Citizenship is understood and practised as a status that conveys rights, protections, and privileges to an individual vis-à-vis a given state. From voting and standing for office to protections against deportation and access to public funds and welfare, citizenship provides a substantive suite of rights that distinguishes insiders (citizens) from outsiders (noncitizen immigrants). And, by establishing formal institutional ties between an individual and a polity, citizenship also designates national membership, where outsiders become insiders to the national political community. The promise of equality among citizens, a sense of status security akin with that of so-called “native” born citizens and enlarged opportunities in the community (such as better access to the labour market) make citizenship valuable and consequential and persuade thousands of migrants each year to embark on naturalisation journeys.

In linking status and rights to social and cultural inclusion, citizenship goes beyond a status: it is a membership category that denotes “who belongs” to the national political community. Citizens and would be citizens use it to narrate their identities. The question of “Who gets citizenship?” is indivisible from the question of “Who belongs?” The procedure of naturalisation, where a migrant completes a series of requirements to obtain citizenship, thus becomes synonymous with a process of immigrant integration. Sometimes integration is measured as cultural, social, political, and economic advances over time; these advances are, in turn, measured against native-born achievements and attitudes. In either case, the assumption of naturalisation is that it produces belonging and enables incorporation along these dimensions. But by inductively looking beyond the national level where citizenship is granted, we see belonging and incorporation occurs at a multitude of sites, especially in the everyday lives of individuals and communities, where societies are interconnected, share resources locally and where belonging is practiced. Across borders, migrants lead increasingly transnational lives, supported by a bricolage of rights and identities that simultaneously sustain both a ‘here’ and ‘there’.

Interrogating the connection between citizenship and integration is not a new empirical inquiry, nor is it a new theoretical endeavour. Almost two decades ago, researchers convened by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) and the Centre for Migration Law (Radboud University of Nijmegen) in Brussels, Belgium, to examine the “implications and nature of the nexus.” Sergio Carrera (2006, 61) summarized the discussion in noting “[c]urrent national practices and programmes linking integration to immigration and citizenship will negatively impact on the social inclusion of immigrants in European society. An EU framework on integration, if it is to be developed, should not provide a venue for some restrictive national philosophies concerning immigrants to influence the European mainstream.”Footnote 1

A lot has changed in the years since. Citizenship has become more materially substantive, but it has also become a significant harder to get. European states have implemented robust and consequential integration requirements for immigration, settlement, and citizenship (Goodman, 2014). If by the mid-2000s the concern was whether citizenship was a meaningful category for promoting incorporation, today, national citizenship has become strengthened as a category of belonging through language and country knowledge integration requirements. It is also harder to obtain because of them (Jensen et al., 2019). Moreover, the European Commission (2020) announced in November 2020 a new action plan on integration and inclusion to encourage and support integration beyond the national level, incorporating regional, and local authorities in the integration process. This builds upon a 2016 action plan by extending integration concerns from third-country nationals (immigrants from outside the EU) to recognize “the challenge of integration and inclusion is particularly relevant for migrants…who might have naturalised and are EU citizens” (Commission, 2020, 1).

Moreover, citizenship rules have also changed in terms of eligibility and retention conditions. Since the early 2000s and concerns about Islamic extremism (including European citizens fleeing to fight for the Islamic State), definitions of what comprises “good behaviour” for naturalisation have changed, and deprivation of citizenship has become more commonplace in countries like the UK and the Netherlands. The conditions for which deprivation of citizenship have proliferated particularly on grounds of threat to national security – and, crucially, the procedures of deprivation – have been simplified with prejudice for naturalised citizens (e.g., UK’s Nationality and Borders Bill). Acquiring citizenship has also become more expensive for immigrants by raising the costs of application. This makes naturalisation observably more difficult for low-income noncitizens and for large families. Across Europe, fees for naturalisation have doubled in the period between 2000–2014 (Stadlmair, 2018).

