ‘International Human
Mobility Charter’ serves as the basis for migrant
welcome and integration in this Sicilian city facing
a large inux of refugees.16
More widely, these policies are in line with a trend
of increasing numbers of human rights cities,
which base their urban policies on international
human rights law, oen taking a more progressive
stance than national governments.17 In Europe,
for instance, 400 cities have signed the European
Charter for the Safeguarding of Human Rights in
the City. Forerunners, such as Graz, Barcelona
and Nuremberg, have human rights oces and
engage in human rights monitoring, thus basing
their urban policies on cosmopolitan norms. e
way in which citizenship in a given locality and
the rights that it has to oer become shaped in
the permanent interplay between international,
national and local authorities can be called ‘glocal
citizenship.’18
15 Citta di Palermo, International Human Mobility Charter
of Palermo 2015.
16 Kirgaessner, S., (2015), From maa city to a haven for
refugees: Palermo moves on from its criminal past, e Guardian,
27 December 2015.
17 Oomen, B., Davis, M. & Grigolo, M. (2016). Global Urban
Justice: the Rise of Human Rights Cities. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
18 See, for instance, Papisca, A. (2011), Relevance of human
rights in the glocal space of politics: how to enlarge democratic
practice beyond state boundaries and build up a peaceful world.,
in K. De Feyter, S. Parmentier, C. Timmerman & G. Ulrich (Eds.),
e Local Relevance of Human Rights (pp. 82-108), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
CITIES, CITIZENSHIP AND
INTEGRATION
e examples quoted, and the developments
mentioned show how the actual benets
associated with ‘national’ citizenship depend on
its relationship and interplay with regional (EU),
international and also local understandings of
citizenship. For a variety of reasons, reaching from
the general strengthening of cities as political actors
to local discomfort with national policies, there is
an increasing divergence between local policies
with regards to migrants in general and refugees in
particular. is divergence impacts on all the main
markers of integration – from access to housing,
education and work to political participation –
and thus also aects the added value of citizenship
status. is means that any understanding of how,
why and for whom citizenship transitions matter
should also include a spatial understanding of
where – at the subnational level – this is the case.
It could well be, aer all, that the advantages of
acquiring citizenship dier more between, for
instance, Paris and Perpignan than between
France and Belgium.
SECTION 1: CITIZENSHIP AND LEGAL STATUSES | BEYOND THE NATION STATE? GLOCAL CITIZENSHIP AND
ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR INTEGRATION ~ Barbara Oomen
