Suchergebnisse

"Recently, the link between immigration, citizenship and national identity has emerged as a major political issue in Western Europe. During the last decade important changes have been implemented in the legislation concerning the attribution and acquisition of citizenship in several Western European countries. A trend of convergence, oberservable since the mid- 1907s, was accelerated after 1990. Previously liberal regulations tended to become more restrictive, whereas traditionally restrictive regulations became more liberal. This article deals with the question whether these developments are due to the harmonization of widely diverging national approaches in the field of immigration and citizenship policies in Western Europe. The first part of the paper is concerned with the legal rules which regulate the naturalisation of immigrants and the intergenerational transmission of citizenship in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and in Australia, Canada, the United States of America. The second part delivers an overview of the long-term effects of different patterns of citizenship policies on the inclusion of immigrant populations as citizens. It will be argued that since the beginning of the 1990s one can observe a certain convergence of legal rules which regulate the transition from aliens to citizens. However, major differences in national approaches to immigrants' inclusion as citizens are likely to remain across Western Europe as well as between European and non-European countries immigration." [author's abstract]

"In recent years the need for indicators that measure the integration of migrant workers and foreigners in general has often been voiced. But most of the time scholars in the field of international migration have in mind single-indicator measures. By contrast, this article represents the first attempt to construct a multi-indicator index for the legal integration of migrant workers from non-EU (or other privileged) countries in eight European states (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland). This index should primarily work as an instrument of representation. It makes possible synchronous crosscountry comparisons as well as the establishment of time series for individual countries. In this first tentative version of an index of integration five domains of legal integration were taken into account: 1) residence and permanent residence, 2) access to the labour market, 3) family reunification, 4) legal status of the second generation of immigrants, and 5) naturalization. The major results of the index in its current version can be summed up as follows: First, there are enormous differences of legal integration in the eight countries studied which will pose great difficulties to the intended harmonization of immigration laws in Europe. Second, the three German speaking countries in the sample still have, generally speaking, the highest amounts of legal discrimination with Austria as the outstanding negative example: In four out of the five spheres analysed Austria shows the highest scores in legal discrimination." [author's abstract]