Moreover, the context in which citizenship policy is being changes has altered dramatically. Two decades ago, there was an interest and political appetite for the EU to forward a common framework on immigrant integration and for EU citizenship to take on political meaning (McNamara, 2015). Much has also changed in the spirit of EU integration that characterized the wake of Enlargement towards ten new member states in 2004 (including Poland and Hungary), Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, and Croatia in 2013. Exacerbating this waning momentum, the EU has weathered several, successive crises—the eurozone crisis beginning in 2009, the “refugee crisis” in 2015, what some would characterize as the Brexit crisis of 2016, and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020–22—increasing, with each, its technocracy. Gerhards and Lengfeld (2015) proposed still in 2015 that social integration in Europe was strong enough to withstand crises, more recent studies show heterogeneous public support for immigrant integration across countries (e.g., Dennison & Geddes, 2019; Blatter et al., 2022). Moreover, the enfranchisement of resident non-citizens (mostly at the local level) has expanded significantly in the last fifty years in Europe, further disassociating citizenship status (or nationality) from rights (Pedroza, 2019; Michel & Blatter, 2021). While the force of this trend has ebbed, the citizenship rights status quo has shifted.

For all these reasons, we think it is time to re-examine the citizenship-integration nexus.Footnote 2 National citizenship has high integration barriers and EU citizenship is not sufficient for creating integration opportunities—from education and employment to accessing health services or affordable housing. But while existing institutions may be lacking, that is not to say inclusion does not take place in other ways. Not only is the policy landscape completely different today, so too are its demographics. The EU is comprised of over 23 million non-EU citizens. And over a million immigrants come each year, some moving from one EU Member state to another (“second country nationals”), and some from outside the EU, with Ukraine, Morocco, and India topping the list. Refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Colombia and – again – Ukraine, have also come in unprecedented numbers.Footnote 3

By renewing attention to the nexus, this volume asks a series of new questions about what citizenship does and where integration takes place. Does citizenship produce integration (by which we mean social, cultural, economic, and political incorporation)? Who can acquire citizenship under the conditions, costs and expectations placed on the naturalisation process? What role do bureaucrats play in determining who accesses the process of naturalisation and how it ends? Moreover, if citizenship through integration is meant to solve the problem of immigrant belonging and membership in a society, how do we evaluate its performance across levels of government, from local to supranational? How does integration take place outside of national citizenship—either above (with EU citizenship) or below (at the regional or municipal level)? How and to what extent do regional governments move these processes of citizenship acquisition away from national qua nation state policies and rhetoric? Beyond official jurisdictions and different government levels, how do interactions in public spaces matter for integration and the construction of citizenship beyond formal membership?

This book asks and answers these many questions by curating a series of contributions that span levels of analysis, methodology, country cases, and theory. Each contribution revisits and revises the citizenship-integration nexus by questioning the assumptions built into its theoretical and empirical framework. This includes, at least, three: first, questioning citizenship as a vehicle of incorporation, examining instead lived experiences of belonging of communities of immigrants and EU citizens in Europe. This necessarily includes examining the promises and pitfalls of the EU as a supranational status-conveying institution. Second, examining the policies and processes of citizenship acquisition, including civic integration tests (see Goodman, 2010), language requirements, and other generalized “integration” or assimilation prerequisites. Third, considering the citizenship premium, that is, the boost to income and access to employment which typically follows the formal process of naturalisation. As alternative statuses to citizenship like long-term residence come with increasing political rights and economic mobility—especially in the case of EU citizenship—the question of whether citizenship remains the lodestar of integration is more relevant than ever. Thus, we argue in favour of reuniting the normative conversation of membership with multidisciplinary empirical accounts of belonging.

The diversity of contributions in this volume allows us to marshal a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies and data types, from omnibus surveys to open-ended interviews, to provide triangulated evidence on the disjuncture between social and legal integration, that is—integration and citizenship status, as well as to the diverse modes and locations of inclusion. As such, the level of analysis across the chapters moves between national sites and regions, cities and inner urban public spaces, as well as between testimonies of different communities—from Roma in London, to French, English and Italians in Bucharest or the Irish in the UK. That all these spaces contribute to the process of integration may be intuitive and obvious, but the aim of presenting these different tributaries alongside each other is to build an inductive understanding of how public policies may produce integration outcomes alongside – or even outside of – traditional naturalisation routes.

