This paper examines changes in integration requirements—including civic knowledge and language tests, integration courses, contracts and oaths—across the EU member states in the past decade.
No other policy changes have been as widespread and consequential to the future of national citizenship and the identity that citizenship formally institutionalizes as those concerning language skills, country knowledge, value commitments, and general integration requirements. New integration requirements are significant not only to the migrant, where they act as authoritative barriers to various legal statuses, but also to the state, revealing how major immigrant-receiving states are addressing concerns about immigrant integration. In this paper, I conduct a cross-national examination of integration requirements and identify a number of regional and historical patterns and policy trends. In doing so, I point to three unique dimensions that set apart the current battery of language and civic assessment from historical markers of membership (e.g., residence duration, integration clauses, renunciation of other citizenships). First is the added expectation of civic knowledge; while integration—measured through linguistic proficiency—has traditionally been part of citizenship acquisition (particularly among ethnic citizenship models), knowledge about a country’s political rules (i.e., government, constitution) and history is patently new in Europe. Second is the expectation of integration and language ability at earlier stages of legal status, requiring evidence of integration at earlier stages of permanent residence and entry. These statuses are non-traditional stages of membership; expectations of integration therefore fundamentally question the extent to which citizenship remains the quintessential group of “insiders.” A final difference between historical language and integration requirements and their contemporary incarnation is formal assessment. In what can be described as an “objective turn,” states are assessing integration through standardized tests and formal oaths. The second part of the paper examines the significance of these policies in terms of the spectrum of inclusive-liberal and exclusive-restrictionist citizenship policy configurations. I argue that in conjunction with existing legal opportunities to access citizenship, integration requirements can have diverse effects though the instruments themselves are similar. Finally, the conclusion considers the consequences of the recasting of national citizenship in traditional nation-states into a membership that is—in principle—accessible to immigrants.
Sara Wallace Goodman is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California-Irvine. She received her Ph.D. in 2009 from Georgetown University (Washington, DC). Dr. Goodman is currently working on a book examining determinants for and patterns in civic integration policies across the European Union. She is most recently the author of “Integration Requirements for Integration’s Sake? Identifying, Categorizing and Comparing Civic Integration Policies” in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2010) and the forthcoming “Integration before Entry? Immigration control through language and country knowledge requirements” in West European Politics (2011). She can be contacted at s.goodman@uci.edu.
