Studying immigrant integration in Europe: civic rhetoric, citizenship policies and self-reported life satisfaction

Aim of this work has been to understand if integration policies help immigrants to enhance their long-term success and parity with natives. Immigrant integration has been conceived as the process aimed at reducing gaps with natives, therefore at providing to immigrants the same opportunities of native-born citizens, in the main domains of life. The first paper of the thesis has offered a comparative overview of civic integration programmes adopted by European countries in recent years. I have argued that civic integration produces a ‘stratification’ of the immigrant population in receiving countries, because it exacerbates the gap between high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants, therefore between wanted and unwanted migration. Moreover, civic integration is strongly embedded into citizenship, since it establishes under what conditions eligible immigrants can obtain the citizenship status of the new residence country. Therefore, the second paper has examined the effect of both individual-level characteristics and measures of national citizenship policies on the likelihood of having citizenship status among immigrants living in selected European countries. As individual level data I have used the Immigrant Citizens Survey (ICS), conducted by the King Baudouin Foundation and the Migration Policy Group, from October 2011 to January 2012. For the country-level data, a systematic review of national citizenship policies, academic literature and the Eurostat database have been used. Results have highlighted the strong effect of individual characteristics on citizenship status among young and adult immigrants and, therefore, the positive effect of higher family stability, educational attainment, current economic situation, perceived financial well-being, duration of residence and cultural similarity between the country of residence and the country of origin. Nevertheless, policy factors intervene to produce this effect. In particular, a low number of years of residence needed for naturalization, the dual citizenship toleration and relatively high naturalization rates and proportions of foreign citizens positively influence citizenship status among immigrants. Finally, self-reported life satisfaction has been used in the third paper to assess immigrants’ subjective integration. Self-reported life satisfaction has allowed taking into account not only objective forms of integration, but also immigrants’ perceptions about their life into the residence country. This is also in line with the idea that integration is a multidimensional and two-way process, which implies the contribution and the point of view of both newcomers and hosting societies. The positive linkage existing between citizenship status and life satisfaction in the residence country provides evidence for the objective character of naturalization in shaping integration, which, although made more demanding by civic requirements, represents, to this day, the best way for immigrants to acquire parity with natives.