Migrant Integration in a Changing Europe: Immigrants, European Citizens, and Co-ethnics in Italy and Spain

By Roxana Barbulescu

In this rich study, Roxana Barbulescu examines the transformation of state-led immigrant integration in two relatively new immigration countries in Western Europe: Italy and Spain. The book is comparative in approach and seeks to explain states' immigrant integration strategies across national, regional, and city-level decision and policy making. Barbulescu argues that states pursue no one-size-fits-all strategy for the integration of migrants, but rather simultaneously pursue multiple strategies that vary greatly for different groups. Two main integration strategies stand out. The first one targets non-European citizens and is assimilationist in character and based on interventionist principles according to which the government actively pursues the inclusion of migrants. The second strategy targets EU citizens and is a laissez-faire scenario where foreigners enjoy rights and live their entire lives in the host country without the state or the local authorities seeking their integration.

The empirical material in the book, dating from 1985 to 2015, includes systematic analyses of immigration laws, integration policies and guidelines, historical documents, original interviews with policy makers, and statistical analysis based on data from the European Labor Force Survey. While the book draws on evidence from Italy and Spain in an effort to bring these case studies to the core of fundamental debates on immigration and citizenship studies, its broader aim is to contribute to a better understanding of state interventionism in immigrant integration in contemporary Europe. The book will be a useful text for students and scholars of global immigration, integration, citizenship, European integration, and European society and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9780268104405

Roxana Barbulescu

Roxana Barbulescu is University Academic Fellow and 250 Great Minds Scholar in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds

Book preview

MIGRANT INTEGRATION

IN A CHANGING EUROPE

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MIGRANT

INTEGRATION

IN A CHANGING

EUROPE

——————————————————

Immigrants, European Citizens,

and Co-ethnics in Italy and Spain

ROXANA BARBULESCU

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2019 by University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Barbulescu, Roxana, 1983- author.

Title: Migrant integration in a changing Europe : immigrants, European citizens, and co-ethnics in Italy and Spain / Roxana Barbulescu.

Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2018] | Series: Kellogg Institute series on democracy and development | Significantly revised version of author’s thesis (doctoral)—European University Institute, 2013, titled The politics of immigrant integration in post-enlargement Europe migrants: co-ethnics and European citizens in Italy and Spain. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018052457 (print) | LCCN 2018057577 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268104399 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268104405 (epub) | ISBN 9780268104375 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268104379 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Europe—Emigration and immigration—Government policy. | Italy—Emigration and immigration—Case studies. | Spain—Emigration and immigration—Case studies | Immigrants—Cultural assimilation—Europe—Case studies | Social integration—Europe—Case studies.

Classification: LCC JV7590 (ebook) | LCC JV7590.B374 2018 (print) | DDC 305.9/06912094—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052457

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

CONTENTS

List of Tables and Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONEMigrant Integration and the State

TWOMigration in Italy and Spain and Integration Outcomes

THREEVarieties of Denizenship: Rights Regimes and the Importance of (Not) Being an EU Citizen

FOURInterventionist States and the Making of Integration Duties: When, How, and for Whom Do States Pursue Integration?

Conclusion. The Freedom to not Integrate: Multicultural Integration amidst Rising Neoassimilation

Appendix. Primary Sources

Notes

References

Index

TABLES AND FIGURES

TABLES

1.1.Shares of the four categories within the total foreign population of Italy and Spain, 2015

1.2.Foreign population in the top ten European countries and shares of EU and non-EU migrants, 2001, 2011

1.3.Total number of migrants in Italy and Spain and main countries of origin (in thousands), 2015

