Pavel Barsa
    Managing Immigration and Integration
    in Europe and in the Czech Republic
     Final Research Paper

    Table of Contents

      Introduction
      
      Chapter I. Normative Theories and Models of Nationhood
      I. 1. Normative Theories
      I. 1. 1. Two Contradictory Principles of the Liberal Nation State
      I. 1. 2. Libertarianism
      I. 1. 3. Liberalism
      I. 1. 4. Communitarianism
      I. 1. 5. Realism
      I. 1. 6. Grounds for Openness and Restrictiveness
 
      I. 2. Nationhood Models
      I. 2. 1. Four Ideal Types
      I. 2. 2. The Immigrant Civic Nation: USA
      I. 2. 3. The Endogenous Civic Nation
      I. 2. 3. 1. Assimilationist Republic: France
      I. 2. 3. 2. Pluralistic Empire: Great Britain
      I. 2. 4. The Endogenous Ethnic Nation: Germany
      I. 2. 5. The Immigrant Ethnic Nation: Israel
      
      Chapter II: Western Experiences
      II. 1. USA
      II. 1. 1. Immigration Policies
      II. 1. 2. Integration Policies
      II. 1. 2. 1. Ethnic Pluralism
      II. 1. 2. 2. Racial Pluralism
      
      II. 2. France
      II. 2. 1. Immigration Policies
      II. 2. 2. Integration Policies
      II. 2. 2. 1. Assimilatory Integration
      II. 2. 2. 2. Islam
      
      II. 3. Great Britain
      II. 3. 1. Immigration Policies
      II. 3. 2. Integration Policies
      II. 3. 2. 1. Pluralistic Integration
      II. 3. 2. 1. 1. Official Multiculturalism  
      II. 3. 2. 1. 2.  “Race Relations” and Anti-discrimination
      II. 3. 2. 2. Islam
      
      II. 4. Germany
      II. 4. 1. Immigration Policies
      II. 4. 1. 1. Ethnic State as a Country of Immigration
      II. 4. 1. 2. Asylum Debate
      II. 4. 2. Integration Policies
      II. 4. 2. 1. From Ethnic to Civic Nationhood
      II. 4. 2. 2. Islam

      Chapter III: Convergence of European Policies and EU Framework
      III. 1. Three Waves of Post-War Migration to Western Europe
      III. 2. Last Developments in France
      III. 3. Last Developments in Britain
      III. 4. Last Developments in Germany
      III. 5. Convergence of National Policies
      III. 6. Common EU Framework for Migration and Asylum Policy
      III. 6.1. EU Labour Migration Policies
      III. 6.2. EU: Integration Policies
      III. 6.3. EU: Trends and Prospects

     Chapter IV: Czech Republic
     IV.1. Immigration Policies
     IV.2. Integration Policies
     IV.3. Active Immigration Policies
     IV.4. Migration Strategy of 2003

     V: Conclusions and Recommendations
      
      Appendix: Explanatory Theories. An Overview
      1. Neo-classical Economics
      2. The New Economics of Migration
      3. Dual Labour Market Theory
      4. World-Systems Theory
      5. Migration Networks Theory
      6. Cumulative Causation Theory
      7. Institutionalist Theory
      8. Client Politics Theory
      
      References
      Tables
      Boxes

      
    
      
      Introduction

      Since the beginning of the 1990s, Czech immigration policies have undergone a vibrant development.  Nonexistent before 1989, they became an integral part of the government agenda at the turn of the century. The experience of modern Czech society with understanding immigration and designing adequate immigration policies is, however, limited. One way to make up for this is to study immigration policies and practices of countries with longer and richer traditions of immigration. Such study may offer conceptual frameworks and tools needed to formulate a more adequate strategy for the Czech Republic. Accordingly, the main task of this research policy paper is to produce a framework for immigration and integration policies in the Czech Republic, with comparative reference to the experiences of western countries.

      At the most general level, the main dilemma of every liberal nation-state is how to reconcile the commitment to universal human principles with that to the collective good of its own people. The former commitment implies an openness to embrace other people who want to come, and to apply to them the same rules as are applied to nationals. The latter commitment, on the contrary, enjoins giving priority to the rights and interests of nationals. Accordingly, policies of immigration oscillate between a liberal and restrictive approach.
 
      As is argued in the first chapter, the abstract normative grounds for openness or restrictiveness are always embedded in concrete conceptions of a national self which may be open, as it is the case of immigrant nations such as USA, closed as it is the case of ethnic nations such as Germany or in-between these two extremes, as it is the case of civic nations such as Great Britain or France. It is again the national self-conception which predetermines the ways of incorporation of foreigners once they have been allowed onto the national soil: assimilationist integration in France, pluralistic integration in the USA and Great Britain, and temporary and differentiated insertion in Germany.

      As is shown in the second chapter, the national models may modify and change over time and take over elements of one another. If the countries are members of the same economic and political region such as the European Union and face the same challenges such as an aging population, increasing competitiveness of global markets and difficulties with integration of non-European groups or religions (Islam), then the convergence of their policies may follow. As the third chapter indicates, that is exactly what has happened among France, Britain and Germany in the last six years or so – all these countries, albeit in various degrees and with differing explicitness and coherency, have clearly accepted the necessity to become countries of immigration while, at the same time, they have toughened their approaches to illegal and unwanted immigrants and made the criteria for granting asylum stricter and less liberal. They have also backtracked from all too generous approaches to multicultural group differences of the 1980s and early 1990s and, in their stead, they have begun to require from would be immigrants that they learn the language and accept the basic values of the host country.
    