With its diverse contributions, the book demonstrates that concerns about citizenship and integration are both projected and experienced differently depending on the relation between the migrant group and the receiving society. This compels us to also incorporate ethnicity, race, class, and perceived group resources alongside our inductive approach in conceptualising the nexus.

1.1 Conceptualising the Citizenship-Integration Nexus

Most citizens acquire status at birth. There are two modes of acquisition. Jus sanguinis is the legal term for how most individuals inherit citizenship – by parentage, that is, directly from one generation to the other, or as the Latin translates, “by blood.” A second mode is jus soli, which translates from Latin as ‘the law of soil’, i.e., being born in a given territory. While the United States, Canada, Central and South America exhibit expansive practices of jus soli, where even individual born of non-residents obtain citizenship at birth, European practices remain comparatively restrictive (van der Baaren & Vink, 2021). Individuals born into citizenship – regardless of the procedure – are presumed to be integrated. They have automatic ties via family, community networks, social linkages, and other processes of socialization, and these so-called “native born” are automatic insiders. In theory, they define the scale of national belonging. Of course, this is not the case in practice.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from automaticity is the process of naturalisation, a mode of citizenship acquisition for immigrant adults (and oftentimes their spouses and children). This route can be highly discretionary, costly, and require great skill to navigate myriad requirements and respective citizenship bureaucracies. Yet it is by completing this process that outsiders become insiders, or “made natural” as the very term suggests. There is an irony to naturalisation. Overall, only a minority of total citizens in the world get citizenship through naturalisation, yet it is among the more politicized dimensions of immigrant incorporation.

Scholars of global inequality have characterized citizenship as a systemic source of inequality. Ayelet Shachar (2009) has referred to birthright citizenship as a lottery, and Branko Milanovic (2016) has shown that 80% of an individual’s wealth stems from where they are born and what passport (citizenship) they hold, rather than one’s personal efforts. In this vein and given that citizenship mainly reproduces structural and historical injustices, Kochenov (2019) calls for rethinking citizenship not as emancipatory and democratic but as a repository of hypocrisy and domination, building on Hindess (1998), who denounced citizenship as an imperial project.

We thus recognize that citizenship and integration reproduce colonial orders and exacerbate pre-existing inequalities along gender, race, disability and income. Citizenship has a gendered dimension as historically women tended to lose their citizenship on marriage and automatically take the citizenship of their husbands. In contemporary times, as citizenship continues to have a gendered implications. For example Chap. 6 in this book discusses how political parties take different position vis-a-vis gendered sectors of migration for example highly supportive of women migrant care givers or Chap. 7 sheds new light on the gendered experiences of Muslim women who wear the scarf and how it changes their relationship with the public space in the city.

Citizenship remains the core instrument for immigrant integration, with incorporation goals tailored around milestones for naturalisation. Scholars since the late 1990s have established a cottage industry to study the determinants, effects, and meaning of naturalisation. In particular, the past two decades have seen a boom of policy indices that have made the categorization and comparison of citizenship easier than ever (see GLOBALCIT, 2017; van der Baaren & Vink, 2021; Goodman, 2015; Howard, 2009; Janoski, 2010; Palop-García & Pedroza, 2019; Schmid, 2020), including those that make connections between integration polices and access to citizenship (Ruedin, 2015) not only in Europe but in other regions of the world as well (Solano & Huddleston, 2021; Palop-García & Pedroza, 2021; Acosta 2018). Thus, there is now a significant literature on the empirics at the citizenship-integration nexus, focusing on outcomes including economic (Džankic, 2019; Peters et al., 2018; Hainmueller et al., 2019) and political integration (Hainmueller et al., 2015; Just & Anderson, 2012). There is also a large body of work that examines questions of political theory, preoccupied with questions of justice, (i)liberalism and social theory (Bosniak, 2006; Joppke, 2010; Favell, 2022; Orgad, 2015; Mouritsen, 2011; Modood et al., 2006; Vink & Bauböck, 2013; Kostakopoulou, 2003).

