National Launches for the ICS survey complete
30/06/2012
Summary
The Immigrant Citizens Survey has been launched in each of the capitals of the countries involved in the study. Over the course of the research undertaken in 15 cities and in 7 different countries, over 7500 immigrants were quizzed about their lived experience of integration policies in practice.
The King Baudouin Foundation, the Migration Policy group and our partners set out to test whether integration policies matched the hopes and needs of immigrants across Europe, using a targeted survey to capture the opinions of such a diverse set of people. It is hoped that this survey will go some way into convincing policy actors to regard immigrants as more than mere statistics, but as people.
Description
- Brussels -9/5/2012 Migration Policy Group, King Baudoin Foundation, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Belgium)
- Milan - 16/5/2012 Fondazione Ismu – Initiatives and Studies on Multiethnicity (Italy)
- Madrid - 22/5/2012 Fundacion CIDOB (Spain), Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS, Spain)
- Budapest - 23/5/2012 Menedék Hungarian Association for Migrants, MTAKI (MTA Etnikai-nemzeti Kisebbségkutató Intézet, Hungary)
- Lisbon - 25/05/2012 High Commission for Immigration and Intercultural Dialogue (ACIDI, Portugal)
- Brussels - 20/06/2012 The EU Integration debate - Giving immigrants a voice. (KBF and EPC, Brussels)
- Berlin - 27/6/2012 Research Unit of the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration (SVR, Germany)
- Paris - 28/06/2012 Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (Science Po, France), France terre d’asile (France).
All played host to different launch events with our different research partners.
Key findings
- Legal integration matters for broader integration into society.
- Long term residence and citizenship isn't always desired by immigrants.
- Differences in national and local policy implementation have big effects.
- Immigrants who became long-term residents or citizens said it made a difference in their lives.
- Targeted integration policis are just one factor among many in the area of social integration.
- Problems faced by immigrants depend heavily on their specific local and national context.
- There is significant potential for investment in broader integration policies, the recognition of foreign qualifications, and political participation policies.
Next steps
It is hoped that the wealth of data collected, available freely for download at www.immigrantsurvey.org will be a boon to the research community. It is hoped that the ICS will be used both as a database and as an example.
This project was co-funded by the European Commission, Oak Foundation, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and King Baudouin Foundation.