2.1.Evolution of foreign residents in Italy and Spain, 1970–2010

2.2.Rights of noncitizens in selected EU countries: MIPEX scores

2.3.Amnesties in Italy and Spain, 1982–2009

2.4.Immigrants groups by gender composition

2.5.Immigrant groups by age

2.6.Immigrants by years of residence in the country

2.7.Immigrants by level of education

2.8.Employment, unemployment, and inactivity among migrants

2.9a. Occupation among immigrants in the Italian labor market

2.9b. Occupation among immigrants in the Spanish labor market

2.10. Citizenship acquisition by category in Spain

3.1.Transitional restrictions for the 2004 and 2007 enlargements for EU-27

3.2.Annual quota for descendants of Spanish origin in Spain, 2000–2009

3.3.Annual quota for non-EU workers in Italy, 1998–2010

3.4.Annual quota for descendants of Spaniards in Spanish Autonomous Communities

3.5.Bilateral enfranchisement between the Kingdom of Spain and non-EU countries

3.6.Right to family reunification: Requirements for third country nationals and EU citizens

3.7.Criteria for citizenship acquisition and toleration of double citizenship in Italy and Spain

3.8.Acquisition of nationality by country of former nationality, Italy, 1997–2008

3.9.Acquisition of nationality by country of former nationality, Spain, 1997–2008

4.1.Cofunding of integration programs: European Integration Fund and Italy

4.2.Sanctions associated with failing integration requirements in selected EU countries, 1998–2012

4.3.How the Italian integration agreement works: Grounds for losing and gaining points

FIGURES

2.1.Migrants who integrate well and very well, 2011

C.1.Evolution of integration strategies by immigrant group

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a long intellectual journey, and I feel privileged to have received support from many institutions and research centers as well as advice from wonderful scholars, friends, and family along the way.

I benefited enormously from the institutional support provided by the following: the European University Institute, where this journey started; the Scenari migratori e mutamento sociali research center at the University of Trento; the Center for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (CEACS) at the Juan March Institute in Madrid; the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Immigration (GRITIM) at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona; the Sheffield Institute for International Development at the University of Sheffield; the College of Europe in Natolin, Warsaw; the ESRC Centre for Population Change at the University of Southampton; and the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds.

Deep gratitude goes to Rainer Bauböck and Adrian Favell for their inspiring mentorship, enthusiasm, and fairness. In addition to the five anonymous reviewers from the University of Notre Dame Press, I owe intellectual debts for erudite conversations and sharp suggestions to the following: Kitty Calavita, Andrew Geddes, Claire Kilpatrick, Anthony Messina, Ricard Zapata–Barrero, Joaquín Arango, Giuseppe Sciortino, Martina Cvajner, Tiziana Caponio, Maarten Vink, Yasemin Soysal, Dora Kostakopoulou, Dimitry Kochenov, Jean-Michel Lafleur, Terri Givens, Jaap Dronkers, Martin Kohli, Fabrizio Bernardi, Héctor Cebolla, Claudia Finotelli, and Amparo González Ferrer. To Jean Grugel, Tobias Schumacher, Paul Bridgen, and Traute Meyer, I say thanks for your support through many crucial transitions in this work. During fieldwork, Ruth Ferrero-Turrión in Madrid and Sergio Briguglio in Roma were essential guides in navigating the Kafkaesque Italian and Spanish bureaucracies. My editors at the University of Notre Dame Press—Eli Bortz, Stephen Little, and Matthew Dowd—have been immensely helpful with their sage advice, craftmanship, and patience in turning this manuscript into the book you are now holding. And artist Matias Mata, known as Sabotaje Al Montaje, was extraordinarily generous in lending his artwork for the cover of this book. Mural was painted in 2010 and stands to this day on the side of an apartment building in the working-class district of San Pablo on the outskirts of Sevilla in Spain. To everyone I say thank you.