But, we argue, the citizenship-integration nexus has implications not just at naturalisation, but also before and beyond naturalisation. Naturalisation is evidence both of assimilation (Fouka, 2019) and a catalyst for it (Hainmueller et al., 2017), but there are more muted results for whether it promotes integration (Goodman & Wright, 2015), national attachment among individuals (Simonsen, 2018; Fick, 2016), or social acceptance among the wider public (Alarian & Neureiter, 2021). Then there are the noncitizens that seek citizenship for no integration purpose whatsoever, but rather to leverage the strategic, economic benefits of investment programs (Džankic, 2019; Surak, 2020), which undercuts the citizenship-integration nexus entirely by delinking residency and integration. These individuals may not be immigrants per se; though they are outsiders, they may never even seek or claim residency in the country of their purchased citizenship. Stretching this interpretation to its limit, Joppke (2021) describes citizenship today as neoliberal—harder to get and easier to lose.

If this body of research suggests citizenship performs tasks other than – and sometimes irrespective of – integration, there is also evidence from the integration literature that incorporation goals are often met irrespective of citizenship. With increasingly diverse population, the scholarship examines how states respond to foster participation, such as what types of state policy interventions work and identify obstacles that hinder participation over time (Alba, 2005; Alba & Foner, 2015; Favell, 1998, 2019, 2022; Barbulescu, 2019; Adida et al., 2016; Maxwell, 2012; Givens, 2007; Schinkel, 2017; Hochschild et al., 2013). This vein of work is often focused on access to welfare and structural barriers of discrimination (Koopmans, 2010), as well as multicultural policies, which are explicitly structured around rights recognition and accommodation (Wright et al., 2017; Citrin et al., 2014; Benhabib, 2004). This is not a critique of this scholarship so much as an acknowledgement that integration is a multi-stakeholder process, pluralist in form, manifesting at many sites, and oftentimes irrespective to the process of naturalisation, that is… at the nexus.

Contributing to and combining these scholarly conversations, and considering large-scale empirical change in the last couple of decades, we re-ask: what are the consequences of having citizenship? Does naturalisation establish political, social, economic, or cultural integration? Can we empirically identify cases of integration without citizenship and citizenship without integration?

It is important that we keep asking fundamental questions at the heart of the assumed relation between citizenship and integration, where a series of links—not merely overlaps—are established through policy at the national, supranational/EU level (Hansen, 1998; Maas, 2008, 2017), and local level (Zincone & Caponio, 2006; Adam & Jacobs, 2014; Pedroza, 2019). For instance, as Pedroza (2019) questions citizenship in its understanding as nationality, she compels us to observe the multiple layers of understandings of citizenship in single countries and to question long-assumed relations between citizen rights and nationality. Also, as increased tolerance for dual citizenship has featured as an essential component of citizenship’s liberalising turn in the last decades (Baubock & Haller, 2021), holding two or more citizenships formalises multiple parallel memberships. This further challenges the nexus by allowing for strategic positioning of individuals at lower costs (Harpaz, 2019). Finally, in addition to different levels of policy (vertical differentiation) and the rise of dual citizenship, the nexus plays out across policy domains, often in non-migration policy areas such as urban planning and the governance of public spaces because these affect the process of integration and are, oftentimes, regulated through reference to different claims to citizenship (citizenship as status vs. citizenship as practice and/or identity).

Politically, the investigation of the citizenship-integration nexus is perhaps more salient now than ever. Ideals of national membership and belonging are the heart of European politics, influencing and altering not only policies of national citizenship but also practices and everyday interactions between different racial and ethnic communities. For political scientists Norris and Inglehart (2019) ‘immigration’ and the social transformation it triggers as communities settle and become part of the country is a key driver of what they call ‘cultural backlash’, or the new populism. And as populist and nationalist parties have made their way into national and European parliaments, they have transformed the politics and rhetoric of ‘immigration’, staging debates on the borders of identity and belonging to include what it means to be a ‘national/citizen’. To wit, the EU Referendum in the UK (“Brexit”) was fought on ‘taking back control’ and, indeed, ending the freedom of movement within the EU (Hobolt, 2016; Sobolewska & Ford, 2020; Favell & Barbulescu, 2018). For all these reasons, immigration plays an outsized, agenda-setting role in national politics and, therefore, citizenship and integration take on a new importance.

