Ines Michalowski

Citizenship rights for immigrants. National political processes and cross-national convergence in Western Europe, 1980–2008

Immigrant citizenship rights in the nation-state reference both theories of cross-national convergence and the resilience of national political processes. This article investigates European countries’ attribution of rights to immigrants: Have these rights become more inclusive and more similar across countries? Are they affected by EU membership, the role of the judiciary, the party in power, the size of the immigrant electorate, or pressure exerted by anti-immigrant parties? Original data on 10 European countries, 1980–2008, reveal no evidence for cross-national convergence. Rights tended to become more inclusive until 2002, but stagnated afterward. Electoral changes drive these trends: growth of the immigrant electorate led to expansion, but countermobilization by right-wing parties slowed or reversed liberalizations. These electoral mechanisms are in turn shaped by long-standing policy traditions, leading to strong path dependence and the reproduction of preexisting cross-national differences.

Required to assimilate? The content of citizenship tests in five countries

In order to investigate questions about the assimilatory or liberal nature of obligatory integration measures for immigrants in Europe, this article systematically analyses and compares the content of citizenship tests in Austria, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. Based on a two-dimensional classification of citizenship test questions – along 14 thematic and two normative categories – the analysis has produced a surprising result: no hypothesis from the existing citizenship and civic integration literature can explain the content of all five citizenship tests. Furthermore, I find that the characteristics of a citizenship policy regime are not a good predictor for the content of the respective citizenship tests. In the sample, countries renowned for having an ethno-cultural understanding of citizenship implemented citizenship tests conveying a politically liberal idea of a community of citizens, united around legal and political norms, rather than around sociocultural ones. By contrast, the Netherlands – a country with a liberal and multicultural reputation – also requires immigrants to be aware of and accept certain sociocultural norms.

The Heuristic Potential of Models of Citizenship and Immigrant Integration Reviewed

This special issue of the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies reviews the use of models for international comparisons of citizenship and immigrant integration. The introduction explores criticism and works to reevaluate the use of models in terms of both conceptual clarity (i.e., distinguishing between different empirical fields where models come into play, such as political and public discourses, policies and institutions, and processes of social integration) and methodological discipline (distinguishing between models used as dependent or independent variables). In sum, this issue suggests that models can help to explain political debates and processes, and the formulation of public policies but that their explanatory power for social processes is limited.

How can we categorise and interpret Civic Integration Policies

In her article on civic integration policies in the EU 15, Sara Wallace Goodman (2010) presents the findings of her 2008 CIVIX Index*a detailed, non-normative coding of recent developments in obligatory integration policies for immigrants in the fields of family reunification, long-term residence and nationality. By subsequently plotting her index against Marc Howard’s CPI Index, which mirrors the nationality legislation in the EU 15 (Howard 2009), Goodman identifies different clusters of countries that represent a typology of four different citizenship strategies called prohibitive, conditional, enabling and insular (Figure 1). She interprets the objectives pursued by obligatory integration requirements in different countries in terms of their belonging to one of these clusters. Goodman’s approach fits into an existing literature that tries to compare complex national regulations on citizenship and integration with the help of indicators (Banting and Kymlicka 2004; Howard 2009; Janoski 2010; Koopmans et al. 2005; MPG 2006). Her study represents a valuable contribution to the existing literature on citizenship and civic integration, which juggles with two problems: how to classify integration requirements and how to interpret them. The present contribution discusses Goodman’s approach with regard to both points: classification and interpretation.

Why Do States Extend Rights to Immigrants? Institutional Settings and Historical Legacies Across 44 Countries Worldwide

In this article, we first test theories on immigrant rights across 29 countries from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, using our Indicators of Citizenship Rights for Immigrants (ICRI) data set. We focus on trajectories of nationhood and current institutional features to explain cross-national difference. We find that former colonial powers, former colonies that developed as settler countries, as well as democracies have been more likely to extend rights to immigrants. Strikingly, once we account for involvement in colonialism, we find no difference between supposedly “civic-nationalist” early nation-states and supposedly “ethnic-nationalist” latecomer nations, refuting a widely held belief in the literature on citizenship. We find no effect of a country’s degree of political globalization. We replicate these findings on a sample of 35 mainly European countries, using the migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX).

