The integration of immigrants [antikvár]

The purpose of this report is threefold. Its primary task is to provide conceptual tools for distinguishing different dimensions and modes of integration of immigrants. Special emphasis will be given to the legal framework. The underlying question is how policies which categorize, discriminate, protect or privilege immigrants in a specific way affect their social, cultural and political integration. Secondly, contemporary trends in integration will be selectively illustrated by policy developments in European immigration states. However, the report is not a strictly comparative one and will neither provide a comprehensive overview of legal regulations nor a collection of data. Thirdly, integrative or disintegrative effects of policies will also be assessed from a normative point of view. It might be objected that this is an inappropriate task for political science that should be left to politics on the one hand and political philosophy on the other hand. However, the term integration carries obviously positive value connotations. Rather than leaving these unspecified it seems important to spell out the normative ideas behind the integration discourse and to use such ideas also as a benchmark against which achievements can and ought to be measured. 1. Migration and integration - basic concepts and definitions 1.1. Internationa] migration This report deals with integration in the context of international migration. Intuitively one might define international migration as a territorial relocation of people between nation-states. This statement is not enough to serve as a definition. There are two forms of such relocation which one should try to exclude from the range of phenomena called migration: first, a territorial movement which does not lead to any change in ties of social membership and remains therefore largely inconsequential both for the individual and for the society at the points of origin and destination; second a relocation in which the individuals or the groups concerned are purely passive objects rather than active agents of the movement. Using the first criterion one can easily exclude tourism. Tourism is not different from migration in the short duration of stay abroad, but in the aims and expectations of the individual who does not intend to take up a long term residence, an education or gainful economic activity. If any of these intentions bear fruits the consequences of relocation are also more significant for the sending and receiving societies. The above mentioned activities (taking a residence or establishing a household, participating in educational institutions, being involved in local economic activities) make an individual in an elementary sense a member of territorially organized societies. Membership in societies is not necessarily mutually exclusive. Migrants can have residences in two countries or they can be international commuters residing on one side of a nation-state border and going to work on the other side. Rather than establishing a clear-cut distinction the first criterion thus leads to a range of different forms of migration some of which are ephemeral and others of a durable nature. Tourism would be outside this range but would at the same time define one of its extreme ends. (As any scholar of European migration knows the line between tourism and immigration is often ill-demarcated in legal and practical terms. Many future immigrants cross borders first as tourists). For many purposes it will be useful to distinguish a somewhat narrower category of immigrants from a broader one of international migrants. The former may be defined as those whose relation to the receiving society is not only one of work or education but also of residence. Border