Nobody makes it on their own, and my heartfelt appreciation goes to my friends and colleagues across the world. In Florence, Laurie Beaudonnet, Herve Boudou, Henio Hoyo, Maria Rubi, Raul Gomez, Maria Tznou, Georgia Mavrodi, Leila Hadj-Abdou, Frédérique Roche, Xavi Alcalde, Bahar Baser, Jean-Thomas Arrighi, Laura Block, Costica Dumbrava, and Andrei Stavila have been responsible for the good cheers, good laughs, and good food since the day I first arrived in that beautiful city. My special thanks to Lidiya Lozova, Leyla Safta-Zecheria, Anna Wieck, Monika Caracuda, Denisa and Dan Dumitriu, Adriana Rudling, and Cristina Sararu for their wonderful friendship, which has disregarded the natural laws of time and space. In Sheffield and Leeds, Andira Hernandez Monzoy, Nasos Roussias, Vicky Yiagopoulou, Dimitris Ballas, Albert Varela, and Sarah Lowi Jones were responsible for the fun and funky times in northern England. I owe the fact that this book is finished at last to them.

My sincerest thank you goes to my family. My parents have been a source of endless encouragement and love. Lucretia Barbulescu, my mother, with her wonderful stubbornness, has been an inspiration and a driver throughout the years. My little brother, Dr. Razvan Barbulescu, with his passion for mathematics and theory (of numbers!), has been a trusted conspirator and a model. Lastly, I dedicate this book to my daughter, Nora, who is encountering her own personal puzzle of integration, and to my husband, Álvaro Martinez Perez, por todo tu amor y tu apoyo por igual.

And regardless of how blasé it may sound, I also dedicate this book to all migrants, for the courage and optimism that they bring into our world when they must pack their dreams and fears and . . . march on.

Leeds, December 2018

Introduction

The integration of immigrants is among the fundamental chores of states. It requires states to reflect on what defines their people as a nation and to organize accordingly rights, duties, and a road map for full members for newly arrived migrants. A growing literature examines how states create such integration strategies, but far less studied and explained is how states use categories to distinguish between noncitizens and pursue integration selectively in the context of accelerated regional integration and devolution processes. Unique regional integration projects such as the European Union, as well as further devolution to elected local governments and special arrangements for diasporas abroad and former colonial subjects, challenge entrenched understandings of belonging and citizenship and, in doing so, profoundly transform immigrant integration in European societies. Migrant Integration in a Changing Europe examines the transformation of state-led immigrant integration in two relatively new immigration countries in Western Europe, Italy and Spain, over three decades.¹

A small library could be filled with studies of models of integration (for Western Europe, see Bauböck, Heller, and Zolberg 1996; Brubaker 1992; Castles and Miller 1998; Favell 2001a, 2001b, 2015; Geddes and Favell 1999; Messina et al. 1992; Messina 2007; Hansen 2001; Hansen and Weil 2001; Ireland 1994; Joppke 2007a; Koopmans et al. 2005; Schain 1999, 2012; Soysal 1994; Vermeulen and Penninx 2000; Howard 2009; Schinkel 2017; Goodman 2014; and for North America, see Bloemraad 2006; Hochschild et al. 2013). Richard Alba and Nancy Foner (2015, 229) characterize the tradition in migration research as one of the most persistent ideas in the literature. While national models of integration have largely been discredited, for example, by pointing to the intense convergence across countries (see Joppke 2007a), scholarly concern with these models continues as states diversify their policy repertoire.

One assumption is that states pursue integration for all immigrants in the same way. This perspective has been challenged by the local turn in migration studies that emerged from the critique of national models of integration. The local turn focuses on how cities and various regions break from the national philosophy and examines subnational models of integration (Caponio and Borkert 2010; Alexander 2007; Favell 2001a; Ireland 1994; Hepburn and Zapata-Barrero 2014; Zapata-Barrero, Caponio, and Scholten 2017). Yet such research reproduces the same assumption that equates one administrative unit to one model of integration.