After integration: Islam, conviviality and contentious politics in Europe

Over the last two decades, scholarly literatures on Islam and Muslims in European societies have proliferated in unprecedented ways. These literatures mirror not only the widening of public interest in this topic amongst politicians, civil society players and European populations at large, which is evidenced in the institutionalization of debates on Islam in political life, judicial discourse, journalism and the infrastructures of new media. They also reflect the growing space, which issues of Islam occupy outside the established disciplinary spheres of research on Islam as a religion (such as the sociology and anthropology of religion or religious studies). Thus, Islam has turned into a hot topic in political science, public policy research, migration studies, international relations and security studies. Some of these emerging literatures are characterized by a very presentist take on their object and are focused on very particular conflicts, often drawn from media discourse or legal dispute.

Migrations- und Integrationsprozesse in Europa : Vergemeinschaftung oder nationalstaatliche Lösungswege?

Die politische Gestaltung der Zuwanderung und der Integration von Zugewanderten waren lange Zeit ein Hort nationaler Souveranitat. Die Entscheidung uber Zugang zum und Aufenthalt auf dem nationalen Territorium war ein konstituierendes Element moderner Staatlichkeit. Und Staaten machten von dieser Gestaltungshoheit umfassenden Gebrauch. Sie offneten die Grenzen fur auslandische Arbeitskrafte, regulierten die Zuwanderung von Fluchtlingen und eroffneten oder begrenzten die Moglichkeit fur Auslander, mit ihren Familien aus ihren Herkunftslandern in den neuen Aufenthaltsstaaten zusammen zu leben. Mit einer wachsenden wirtschaftlichen und politischen Integration Europas haben sich die Mitgliedstaaten fur die Schaffung gemeinsamer Ausengrenzen entschlossen und die Freizugigkeit fur EU-Burger innerhalb dieser Grenzen bestarkt. In diesem Zuge haben die Mitgliedstaaten einige bisher rein nationalstaatlich verortete Aufgaben wie die Bewachung der Grenzen an die EU bzw. einzelne Mitgliedstaaten abgetreten, und auch in anderen Bereichen der Migrationskontrolle haben sich die Mitgliedstaaten fur eine supranationale Regelung entschieden. Doch einige Bereiche haben bisher der Vergemeinschaftung widerstanden, wozu etwa die Regulierung der Arbeitsmigration gehort. Haufig wird auch die Integration von Zuwanderern als Themenbereich verstanden, in dem die Nationalstaaten ihre Entscheidungshoheit beibehalten.

Long‐Term Effects of Language Course Timing on Language Acquisition and Social Contacts: Turkish and Moroccan Immigrants in Western Europe

This article investigates long-term effects of the timing of language course participation among immigrants, focusing on self-assessed immigration country language skills and interethnic social contacts among immigrants from Turkey and Morocco who came to Western Europe mainly during the guest worker period. Data stem from the 2008 Six Country Immigrant Integration Comparative Survey. We find a positive, long-term impact of course participation in the first four years after immigration on language skills and social contacts. Results support linguistic theories on the benefits of early language instruction and sociopsychological theories on long-term effects of (even short) social belonging interventions on participants’ perseverance in achieving educational success.

A New Agenda for Immigration and Citizenship Policy Research

Given the widespread interest in political solutions to the current problems associated with immigration, we need to have an accurate understanding of existing policies in a cross-national perspective. To explain the coming into being and effectiveness of these policies, researchers have recently started to quantify immigration and citizenship policies and built databases across time and a large number of countries. These indices are likely to reconnect political science research with a field from which it has long been disconnected in terms of theories and methodology—the sub-field of migration and citizenship research. This special issue brings together scholars from North America and Europe who have been at the forefront of index-building and have started to employ these indices in empirical research.

Islam in Europe: Cross-national differences in accommodation and explanations

The aim of this volume was to provide insights into how Islam as a non-Christian immigrant religion is integrated into European societies. Rather than looking at indicators of individual integration and well-being among Muslims in Europe, we took an institutional perspective on this question by analyzing how European public institutions, legal and political systems, Muslim organizations and representatives, as well as other actors from civil society and the religious field have reacted to the change in Europe’s religious landscape that was driven by immigration from countries with Muslim majorities. As the institutions of the immigration countries have been shaped mainly against the backdrop of Christianity as the majority religion, the implantation of a new faith group raises the question whether and to what extent present institutional arrangements are to be renegotiated.