Migrant Integration in a Changing Europe: Immigrants, European Citizens, and Co-ethnics in Italy and Spain (Kellogg Institute Series on Democracy and Development) - Hardcover

Barbulescu, Roxana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0268104379 ISBN 13: 9780268104375

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019

Synopsis

In this rich study, Roxana Barbulescu examines the transformation of state-led immigrant integration in two relatively new immigration countries in Western Europe: Italy and Spain. The book is comparative in approach and seeks to explain states' immigrant integration strategies across national, regional, and city-level decision and policy making. Barbulescu argues that states pursue no one-size-fits-all strategy for the integration of migrants, but rather simultaneously pursue multiple strategies that vary greatly for different groups. Two main integration strategies stand out. The first one targets non-European citizens and is assimilationist in character and based on interventionist principles according to which the government actively pursues the inclusion of migrants. The second strategy targets EU citizens and is a laissez-faire scenario where foreigners enjoy rights and live their entire lives in the host country without the state or the local authorities seeking their integration.

The empirical material in the book, dating from 1985 to 2015, includes systematic analyses of immigration laws, integration policies and guidelines, historical documents, original interviews with policy makers, and statistical analysis based on data from the European Labor Force Survey. While the book draws on evidence from Italy and Spain in an effort to bring these case studies to the core of fundamental debates on immigration and citizenship studies, its broader aim is to contribute to a better understanding of state interventionism in immigrant integration in contemporary Europe. The book will be a useful text for students and scholars of global immigration, integration, citizenship, European integration, and European society and culture.

About this title

About the Author

Roxana Barbulescu is University Academic Fellow and 250 Great Minds Scholar in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In recent years, many prominent figures have spoken publicly about immigrants’ “duty to integrate”. Tony Blair of the UK Labour Party delivered a speech in 2006 where he urged immigrants to assume ‘their duties’ and called for shared common British values. The French Minister for EU Affairs and the Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism each reminded immigrants that rights come with duties to the host society. Pope Benedict too preached migrants that they have duties in the country in which they settle and that they should respect the laws and the national identity of their new society. Yet while the consensus that migrants bear no rights alone but that they come with duties to integrate was growing stronger, ideals of what integration were also transformed. Multiculturalism, however fragmented or poorly implemented it was in practice, was unequivocally deserted by the same political leaders who spoke of the duty to integrate. This abandonment signals a departure from a post-war consensus for liberalism.of building in protections to support and safeguard cultural differences, promote respect for the other and instill tolerance in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The project of European integration sought to bring together different cultures from across the continent is in itself a multicultural project. It is for these reasons that desertion from such principles, is a step backward for Europeanisation as well as for what is expected of migrants. For Angela Merkel, the model of people from other different culture living happily side by side did not work, and declared its death: this form of multiculturalism has ‘failed, utterly failed’ The Guardian printed the news as ‘German multiculturalism has failed’, distancing itself from advancing a similar faith for multiculturalism in Britain. One year later, at the Security Summit, David Cameron did precisely that: he revoked multiculturalism as we knew it and announced the world the birth of muscular liberalism – in effect a new compromise exchanging liberty for security which targeted the Muslim community. Messages from political and religious leaders respond and are indeed reinforced by public concerns about the integration of migrants. Overwhelming shares of the population think that migrants do not integrate, 41 percent in Spain and 52 percent in Italy respectively (Marshall Transatlantic Trends, 2015). The numbers-too high by any standard are to be interpreted with caution. We know little about what ‘integration’ might mean for such a large number of people. It might mean that people might have different definitions and preferences for what integration of migrants is. Equally, it might mean that the people define integration in the same way but that for some those characteristics are insufficient while for others they are sufficient. In a similar fashion, it is unclear whom they identify when they speak of the failing integration of migrants. The consistent overestimation of immigrants in society is a well studied phenomenon (for a review see Herda 2010) with wide implications. People can mistake a third generation citizen and mistake her for a migrant or vice-versa, they can not see a migrant who walks by. Deconstructing and problematizing this statistic however does not alleviate the power of such high numbers that can be read as harbingers of demoliting future tensions between migrants and natives.

In this study, I have turned the tables around from the immigrants to the state and have examined its role, capacities and commitments to immigrant integration. The state is the political representative of the host society and an agent of integration with disproportionately more institutional and financial resources than individual immigrants. Furthermore, the state is the agent of integration that has one unique ability which is key to achieving integration and which no other agent involved in this process shares, either the immigrants themselves or the host society: only the state authorities can grant rights and citizenship. Immigrants can achieve full social membership in their local communities but without also achieving the full rights of other citizens.

While this line of research highlights the role states carry in integration, it misses both the fact that state interventionism is not constant but varies significantly over time, groups, levels of decision making. This work distinguishes between states’ discretion to 1) to grant or withheld rights to certain noncitizens 2) to actively intervene in integration and introduce policies and public funds with this aim or, on the contrary, to take a laissez-faire approach. Historically, some of the migrants have simply remained at the margins of the state’s intervention in immigrant integration. European citizens, for instance, are rarely regarded as ‘migrants’ and included in integration strategies. Why do states act inconsistently when it comes to immigrant integration and intervene in different ways for different categories of migrants is a puzzle on which, hitherto, the literature has remained silent and which this book has aimed to solve.en migrants and natives.

(excerpted from conclusion)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268104379
• ISBN 13: 9780268104375
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304