This book therefore is a journey on a well-traveled road in migration studies: a study of national models of integration in Western Europe. Yet it embarks on this road with the mission of uncovering new paths. It seeks to theorize state intervention in integration by discussing the roles of group differentiation during a period of intense Europeanization. It differs from the studies cited above in that it focuses on the efforts states² make to integrate third country nationals, European Union (EU) citizens from new and old EU member states, and co-ethnics and argues that states pursue different integration strategies for different immigrant categories. These last two immigrant categories have tended to be overlooked in the literature; to my knowledge, this book is the first attempt to analyze the four categories together.

Some migrants have simply remained at the margins of the state’s intervention in immigrant integration. Citizens of other European states, for instance, are seldom invited to integrate anywhere in Europe. They settle and build entire lives in another EU country without being considered candidates for integration. For instance, in the Netherlands, Europeans and citizens of developed nations are exempted from the examinations that are mandatory for immigrants from other countries. In these cases, rather than pursue integration, states maintain a laissez-faire stance and let incorporation take a natural course.

This raises a number of questions. Given that since the postwar period states have made a definite move toward stronger intervention in integration and that all states have now developed some form of integration strategy, why do states remain passive when it comes to particular migrants? And why do states simply let be some migrants—using Dora Kostakopoulou’s (2010b) expression—but formulate integration requirements, sometimes mandatory ones on which rights are conditioned, for others? Nonintervention is even more surprising from the nation-state perspective, according to which all those who are not members of the nation, including European citizens, are foreigners and thus should all be considered candidates for integration.

To make things even more complicated, as discussed throughout this book, states break with the laissez-faire stance when it comes to dealing with European citizens from the new member states. The new Europeans are included in state programs for immigrant integration. Why states act inconsistently with regard to immigrant integration and intervene in different ways for different categories of migrants is a puzzle about which the literature has hitherto remained silent and which this book aims to solve.

This book is comparative in approach and seeks to explain states’ immigrant integration strategies across three levels of decision and policy making: national, regional, and local. The empirical material for this work covers the period 1985–2015 and consists of systematic analyses of immigration laws, governments’ policies, other legal and historical documents, a set of seventeen original interviews with policy makers at the three levels of government in both countries, and statistical analysis based on data from the European Labour Force Survey. While the work as a whole builds on evidence from Spain and Italy, its broader aim is to contribute to a better understanding of state intervention in immigrant integration in contemporary Europe.

This book makes three contributions to the literature. The first contribution is theoretical and consists in examining state interventionism in migrant integration by exploring how states pursue no one-size-fits-all integration strategy. On the contrary, states simultaneously pursue multiple strategies that greatly vary from one group to another. While immigrant integration is a prerogative of states, states’ commitments to European and international partners and national interests such as migration control and security, as well as responses to financial incentives provided by EU funding, also shape integration in definite ways. On the one hand, fellow European citizens who are co-participants in the European Union or co-ethnics and postcolonial migrants with whom states acknowledge historical and cultural bonds are not subject to the same integration strategies as other noncitizens. On the other hand, increasing popular discontent with levels of immigration as well as concerns with homegrown security threats and a perceived failure of previous state-led integration projects further link states’ national interests with their integration agenda. This work argues that states mitigate the conflict between their interests and their commitments by distinguishing between noncitizens and multiplying integration strategies. However, the proliferation of such strategies unavoidably transforms immigrant integration and challenges conventional understandings of citizenship and belonging. This work, therefore, seeks to connect the integration debate, which traditionally has been centered on the nation-state and national citizenship, and the state sovereignty debate, which has centered on international constraints, national interests, and state capacities.

The second contribution is methodological. This book examines strategies of immigrant integration at the regional and local levels as well as the national level. While the local turn in integration studies has led to a collection of recent analyses of integration in cities and regions (Zapata-Barrero, Caponio, and Scholten 2017; Caponio and Borkert 2010; Alexander 2007; Favell 2001a; Ireland 1994; Hepburn 2009), they are rarely linked with national strategies or examined together (see also the pioneering work, Caponio and Jones-Correa 2017). This book is unique in that it studies the development of integration strategies across the three levels of decision making, national, regional, and local, applied to the cases of Italy and Spain.

