Jakob Hurrle: Development of a Monitoring Framework for Migration and Integration Policy

In the area of migration and integration, the use of indicators is currently very much promoted by the European Union. One of the reasons for this development is the desire to better compare developments in the 27 member states. A quite widespread initiative in this field was the MIPEX study (conducted by the Migration Policy Group and financed by the European Commission), which ranked the performance of all member states (with the exception of Romania and Bulgaria) in regard to their migrant integration practices. The ranking is done on the basis of normative indicators that, somewhat simplified, value the provision of rights to migrants and nonbureaucratic procedures positively (high ranking), while weak rights and large bureaucratic obstacles are valued negatively (low ranking). While it is possible to argue both about the normative tendency of this research and the reliability of information in regard to some countries, the resulting map, which marks a country's degree of friendliness towards migrants by colour, is nevertheless informative, as the existence of certain clusters of countries reveal the existence and prevalence of geographical and historical patterns. We should, however, be aware that the normative scale used by the studyís author is not a scale that would be accepted by the more restrictive member states. It is therefore not realistic to expect that low-ranking countries such as Austria will feel a need to move even some steps into the direction of best-ranking Sweden...
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