Roland Czada: Governance of Immigrant Integration in Europe

Migrant Integration Policy Index (Niessen J. et. al., 2007, Huddleston et.al.2011) provides data on existing consultation bodies for foreign residents on national, regional and local levels. The data comprise processes of leadership selection, degrees of institutionalisation and representativeness, e.g. whether candidates have to endorsed or directly selected and appointed by the state. The participation of immigrant associations inpolicy implementation is indicated by public funds provided, e.g. public funding or support of immigrant organisations on national, regional and local levels. In some countries such as Sweden consultation bodies are not formally stated or regulated but part of consultation procedures in different general contexts that are not necessarily immigrant-specific. Others switched from the informal participation of migrants in pre-existing corporatist bodies of self-government to more formal immigrant-specific national consultative bodies...
Data on formal immigrant consultation bodies established by governments laid down in the MIPEX-index (Huddleston et.al. 2011) reveal a negative correlation with naturalizationrates (figure 1). This points out to the underlying paradigms of group incorporation versus individual citizenship. Immigrants’ individual legal and democratic civic rights acquired through naturalization seem to soften problems associated with mass immigration, and simultaneously tend to make special consultation structures for non-functional ethnic or religious groups of immigrants less important. One has to be cautious, however, to draw functionalist conclusions of this sort...Read more