The third contribution is empirical. Despite having received large numbers of immigrants in comparision to other European countries, Italy and Spain remain less known cases. As a result, these two cases as well as other new destinations are disconnected from integration debates and policy innovations and routinely excluded from most ambitious contemporary studies of immigrant integration. Over the past decade, the work of Sciortino, Caponio, Zioncone, Pastore, Colombo, Ambrozini, and Finotelli for Italy and Arango, Zapata-Barrero, Bruquetas Callejo, Garces Mascareñas, Moreno Fuentes, Morén-Alegret, Gonzalez, Cebolla, and Sánchez-Montijano for Spain has consolidated knowledge on these case studies. Kitty Calavita’s seminal book, Immigrants at the Margins (2005a), is an important pioneering effort to conceptualize and narrate the story of immigration in Italy and Spain in a comparative fashion. This book intends to extend their work and explore in depth the cases of Italy and Spain.

In post-enlargement Europe, the composition of the immigrant population has changed remarkably. Migration from other European countries and co-ethnic migration have become significant elements of total immigration in Europe. At the beginning of 2012, EU citizens represented 38 percent of the total immigrant population and 2.5 percent of the total EU 27 population (Eurostat 2012). Among mobile European citizens, Eastern Europeans from the new member states are more numerous than Europeans from the old member states. The migration of new EU citizens is strongly linked to the accession of their countries to the EU. The removal of the visa requirements prior to accession, the right to free movement gained on accession, and the removal of transitional requirements for workers from the new member states gradually made it easier for Eastern Europeans to move and take up employment in the old member states.

Confronted with growing pressure for convergence in the EU in immigration matters, many countries have found themselves having to restrict entry to nationals of countries with whom they share historical and cultural bonds. In order to prevent a full stop of these flows, a number of states have opened new backdoors for co-ethnics by signing preferential agreements with selected third countries. As of 2012, a total of 33.3 million migrants (EU and non-EU) lived legally in the EU, with 77 percent of them concentrated in five host states in Western Europe: Italy, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France (Eurostat 2012). If immigrants were to form an independent country, it would be the EU’s sixth largest member state.

In order to study state intervention in immigrant integration, I survey two policy areas, immigrants’ rights and duties as coded in public policy programs. My argument builds on original field, legal, survey, and historical data for the period 1985–2016. The interviews were conducted in Madrid and Rome in 2010 and 2011. When analyzing the data, attention was paid to how states address the different immigrant categories in their policies. Studying these two dimensions allows us to explain governments’ responses to immigrant integration and in particular how and why they organize integration differently for different groups of immigrants.

Throughout this book, the term migrant groups refers not to ethnic groups but rather to the legal definitions of noncitizens that EU member states themselves make to distinguish between different categories of foreigners (noncitizens). The four groups are EU citizens, among whom I distinguish between citizens from new member states who are subject to restrictions to the labor market (Romanians and Bulgarians) and citizens from old member states who fully enjoy the right of free movement; and non-EU citizens, or third country nationals, among whom I distinguish between co-ethnic migrants and other foreigners who are neither EU citizens nor co-ethnic migrants.

Identifying EU citizens as migrants can be interpreted as problematic. After all, EU citizens enjoy freedom of movement and their arrival in another EU country is mobility that shares more traits with movement within a country than with crossing borders and international migration. Interestingly, the reluctance often comes from authors who are comfortable and indeed pedagogical in closing the gap between internal migrants and international migrants. Acknowledging the challenges, I propose to consider all classes of noncitizens together in order to understand what it means to be a European citizen and, most important, what integration is; we know that integration applies, not to citizens, but to others (i.e., noncitizens, migrants).