1.2 Structure of the Book

Against the rich theoretical and empirical background outlined above from the comparative research on citizenship, integration, and their interconnections, and in the context of prescient political times, the objective of this volume is to provide an up-to-date perspective on how integration and belonging—the everyday “life of citizenship”—are established and achieved alongside, or potentially in spite of, national citizenship rules. Almost two decades after the initial conference on the citizenship-integration nexus, scholars are still asking whether integration as “currently formulated in national policies and laws” coincides with “its more genuine meaning of ‘social inclusion’ with regard to immigrants” (Carrera et al., 2006, 61)?

This edited book assembles eighteen scholars to investigate the relationship between policies and practices of naturalisation, on the one hand, and – on the other hand – integration as seen from both the policy side and the lived experiences of migrants. Each chapter considers this nexus from the perspective of case-specific contexts. The central, shared contribution of the volume is to show how membership is achieved through, but also around, and sometimes despite formal citizenship requirements in different political and policy arenas. Thus, we consider integration through citizenship, integration below citizenship (that is, beneath the national level) and integration above and around citizenship (specifically, through EU citizenship status).

A second, related contribution is to highlight the practice of citizenship, both in the process and procedure of naturalisation itself and in the lived experiences of migrants in Europe. Through this treatment, we expose the fragmented and discretionary nature of citizenship. That is, by proceeding inductively to locate multiple sites of integration and, consequently, dropping the central assumption that naturalisation policy, which for being national, is homogeneously applied because requirements are enunciated in a universal manner, we also observe a far more discretionary process than a deductive approach would allow. There are large differences between procedures and outcomes, as bureaucrats are often located at “street-level” (Jones-Correa, 2001; Lipsky, 2010) and rarely operate with unambiguous guidelines.

The volume’s contributions are organised across three thematic sections, to separately investigate the citizenship-integration nexus through the process of naturalisation (Part I), beneath national citizenship (Part II), and above or around national citizenship (Part III). Brexit serves as a particularly useful case study for assessing the before-and-after effects of EU citizenship. As supranational citizenship is the substantive focus of Part III, Brexit and the UK appear as illustrative cases for several chapters therein. As a whole, these chapters are interdisciplinary, multimethod, and consider a variety of case studies and levels of analyses.

Part I – Integration through Citizenship – interrogates how and to what extent naturalisation produces or achieves integration. In other words, it examines the status of the traditional citizenship-integration nexus today. These contributions highlight the differentiated effects of naturalisation, the markedly different interpretation of policies and practices by bureaucracies, and the experience of integration without national status at various sites, including cities. Sredanovic opens the collection with a contribution that looks directly at the procedure of naturalisation, taking us into the back offices of civil servants who decide on naturalisation applications in the UK and Belgium. With unique access, Sredanovic interviews officers on how they navigate and make sense of the evidence people collate for citizenship acquisition. Both the UK and Belgium operate with long lists of requirements including passing tests. Answering in different languages, the civil servants introduce us to how limited the guidance is, where there is flexibility for interpretation in matters of assessing integration but also in areas where one would not expect such as the modalities and reasons for entering the country. Sredanovic also brings an interpretivist perspective into the discussion—centring ideas of what integration means, as civil servants question the integration requirements and take clues from the lived experiences of migrants and from what they perceive or expect the economic contribution of the immigrants to be.

Next, Peters, Flacke and Vink focus on the impact of a particular policy change—increases in naturalisation fees—as a prism for understanding the (literal) value of citizenship and in what way it encourages naturalisation – that is, faster and earlier naturalisation – and produces economic returns. An extension of their extensive research program on understanding the effects of citizenship through life course analysis and, specifically, on the relationship between naturalisation and integration (in this case, economic integration), Peters, Flacke and Vink conclude that a change in naturalisation policy has an impact on the propensity to naturalise but also the stratified impact on migrants in low-pay sectors.

