Abstract
What does it mean when national or local policies in Western European countries use the term “integration” as an objective related to immigrants and ethnic minorities? Since the 1990s it has been argued that the concept of integration is the one that best corresponds to the vision of the Nation-state in Europe, as the social organization unit most capable of creating structures and institutions to achieve the objective of accommodating immigrants within the local society. In this context, integration points to a number of policies and institutions put in place by the State to guide this process. In academic studies, integration is understood as a process that begins after the arrival, and represents the different stages that migrants follow at individual and collective levels to adjust to the main culture. Integration also involves multicultural dynamics through exchanges and negotiations that draw new cultural and social dimensions within the whole society.
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- 1.
In practice, in recent years in Europe other means of guaranteeing equality were developed under the banner of “integration”, among these, a model, which implies, in general, a series of obligations, which the immigrants had to accomplish to reach the objective of integration. As indicated by Weber, “Integration is before all a right to benefit of an equal treatment, but in fact it has transformed into an obligation to submit oneself to certain conditions: the meaning of the term has taken another turn due to the motives of consensual electoral communication which is easy to represent.” This is the case of ‘Contrat d’accueil et d’integration’ (CAI) established in France, and the obligatory courses on introduction to citizenship in Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands.
- 2.
In most immigration countries in Western Europe populist and extreme-right parties, nationalist and openly against immigration, are becoming important players in politics. Among these are le Front National, presently led by Marie Le Pen in France; the Austrian Freedom Party in Austria, Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands, MSI in Italy, Vlaams Blok in Belgium, among others. This political use of immigration has had significant support from sensationalist media, where mass immigration is presented as a threat (Moraes 2003; Thränhardt 1996).
- 3.
It has been noted that the population coming from non-European countries will continue to grow. This population has been estimated to be between 15 and 17 million, accounting for over 4% of the total population. In the early 1990s, more than 1 million immigrants arrived in the European Union per year, twice the amount that arrived per year in the 1980s. Despite a decrease in migration in the second half of the 1990s, by 1996 migrants represent three quarters of the population increase in the EU. It has been estimated that the EU needs to receive between 50 and 70 million immigrants per year to compensate for the aging population and the decrease in birth rates. The European Commission had officially recognized this situation in 2000, and began to promote a common policy on immigration and integration (Rogers et al. 2001).
- 4.
In the process of integration of the European Union, the Schengen accord represents a transcendent moment of change. With this accord, came the gradual abolishment of frontier controls between Germany, France and the Benelux countries, allowing the free movement of services, goods and people. At the same time, the harmonization of policies directed at controlling immigration from third countries was proposed (Collinson 1993).
- 5.
The Treaty of Amsterdam entered into force in May 1999. In the development of communitarian governance, themes related to the movement of people such as conditions of entry and residency, national standards and procedures to issue visas and resident permits were regulated. Additionally, the procedure of family reunification and the repatriation of undocumented migrants were included (Carrera 2005, Moraes 2003).
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- 7.
A vision based on security in the theme of immigration was reinforced with the terrorist attack in Madrid in March of 2004, and the attacks in London in July a year later.
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In 2004, the European Union was enlarged with new member countries, including the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Slovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Malta and Poland. In the year 2007, Romania and Bulgaria brought the number of member countries to 27.
- 9.
The entire document can be consulted on the webpage: www.europarl.europa.eu. More information can be found in El País, “El Parlamento Europeo aprueba sin enmiendas la directiva de retorno de sin papeles”, July 18, 2008 and Courrier International, “Union Européenne: La ‘directive retour’ fabrique les clandestins”, June 20, 2008.
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Pardo, F. (2018). A Critical Approach to the Notion of Integration and Its Use in Policy. In: Challenging the Paradoxes of Integration Policies. Migration, Minorities and Modernity, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64082-2_2
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