I take the cases of two new immigration countries, Italy and Spain, and critically examine how governments at the national, regional, and local levels pursue the integration of immigrants. I show that policy makers at the three levels engage in developing integration strategies that are holistic in aim but also distinctive when compared to their understanding of other national models. Italy and Spain were chosen because they are among the top five destination countries in Western Europe for migrants, yet remain significantly less studied than other countries. Alba and Foner’s authoritative Strangers No More (2015) surveys assimilation trends of Western European countries, yet focuses on and draws conclusions from the cases of Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Germany, again leaving out Italy and Spain, which nonetheless account for 10 million of the 33 million noncitizen legal residents in contemporary Europe. At the subnational level, I have selected one region and one city for each country: for Italy, the Latium Region (Regione Lazio) and the capital city, Rome; for Spain, the Autonomous Community of Madrid (Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid) and the capital city, Madrid.

The core argument is that states pursue no one-size-fits-all integration strategy but rather pursue simultaneously multiple strategies that vary greatly for different groups. As the book demonstrates, two main integration strategies stand out: the first one targets non-European citizens, is assimilationist in character, and is based on interventionist principles according to which the government (whether national, regional, or municipal) actively works toward the inclusion of migrants; the second one targets EU citizens and is a laissez-faire scenario where foreigners enjoy rights and live their entire lives in the host country without the state or local authorities seeking their integration. Co-ethnics and European citizens from new member states occupy intermediary positions. In both Italy and Spain, Romanians and Bulgarians were included in the voluntary integration programs even after their countries’ accession to the EU. Furthermore, both Italy and Spain opted for temporary restrictions to their labor market. Spain lifted them in January 2009, but it chose to reintroduce the restriction in July 2011 and only for Romanian workers. Italy suspended the restrictions in January 2012.

Co-ethnic migrants enjoy a bundle of special rights in both countries. As a rule, they have more rights than third country nationals, but in some areas, such as a fast-track route to citizenship or the ability to enter military service, they also have more rights than do European citizens. However, when it comes to programs of integration, both Italy and Spain include co-ethnics in the broader group of third country nationals and give them no special treatment.

Starting in 2009, Italy introduced mandatory, sanction-based integration programs that require third country nationals to take a language test when applying for permanent residence and to sign an Integration Agreement (Accordo Integrazione) upon their arrival in Italy. Spain remains one of the few European countries with no sanction-based, mandatory integration program.

Overall, there are striking differences in the integration strategies for EU and non-EU citizens. Whereas for the former, states pursue a laissez-faire agenda with no tests to pass to enjoy generous rights, for the latter, they pursue an agenda in search of the perfect citizen (Carrera 2009) via a repertoire of policy instruments and by conditioning the already restricted rights on passing tests on country-specific knowledge. Thus, I posit that there is a continuum of models, from less to more inclusive, for different foreign groups that are simultaneously enforced by one state.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

Chapter 1 is theoretical and discusses the relationship between immigrant integration and states. I start by examining the conceptions of integration that have been used in the literature. I emphasize the need to go beyond the orthodoxy of citizen-alien distinctions and propose distinguishing between various groups of immigrants based on the legal distinctions that the states themselves make. I then review and evaluate the literature on integration and introduce a new model for the study of state strategies of integration, which I will be considering throughout this book. The chapter concludes with a summary of my approach to integration and highlights how it differs from other approaches.

Chapter 2 introduces the phenomenon of immigration in Italy and Spain and places the experience of the two countries in the European context. It continues with the empirical profiles of the immigrant groups, their integration outcomes, and natives’ perceptions of the integration outcomes.

Chapter 3 looks at the state’s integration strategy based on an allocation of rights (i.e., the rights-based approach to integration). It outlines and evaluates the legal integration regimes for co-ethnics, EU citizens, new EU citizens, and non-EU citizens across the three levels of policy and decision making in the two countries. It critically examines the divergent strategies pursued for each of them and examines their consequences.