Last, Fernandez and Sumption provide an assessment of incentives to naturalise by looking at EU citizens living in the UK before and after Brexit, observing there was little push to naturalise prior to Brexit. However, they document the anticipation of the UK leaving the EU as intensifying the propensity of immigrants to seek British citizenship but to a lower degree for immigrants from non-EU countries, as the latter would get relatively more rights from the status.

What we learn about the citizenship-integration nexus from these studies is that there are several costs and benefits to citizenship, not all of which produce or incentivize integration. The act of becoming a citizen bears expressive and symbolic value, while the meaning attached to it are sometimes related to factors that are external to the cost-benefit calculation. Discretionary practices, high fees, and obscure rights challenge the notion that citizenship reflects, incentivizes, or produces belonging. This was a similar conclusion to the first re-examination of the nexus in 2006, in which Elspeth Guild (2006, 40) remarks “the heart of the nexus is the problem of social exclusion.”

In Part II—Integration Below Citizenship—we zoom in on the perspective of the migrant communities, the opportunities of non-citizens and their everyday experiences of citizenship and integration in the absence of nationality. First, Alarian investigates the integration of non-citizens through the lens of access to economic rights. Given tense public debates on migrant eligibility to welfare rights, Alarian examines the effects of access to economic rights before citizenship. While taxed on equal basis but with fewer economic rights, Alarian elegantly poses the question about the kind of incentives that push immigrants to integrate. She shows that in the absence of citizenship, individual integration is achieved through enhanced access to economic rights, opening labour markets to immigrants but also social assistance, so that they can improve their quality of life.

Not only do migrants obtain levels of integration before citizenship, but they also find paths of belonging below the national level. Wisthaler reminds us that nation states are not the only rule-makers and that regions—particularly in secessionist states, but also autonomous regions and federal states—often define the meaning of belonging instead of centralized political authorities. Integration is rescaled and reframed to align with the collective identity and competing nation-building projects of minority nations. To investigate how regionalists achieve this, Wisthaler collects data on Stateless Nationalist and Regionalist Parties (SNRPs) in five minority regions: Basque Country (Spain), Corsica (France), South Tyrol (Italy), and Scotland and Wales (UK). The findings show that there is wide variation in how parties in minority regions define citizenship and belonging. They constitutionalise membership strategically whilst at the same time create hierarchies of deserving and integrated migrants.

The citizenship-integration nexus can also be challenged from the point of view of everyday interactions. Whilst citizenship offers equality in terms of rights, its impact on the lives of different immigrant communities is limited by and rooted in the resources and perceived characteristics of those different communities in different spaces. Zapata Barrero and Hellgren show how in everyday encounters, perceived integration is anchored in racialised and gendered assumptions rather than in the status of formal citizenship. Collating evidence across multiple years and various research projects, they illustrate how public spaces inhabited and designed by majorities can be discriminatory to minorities with or without citizenship, but also how the experiences collected at local scale can help to counteract negative experiences in the broader society, and promote intercultural citizenship, in an understanding beyond the formalism of citizenship-as-nationality.

By looking at integration before and below national citizenship, we see the integral role of communities, employment, and social experiences, as well as regional politics and actors. The lived experiences of immigrant non-citizens may, in the end, look functionally similar to their naturalized equivalent.

Last, Part III examines paths and possibilities of integration above citizenship, looking specifically at the institution of EU citizenship and the variety of experiences of EU citizens. Mobile EU citizens can take their rights further and develop unique transnational lives (Recchi et al., 2019). EU citizenship—the unique membership category fortified by commitment to the non-discrimination principle in Article 18 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) enables separating naturalisation from integration. But this also potentially removes expectations on integration. Whilst integration is explicitly mandated for non-EU citizens, EU citizens are entrusted with the freedom to not integrate and ‘let be’ (Barbulescu, 2019, 208–225). This third part is particularly important in light of the preoccupations and recommendations of the initial examination of the citizenship-integration nexus in 2006, where the audience was the European Commission and one of the central concerns was the scope for an EU framework of integration. Part III brings into focus precisely the challenges and limitations that EU citizenship, the discourse on integration, political authority, and emerging conflicts when status comes into play.

