Local integration policies for newcomers in the United Kingdom

While integration policies as such are not new, and in some countries date back to the 1980s and beyond, there have been important shifts in the debates on integration and in related re-configurations of integration policymaking in the past decade or so. One of the main recent trends is the linkage of integration policy with admission policy and the related focus on recent immigrants. A second trend is the increasing use of obligatory integration measures and integration conditions in admission policy, and third, integration policymaking is increasingly influenced by European developments, both through vertical (more or less binding regulations, directives etc.) and through horizontal processes (policy learning between states) of policy convergence.
An increasing number of EU Member States have, in fact, adopted integration related measures as part of their admission policy, while the impact of such measures on integration processes of immigrants is far less clear. In addition, Member States' policies follow different, partly contradictory logics, in integration policy shifts by conceptualising (1) integration as rights based inclusion, (2) as a prerequisite for admission residence rights, with rights interpreted as conditional, and (3) integration as commitment to values and certain cultural traits of the host society.
The objective of PROSINT is to evaluate the impact of admission related integration policies on the integration of newcomers, to analyse the different logics underlying integration policymaking and to investigate the main target groups of compulsory and voluntary integration measures.
The project investigated different aspects of these questions along five distinct workpackages,. These analysed (1) the European policy framework on migrant integration (WP1), (2) the different national policy frameworks for the integration of newcomers in the 9 countries covered by the research (WP2), the admission-integration nexus at the local level in studied in 13 localities across the 9 countries covered by the research (WP3), the perception and impacts of mandatory pre-arrival measures in four of the nine countries covered (WP4) and a methodologically oriented study of the impact of admission related integration measures (WP5).
The countries covered by the project were Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Apart from individual cases project reports generally cover the period until end of 2010.
For more information about the project visit http://research.icmpd.org/1429.html.