Abstract
Demarcated by growing austerity, economic uncertainty, and EU-exits, the past decade witnessed monumental shifts across the political and economic landscapes of Europe. Citizenship is a stabilising force in this era of crisis, particularly for intra-EU migrants. In this contribution, I examine how the Euro crisis impacted citizenship acquisition among these migrants. Building upon the model proposed by John Graeber’s article [2016. ‘Citizenship in the shadow of the Euro crisis: explaining changing patterns in naturalisation among intra-EU migrants.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42 (10): 1670–1692], I discuss the relative importance of citizenship in times of crisis from global and regional perspectives. I argue Graeber’s theory presents a strong model for citizenship acquisitions during the crisis, yet leaves the core dyadic structure and several inconsistent findings unexamined. I replicate these models and introduce a dyadic model using bilateral data from 21 receiving and 23 sending states in Europe between 2007 and 2013. Contrary to Graeber’s theory, I find citizenship acquisitions among intra-EU migrants primarily coincide with increased in-migration, rather than influences of the Euro crisis. I conclude that while economic sending and receiving contexts matter, the Euro crisis did not appear to restructure intra-EU migrant citizenship incentives.
MIPEX in use
I include the annual MIPEX as an indicator of institutional citizenship policy (Migration Integration Policy Index 2015Migrant Integration Policy Index. 2015. Huddleston, Thomas; Bilgili, Ozge; Joki, Anne-Linde and Vankova, Zvezda. ). Recently, MIPEX released annual comparable integration policy data from 2007 to 2014 providing an excellent resource for the present analysis.1313 The comparable data exclude education level data added to the index in 2010.View all notes MIPEX assesses 167 citizenship and integration policies to develop a multi-dimensional guide to gauge variability and render comparisons across 38 countries ranging in score from 0 (highly unfavourable policies toward migrants) to 100 (highly favourable policies toward migrants). Predictions across MIPEX and ICCI thereby should differ in their signed effect as citizenship acquisitions are theorised to increase (decrease) with the relative institutional ease (cost) of obtaining citizenship.
