1 Introduction
Maciej Duszczyk, Marta Pachocka and Dominika PszczĂłĆkowska
Migration, which is one of the most common social processes in the world today, brings a number of both benefits and challenges. Unfortunately, in recent years and especially in receiving countries, there has been a growing conviction that migration is a source of problems such as crime, poverty or lower social cohesion. Many opinions are formed based on stereotypes or unverified information repeated in the media. Simplifying somewhat, we can say that attitudes towards migrants and migration in Europe and the United States are today more negative than at any time since World War II. At the same time, a world without migration and migrants simply would not exist. We thus need to search for new theoretical concepts which would help to solve this challenge. One of the solutions worth considering is a better interconnection between immigration and integration policies, which, together, form part of a broadly understood migration policy. In the past, the two policies were implemented separately, which is one of the reasons for the current problems. Forgetting or consciously forgoing integration activities and subordinating immigration to the needs of the labour market in the hope that migrants will return home after some time was a mistake. We must draw conclusions and not repeat the mistakes of the past. This particularly concerns countries which are now transforming into immigration hubs, such as those of Central and Eastern Europe.
The migration and refugee crisis in Europe in 2015â2016 gave a new urgency to the issue of immigration and integration policies on the continent. Political decisions, first to let in all those seeking international protection and then to attempt to keep them outside European Union borders, have strongly divided leaders and public opinions in the EU. This book takes a step back in order to reflect on the decision-making processes in immigration and integration policies in Europe, not only in recent years but also in the last few decades and regarding not only refugees but also migrant workers, family migrants and all other categories of international migrants. It aims to contribute to the theoretical and practical debate regarding immigration and integration policies by arguing that â contrary to what is often assumed â immigration policy should not be treated as having precedence over integration policy. In fact, the present migration and refugee crisis and several other decisive moments in Europeâs immigration history have demonstrated that it is the integration policy and its effectiveness which later determine a given stateâs admissions policy. Integration policy can thus be equally as important as or even take precedence over immigration policy. The answer to the question of how many people a given country plans and is able to integrate can determine its immigration policies.
Consequently, this book focuses on relations between immigration and integration policies. The fact that integration outcomes can influence future immigration policies has been acknowledged since at least the 1980s, especially following the canonical writings of Tomas Hammar (1985, 1990, 1992) and Brochman and Hammar (1999). However, integration policy has often been treated as a subsection of immigration policy (Hammar 1985, 2010), as something that comes chronologically later or as an (often late) reaction to the inflow of foreigners (Messina 2007). We assume that the two are separate but related policies. Immigration policy â focused on admissions â is understood here as the stateâs activities aimed at controlling the rules of entry and stay on its territory of people who are not citizens of the country, in order to obtain the optimum scale and structure of the inflow of foreigners. Integration policy is defined as the stateâs actions aimed at achieving a dynamic and bi-directional process of mutual adaptation (adjustment) of immigrants and the receiving society, so that the potential of foreigners in the economy and society can be utilised optimally for both parties. We thus follow in the footsteps of a number of scholars (Entzinger and Biezeveld 2003; Hellgren 2015) and, in recent decades, the European Union (European Commission 2004, 2005, for example; see also Duszczyk 2011) in underlining that integration is a two- or three-way process (GarcĂ©s-Mascareñas and Penninx 2016) which also demands some adjustment on the part of the receiving society. Both policies may be formalised as strategic documents, but the absence of a strategic document does not mean the absence of policies as such and is sometimes a policy statement of its own (for more on this, see Chapter 2 of this book).
From objective to subjective factors in migration-policy decision-making
This book is the result of our analysis of decision-making processes regarding migration in several key moments of Europeâs postwar history: from the guestworker period of the 1950s to early 1970s, to the ârefugee crisisâ of 2015â2016. Analysis of factors taken into consideration by states in key moments when immigration policy was (re)formulated shows that Europe is moving away from rational, economic arguments and towards more political ones.
In the years of the guestworker period, it was the objective needs of the labour market which dictated immigration policy. Other areas of migration policy, most notably integration policy, were largely nonexistent (Messina 2007; for a detailed discussion, see Chapter 3), and the subject was nonpolitical and managed by state bureaucrats barely influenced by public opinion.
Nevertheless, some scholars (notably Hammar 1992) believed that, as early as the 1970s, some influence of public opinion on decision-making was visible and the end of the guestworker policy in many countries was the result not only of the economic crisis but also of perceived problems with the integration of newcomers. In the 1980s, some countries responded to these problems with elements of integration policy, for example the somewhat paradoxically named âtemporary integrationâ in Germany, which meant that workers had rights linked with the labour market, such as unemployment benefits or trade-union membership but that no steps were taken towards their legal or cultural integration (Hammar 1985). By the 1990s, the politicisation of migration issues in Western Europe, which had already begun in the 1970s, was irrevocable (Messina 2007).
The period preceding the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 was an interesting case of decision-making in immigration policy. The enlargement of the EU by ten countries, including eight from Central and Eastern Europe, raised public fears in neighbouring countries, especially Germany, regarding the potential mass inflow of workers and persons who would burden the social security system. A majority of the German population at the time was in favour of limiting or stopping immigration from Central and Eastern Europe (see Chapter 8). The decisions of political leaders reflected these fears, but â in part due to the nature of the accession negotiations, with European institutions acting as quasi-impartial brokers and basing their proposals on objective economic factors and migration forecasts â evidence-based factors still played a significant role in decision-making. Nevertheless, some authors believe that the delay in opening up the German labour market to new EU citizens was not justified by economic factors; rather, they believe that public fears were the main argument (Elsner and Zimmermann 2013).
