Dr Roxana Barbulescu - New Migrations in UK and Europe

This seminar will discuss the policies through which societies pursue immigrant integration.

The presentation will examine the policies through which societies pursue immigrant integration in two new destinations in Western Europe: Spain and Italy. Unlike traditional countries of immigration, Spain and Italy have shifted from sending to preferred countries of destination over a short period of time, two decades, in which they have managed to absorb more than a third of the total foreign population residing in the EU (Eurostat 2012).

The study builds on evidence from the three levels of policy making –the national, regional and city level – collected through elite interviews with key policy makers, document analysis of immigration laws and state programmes for immigrant integration introduced from 1985 to 2014. Based on this evidence, it will be argued that rather than pursuing only one integration strategy, the states examined use their resources and abilities to simultaneously pursue different integration strategies for different categories of migrants especially in what it regards the integration policies for European citizens, co-ethnics and third country nationals.

These strategies range from less to more restrictive (from laissez-faire multiculturalism to neoassimilation). For instance, while for European citizens enjoy many rights in their host countries but are not subjects of their integration programmes, the non-EU citizens enjoy far less rights which they risk to lose if they do not comply with integration programmes. Finally, the rights migrants have are not fixed but dynamic; they are subject to change. In order to understand how the triangle between citizenship, rights and integration work I will then zoom in on the retrenchment of welfare rights of EU citizens comparing their social entitlements in UK, Spain, Germany and Sweden.

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