Chapter 4 examines the integration duties that states code in their public policies and programs, the frames they use, and the institutional organization of integration in broader terms. Here, I focus on the legal and conceptual frames that the integration plans use, on who the targeted immigrant populations are, the policy areas in which governments decide to intervene and mobilize funds, the budgets allocated, the consistency of the plans over time and across levels of policy making, and also whether these plans are actually implemented by public institutions or other actors. Based on the empirical evidence collected in the field, I analyze the consequences of the particular forms of organization and evaluate the governments’ commitment to integration across the three levels of decision making: national, regional, and local.

Finally, the conclusion reviews the findings of the previous chapters and investigates why states develop multiple strategies of integration for different migrant categories.

CHAPTER 1

Migrant Integration and the State

No sovereign liberal state can lose its right to define . . . [immigrant] incorporation policies.

—Seyla Benhabib, Citizens, Residents and Aliens in a Changing World

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. This saying advises travelers to conform to the local mores, language, and lifestyle of the new place. The expression dates from AD 390 and is first recorded in the correspondence of Saint Augustine, who at that time was living in Milan. Augustine writes to his friend Januarius, bishop of Naples, and confesses to him, [When] I go to Rome, I fast on Saturday, but here [in Milan] I do not, and he advises Januarius to follow the [local] custom . . . , if you do not want to give or receive scandal.¹

This saying is a good starting point for analyzing the relation between the state and immigrant integration. It seems to indicate that the traveler is the only agent of integration. It allows for no exceptions to this rule, or at least none is mentioned; nor are there any limits of adaptation suggested by Augustine. In addition, Augustine fails to mention two notable entities: the receiving society and the state. Neither seems to bear responsibility or to have a duty of its own in the process of integration.

More recent understanding of integration has moved from such one-sided interpretations to more balanced ones in which the receiving society and the state play equally important roles (known as two-way integration). Rather than a one-sided process of adaptation, integration is regarded as a dynamic process of negotiation. As Aristide Zolberg (1999, 8) points out, the process of integration can be thought of as the negotiation in which hosts and immigrants engage around [us and not us] boundaries. Ultimately, despite immigrants’ efforts, their integration cannot succeed if they are not recognized as full members by society and the state. To begin, why are states relevant for integration?

First, it is important to examine states’ intervention because governments are the democratically elected representatives of the host society. They represent the will of the political communities and are elected based on electoral programs that more often now than in the past entail a specific take on immigration. Because of this direct connection between receiving societies and states, the strategy and vision of integration that governments opt for can be taken as a good proxy for the vision of integration of host societies.

Furthermore, as the contemporary political map of the world has no more white points that belong to no state, immigrant integration always takes place within the borders of one state and under its conditions. In other words, states are the locus and the rule setters of integration. For these two reasons, states play an essential role in integration.

Joseph Carens (2005, 29) takes matters further and makes a normative argument according to which states should get involved in integration. He indicates that it is the responsibility of the receiving country to promote equality between immigrants and the native population, and integration is the most straightforward way to do so. Carens points out that although integration is a mutual process, it is highly asymmetrical in nature because immigrants have to adapt more than does the receiving society. Because of this asymmetry, states are responsible for investing more effort in accommodating immigrants than the immigrants themselves. Penninx and Martiniello (2004, 142) observe a similar asymmetry between states and individual immigrants. They argue that the host country is also an unequal partner in terms of power relations and institutional and financial resources and thus should compromise more in matters of integration.

INTEGRATION FROM POSTWAR TO POST-ENLARGEMENT: AN OVERVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Historically, assimilation has been the norm for immigrants. Foreigners were expected to become more like the natives, to learn the language and, in general, adopt the lifestyle of the cities and villages that they made their home. This was regarded as a gradual process of self-accommodation (see Gordon 1964). Alba and Foner (2015) continue this line of research, benchmarking the achievements of immigrant-origin groups vis-à-vis averages of the majority on various indicators. Their work focuses on the achievements of what they