Sigona and Godin begin this section by focusing on Roma living in London in the wake of Brexit. By focusing on the experiences of a vulnerable, deprived, and racialised community, this chapter sheds light on the emotional landscape of Non-British EU citizens, who often experience discrimination in everyday encounters in a global city that, reminding us that integration is relational and that comparisons of discourses and lived experiences in other societies matter as well.

Next, Voicu and Croitoru keep the focus on EU citizens but look at a group on the other end of the privilege spectrum, focusing on the experiences of high-skilled/high-wage EU citizens in Bucharest, Romania. Managers and employees of multinational corporations with branches in Southeastern Europe often operate from the capital city, and they make up a unique community of non-citizens which does not perceive its integration to Romanian society to be questioned or required by the native citizens. Voicu and Croitoru’s contribution demonstrates how personal resources—actual and perceived—and shared EU citizenship keep pressures and expectations to acquire national citizenship at bay.

Barry Brown brings the analysis back to the UK by looking at a third group of citizens—British citizens with Irish ancestry that are seeking to acquire Irish qua EU citizenship in the wake of Brexit. Specifically, this contribution looks at the nexus through the prism of the voting rights of the newly naturalised. The ‘Brexit Irish’ report mixed feelings as they solder together the two identities while navigating through the changing landscape of Brexit, what Brexit means, and the impact it has for the relationship of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain. From this site of observation, the citizenship of Irish abroad is trimmed down by policies of external voting while the Irish EU citizens themselves challenge and debate their belonging vis-à-vis the post-colonial political participation from the UK whilst absent from the Republic.

Finally, Goodman moves the discussion from the individual level and the experience of EU citizens across the continent to the institution of EU citizenship itself, asking “What can EU citizenship do?”, “What was it designed to it?” and “What should it do?” This discussion is particularly important given the central role that immigrant integration concerns play in national and supranational politics and the evidence provided in the different previous chapters of the book about the diversity of experiences across individuals in the member states in terms of social, political and economic rights being premised on citizenship or not, depending on class and origin. Goodman’s chapter closes the book with a larger picture on EU citizenship, showing how it conveys meaningful rights for promoting political integration, but is an incomplete status, furthering inequalities across the member states. The democratic implications, in areas from Enlargement to Brexit, are disquieting.

This book provides a substantial expansion and advancement on the citizenship-integration nexus. Overall, we show naturalisation is not a foregone pathway to integration and inclusion, local experiences are valuable for building meaningful linkages between migrants and host societies, and EU citizenship is not the panacea it might have been two decades ago. It is rather class and perceived resources that open doors to fluid migration within the EU rather than the EU citizenship as status itself.

Taken as a whole, the contributions in the volume add nuance, interdisciplinarity, and elaboration to studies of politics and policy agendas surrounding the citizenship-integration nexus. These contributions problematize the hierarchies of integration in different levels of political community and look to the different paths of institutional and societal inclusion beyond naturalisation to which migrants assign meaning irrespective of cost-benefit analyses of having a passport (in some cases an additional one) or the right to vote. Moreover, these chapters also take a critical view of the sometimes-implicit logics of deservingness behind what appear to be standard (and standardized) naturalisation rules, as well as the openly discriminatory naturalisation rules and practices and their effect on the incentives of migrants to integrate.

Studies on the citizenship-integration nexus have profited from contributions of sociologists, demographers, political geographers, anthropologists, historians, and political scientists. Today, this field is reverberating with the impulse provided by multilevel analyses that has left behind the assumptions of national homogeneity, tackling the challenges of intra-case and cross-provincial comparisons nested in cross-national comparisons. We hope the insights in this volume push scholars and policymakers alike to similarly push beyond deductive understandings of citizenship-as-integration, and think inductively about potential sites of integration, the utility of national citizenship, and alternative mechanisms to promote incorporation.