Family Reunion Policy Briefings

Who do you imagine when you think of family reunion? You may see Moroccan and Turkish wives arriving in countries with longer histories of family immigration like Austria, Belgium, France, and Germany. You may think family reunion is the way that most immigrants come to your EU Member State. These stereotypes are far from the real lives of these families who are making the EU their home. Any debate on the EU Family Reunion Directive should start with Eurostat’s comparable statistics. Around half a million non-EU family members were able to reunite with their non-EU sponsor in 2010 in one of 23 EU Member States (statistics not reported for Cyprus, Estonia, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands). The overall number slightly increased from 2009 to 2010 as many more children joined their parent(s) in Italy and Spain.

EU Family Reunion Directive 2003/86/EC establishes the right to family reunion for non-EU sponsors and their families with key objectives of promoting integration and comparable rights and obligations. The Directive recognises that facilitating family reunion facilitates immigrant integration and societal cohesion. The Directive has not only extended basic rights and legal securities to reuniting families in new immigration countries, but also secured them from further policy restrictions in all countries. While the future for immigrant families in Europe remains unclear with the current political climate and impact of far right parties, most Member States today still have policies that MIPEX finds are ‘slightly favourable’ for family reunion. The average EU country goes beyond the Directive’s minimum standards. Vague provisions in the Directive’s text and incorrect transposition in Member States were identified in the 2008 Commission Application Report. These problems have been and can be addressed by national and EU courts. To date, the two ECJ judgments on family reunion reinforced the Directive’s overall objectives that Member States’ policies must respect the right to family life, right to family reunification, equal treatment, and general principles of EU law.

New family reunion requirements, such as pre-entry tests, high income requirements, and age limits above the marriage age, are relatively new and untested. They are limited to a small set of EU Member States, led by Denmark and, more recently, The Netherlands. They are often justified as improving immigrants’ socio-economic participation and language knowledge as well as fighting forced marriages. Based on available studies and government evaluations, it cannot be claimed that these requirements effectively promote integration objectives. They do not significantly help successfully reuniting families to integrate much faster into their new country of residence. On the contrary, they are more effective for limiting the number of reuniting families. Many families, no matter their motivation and preparation, cannot persist to meet the new requirements.

One major assumption behind family reunion policymaking is that policy determines how many families are able to reunite in a country of destination. Surprisingly, this assumption has never been proved quantitatively across countries, despite its serious implications for both immigration flows and fundamental rights under national, European, and international law. The non-EU family reunion rate is a simple new measure used in this briefing to compare the outcomes of family reunion policies. It describes how common or uncommon non-EU family reunion is in a country. The Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) compares family reunion policies. It analyses whether countries facilitate the right to family reunion as a means to facilitate integration. Spearman’s correlation analysis of MIPEX and Eurostat statistics identifies a very strong positive relationship between non-EU family reunion rates and policies. Recent evaluations in a handful of countries have found that specific policies like pre-entry tests, high income requirements, and high age limits have affected family reunion rates.