Promoting citizenship: The choices for immigrants, advocates, and European cooperation

Migrant Integration Policy Index II

Summary

An article by MPG Policy Analyst, Thomas Huddleston, on ‘Promoting citizenship: The choices for immigrants, advocates, and European cooperation’ has been published in a new CIDOB Foundation publication entitled Citizenship policies in the age of diversity: Europe at the crossroads

Description

The article assesses how national trends in promoting civic and national citizenship are reshaping legal choices for immigrant residents, policy priorities for advocates, and opportunities for European cooperation.

The article is published in the CIDOB Foundation book, Citizenship policies in the age of diversity: Europe at the crossroads, which can be downloaded in full from the CIDOB Foundation, click here.

Promoting citizenship

Using the results of the 2007 Migrant Integration Policy Index, the first part of this article presents the state of citizenship(s) in the EU Member States. The few high standards in Council Directive 2003/109/EC may have had a greater and wider impact on the eligibility, procedural guarantees, and rights of long-term residents than many similar “soft” trends in naturalisation. On average, facilitating long-term residence seems to have little positive impact on naturalisation. Rather, some negative spillover effects are observed between the two. Countries are imposing many similar and related conditions onto long-term residence, the acquisition of which can become a requirement to be eligible to naturalise and can reduce many incentives to apply.

The second part of the article clusters the 28 MIPEX countries into a “citizenship continuum” on the basis of whether nationals, long-term residents, and newcomers have the rights to act as citizens in the many areas of life. How far certain states have chosen to follow both, one, or neither of the two trends helps to explain immigrants’ options about what status to apply for and advocates’ strategies about what policies to improve.

Citizenship is at the core of the EU’s values and part of the core business of Justice and Home Affairs ministries, many civil society stakeholders, different levels of government, and European institutions. Should these actors pursue greater European cooperation, they may secure the legal standards and resources that they need to promote civic and national citizenship in countries all along this continuum. Immigrant residents’ “genuine and effective links” to their country of residence could be better reflected in new European legal standards on facilitated residence requirements, ius soli provisions, and mechanisms to manage the acceptance of dual nationality. Second, deeper EU legal and practical cooperation could evaluate the impact of current EU standards on civic citizenship, raise them through amendments to directives, and better implement them through “common European modules.” Two proposed areas for cooperation are administrative practices and language/integration tests. A third strategy could be for advocates and governmental agencies to use the EU infrastructure on integration to launch an EU-wide campaign with the common goal to raise naturalisation rates among immigrants.

More about the publication: Citizenship policies in the age of diversity: Europe at the crossroads

While confronting a certain sense of crisis in the management of immigrant diversity, many European States are opting for a citizen­ship-based policy approach. The current debate suggests that we are facing an important change of direction. The category of citizenship is entering the political agenda of most European states as a policy for managing diversity. This political link was already fuelling academic debates during the two last decades of the 20th century, but now it is crossing the academic realm and entering into that of policy. This shift constitutes the basic framework of this book. European states are using citizenship as a policy response to the multicultural crisis. In accordance with M. Walzer’s (1983) seminal work on distributive justice, states are becoming aware of the fact that citizenship is a primary good for allocating membership to a political community. The re-definition or consolidation of the old institution of citizenship touches on impor­tant normative questions of political membership in diverse societies, as it modifies the relation between national identity and formal politi­cal membership. As for a state’s authority to decide who may enter national territory (the territorial border where migrants become immi­grants), the allocation of citizenship is one of the major bastions of nation-states’ sovereignty in the management of immigration. Citizen­ship is not only a device for sorting out “wanted” and “unwanted” migrants, it also establishes a second gateway that immigrants have to pass through in order to become full members of the polity.

The publication is available to download from the CIDOB Foundation, click here for the full edition.