Integration Policies: Who Benefits? November 2013 – April 2015

Overview

This project, which is led by the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) and the Migration Policy Group (MPG), aims to inform and engage key policy actors about how to use indicators to improve integration governance and policy effectiveness. The COMPAS team will be responsible for data collection and staging an in-depth national policy debate in the UK.

The main objectives of the project are: to identify and measure integration outcomes, integration policies, and other contextual factors that can impact policy effectiveness; to describe the real and potential beneficiaries of policies in seven key areas, namely employment, education, political participation, access to nationality, family reunification, long-term residence, and anti-discrimination; and to collect and analyse high-quality evaluations of integration policy effects.

Topics

EducationEuropean UnionFamilyHealthIntegrationPolicies

Regions

Europe

Theory

This project draws on European academic literature on integration, which suggests that integration is not a single process but a series of autonomous processes, which relate to each other in complex ways; that integration is the responsibility of the institutions of a receiving society as well as of migrants themselves; that migrants’ rights and entitlements are foundational to the very possibility of integration across the domains; and that integration happens naturally over time but that policy makes a fundamental difference by creating barriers and opportunities.

Building on this, Migration Policy Group designed a series of indicators based in assumptions about which policies most facilitate integration. At COMPAS, we hope to use the results to clarify what is at stake in a resetting of our national debate on migrant integration in the UK.

Methods

This project is based on a desk-based audit of existing policy and legislation in the UK, informed by interviews with government and civil society experts. These are used to complete a questionnaire based on a suite of indicators designed to enable comparative research across EU and other countries. The completed questionnaire is then independently peer reviewed.

The key research outputs will be an interactive website building on the successful MIPEX website and an e-book presenting all the data through easy-to-use country profiles, analysis, and databases. This data will be calculated separately for every country and for each of the seven policy areas. In order to deliver these outputs, the MIPEX team will:

• Update policies – the project will provide detailed and comparable accounts of the most recent policy changes, building on the baseline data gathered in the MIPEX research. A new strand on health will be added in partnership with the COST/ADAPT research network and the International Organisation for Migration.
• Collect and analyse statistical information on policy outcomes, context, and beneficiaries.
• Identify and analyse evaluations of policy effects in at least 10 member states.
• Publish and disseminate the results – press campaigns will be organised in all 28 EU member states and in-depth policy debates in at least 12. In this case, national debates will be organised, expecting 50-100 participants, where participants will have the opportunity to discuss whether and how policies lead to the desired outcomes for different beneficiaries. At the final event in Brussels, the results of the research, evaluations and national debates will be presented, aiming to link national with European debates and the Stockholm Programme with the Europe 2020 strategy.

Outputs

Migration Integration Policy Index 2015

UK results

Impact

The project findings will be launched at a national debate in 2015, and we will then track the policy impact of these.