The ârefugee crisisâ of 2015â2016, the next period when European countries had to make decisions regarding a major inflow of newcomers, seems to be a time when the decisions of particular states were based even less on objective factors. The number of asylum applications was certainly not a determining factor, as some of the most affected countries, such as Germany, were also initially the most refugee-welcoming ones, while countries not frequently chosen by refugees, notably those in Central and Eastern Europe, adopted an unwelcoming attitude and discouraged refugees from applying for international protection. The growing anti-immigration sentiments and the securitisation and criminalisation of migration issues, fuelled in part by right-wing politics, seem to have contributed to stark changes in the positions of the governments of, for example, Germany and Sweden, by 2016. Significantly for this book, the issue of possibilities for immigrant integration was also a key argument. Previous failures in this field led directly to a limitation on the numbers of newcomers, which was stated directly, for example, by the government of Sweden.
These events demonstrate an increasing focus on issues of migrant integration in Europe. However, the relations between immigration and integration policies remain under-investigated and frequently overlooked when making fundamental political decisions. Hence this book aims not only to draw attention to the importance of integration policies but also to show that the effects of these policies frequently determine attitudes to immigration and immigration policies later on. Integration policy can, then, be treated as a primary concern or, at least, as being equally as important as immigration policy; it should not be seen â as many policy-makers and academics have done â as a nonfundamental and secondary subsection of immigration policy.
Structure of the book
The book consists of ten chapters, of which the first three â written by the IMINTEG team (an interdisciplinary group led by Prof. Maciej Duszczyk at the University of Warsaw, comprising political scientists, sociologists, an economist and a lawyer) â are based on our own findings and analysis. Chapter 2 provides a theoretical background and discusses both how migration policies are created, which factors influence their creation and how â in the eyes of other scholars and ourselves â they should be created. Chapter 3 takes a historical look at how these policies were implemented in various European countries and in the EU as a whole. Chapter 4 presents the results of our Delphi survey. We confronted our findings regarding immigration and integration policies and the links between them with 79 experts from central and local governments, academia and NGOs from various parts of Europe (Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, the UK, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden).
The following six chapters, written by some of the most prominent migration scholars in Europe, take the reader to various parts of the continent, where the authors analyse the relations between immigration and integration policies in their countries of residence. The countries have been chosen to represent a wide geographical spectrum â from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula to Central and Eastern Europe â and a diverse range of immigration histories and models. One of the bookâs strengths lies in the fact that it enlarges the usual Western European perspective to include experiences from Central and Eastern Europe, regions with countries which either have very recently become net immigration (the Czech Republic) or are currently on their way to becoming so (Poland).
The chapter on Germany talks about the history of relations between immigration and integration policies and analyses the countryâs latest experiences of the inflow of more than one million refugees after 2015. The following chapter is devoted to the Netherlands, which has many experiences of both immigration policy and attempts to integrate foreigners into Dutch society. The two policies â immigration and integration â were implemented separately, which influenced their effectiveness. We may, however, risk saying that Netherlands has the richest experiences, both positive and negative, in implementing integration policies. Scandinavia is represented in this book by a chapter on Denmark. The authors focus on demonstrating the change in the countryâs approach to migration, which is visible in both its immigration and its integration policies. They argue that the present restrictive immigration policy is a response to the growing influence of anti-immigrant and populist parties. The chapter on Spain describes the experiences of a country which transformed very dynamically from being one of emigration to one of emigration/immigration and, finally, to one of immigration. The authors also discuss the role of local governments in creating and implementing immigration policies.
The authors of the chapter on Poland took a similar approach. In practice, the country does not really have an integration policy. Actions of the state are focused on managing economic immigration, particularly from the Ukraine. The country has, in recent years, faced a very significant wave of immigration, which brought unprecedented challenges. The Czech Republic is also discussed in its own chapter. Especially interesting in this chapter are the reasons for abandoning the liberal immigration policy of the 1990s, which also regarded economic immigration. It seems that this was due to problems resulting from an ineffective or almost nonexistent integration policy.
The European Unionâs experience in the area of migration and integration and its relevant policies â the EU being a unique supranational regional organisation on the Old Continent â has also been included, ranging from postwar developments to recent events related to the refugee crisis. Finally, to allow for a more global comparison of policies implemented in Europe (and in the EU) and other immigration states, we invited experts from Australia â a country somewhat less present in migration literature than the US or Canada â to reflect on the migration and integration policies implemented in that country and point to the lessons that Europe can draw.
Our book transfers academic knowledge, based on interdisciplinary and international research results, in an accessible way (and in online open access), so that it can be widely used for research, publishing, teaching and other dissemination purposes. It is directed at various audiences in Europe and beyond. We believe the book will be of interest to both the academic community â researchers, teachers and students â and representatives of public administrations, international and nongovernmental organisations and, indeed, anyone interested in migration and European studies. We hope that the content will encourage readers from across the globe to explore the relations between immigration and integration policies in their countries. Today, such reflection is absolutely necessary if we are to create more effective and more just migration policies which will benefit both the receiving societies and the migrants themselves.
References
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