      Given the similarity of challenges faced by the Czech Republic and its accession to the EU (with the required acceptance of the acquis concerning immigration and integration), the development and experiences of west European countries should be the main source of inspiration in this field. As the last chapter argues, as far as the attitude towards immigration is concerned, the first post-communist decade may be divided into a liberal or laissez-faire period (1990 – 95) and a restrictive period (1995 – 2000). Throughout the 1990s, the place of a strategy in the field of immigration and integration was occupied at first by the efforts to adjust the Czech legislation to international (i.e. western) standards, and, subsequently (in the second half of the 1990s), to the acquis of the EU. Only since 2000 have the first steps been made to formulate a more comprehensive set of immigration and integration policies.

      As far as integration is concerned, policies of the 1990s were exclusively focused on immigrants with refugee status and those who came through the state sponsored resettlement programs for the Czech expatriates in Eastern Europe. It was only in 1999 that the Czech Interior Ministry established a special advisory organ  - the Commission for the Integration of Foreigners and Community Relations - which formulated a “catch-all” strategy of integration in 2000. The target group was defined as all foreigners living legally on Czech territory for more than one year. The strategic aim was to bring the legal status of long-term settled foreigners as close as possible to the legal status of the Czech citizens and to ensure their fair treatment. The institutional environment for this task changed dramatically after the devolution of powers to regions and municipalities, completed as of 1 January 2003. Moreover, the first experiences with policy making and implementation in this field brought the responsible officials to the realization that, due to its social aspects, the integration agenda would be better placed under the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, which, in actual fact, has taken it over since January 2004. One of the recommendations of this paper (see Conclusions and Recommendations) is that the integration agenda should be managed by a full time administrative body rather than by an advisory commission and that such a body should also systematically fund or organize research and data gathering in the field.

      The handing-over of the integration agenda from the Interior Ministry to the Ministry of Social Affairs symbolizes the shift of emphasis in the definition of integration from equal status and fair treatment to social cohesion and economic welfare. This shift remarkably corresponds with the same conclusions concerning integration at the EU summit in Thessaloniki in June 2003. This research paper will be submitted to the responsible officials of the Ministry of Social Affairs and will thus hopefully help to formulate the new approaches to the integration and immigration agenda for the new period, which will begin in May 2004 with the accession of the Czech Republic to the EU. A shorter Czech version of this paper was commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and submitted to it in December 2003. (Currently, the Ministry is organizing an evaluation process of the paper, which involves high officials responsible for integration and migration policies at the Interior Ministry.)
 
      Interestingly, the integration strategy of 2000 left the very word  “immigrant(s)” out, thereby avoiding a thorny issue whether (and to what extent) Czech society is (or should be) conceived of as a society of immigration. The main hypothesis of this research paper is that for this particular question, the experiences of our western neighbour Germany are of paramount importance since both Czech and German nationhood was originally forged as “ethnic” rather than “civic”, let alone “immigrant”. The Czech republic should draw extensive lessons from still unfinished efforts of (a part of) German political elite to redefine their nationhood in civic terms (Nationality Law of 1999) and change their country into a country of immigration (Immigration Law of 2002).

      The first step of the Czech government in this direction is the “Pilot project for the active selection of qualified foreign workers”, approved in July 2002 and implemented by the Ministry of Social Affairs since the summer 2003. This project corresponds with the Principles of the Government Policy in the Field of Migration of foreigners, adopted in January 2003. In this document, the support for “beneficial forms of migration” is stipulated as one of the basic principles of migration strategy, alongside combating illegal migration and contributing to the solution of humanitarian crises in the world. This research paper approves this direction and argues for an extension of the active immigration scheme (from the limitation to the three countries selected in the pilot project) to a program with universal scope as far as countries of origins are concerned. Drawing from the policies of Britain, Germany and France, the paper also argues for the introduction of other avenues of active immigration such as offers to stay for foreign students, and preferential treatment for highly qualified and creative persons (e.g. managers, artists), potential investors, and groups in a difficult situation in their countries of origin and with good integration potential (e.g. Jews). The administrative procedures should be adjusted in such a way that there be a continuous line of steps from immigration through the acquisition of permanent residence status to the possibility of naturalization. These, and other measures in the field of immigration and integration (see Conclusions and Recommendations) should help to formulate a coherent immigration and integration strategy for the Czech republic of the 21st century. The major middle-term goal of this strategy should be to transform progressively Czech society from an ethnic into a civic nation that is ready to embrace immigrants as its new members.

***
      As adumbrated above, this paper is divided into four chapters.
      In the first chapter, I provide an overview of the main normative approaches which have been developed in western countries and I construct four ideal types of nationhood entailing different degrees of openness or restrictiveness in receiving and integrating aliens.
      In the second chapter, I summarize the historical development of immigration and integration policies in the U.S., France, Great Britain and Germany. In the third chapter, I focus on the current convergence of the immigration and integration policies of Great Britain, France and Germany within the framework of the migration and asylum policies of the EU.
  
      In the fourth chapter, I apply the conceptual tools as well as the historical models and examples worked out in the three preceding chapters to the case of the Czech Republic. I begin by describing the development of  the Czech Republic’s immigration and integration policies since the end of the Cold war and devote special attention to the last four years, when several steps have been made on the way to more comprehensive integration and migration strategies. I assess these recent policy initiatives with regard to the last developments in the EU countries within the common EU framework for migration and integration. In lieu of a conclusion, I give several recommendations which should be heeded by the Czech policy-makers in their future decision-making, if they want to bring Czech society closer to the ideal of an open society which is ready to accept aliens who are willing to contribute to its development, and to make of them its members on an equal footing with the rest.
 
      As far as methodology is concerned, there is a difference between chapters 1 - 2 and chapters 3 - 4. The first two chapters survey and sum up a vast amount of theoretical and empirical material making use mainly of secondary resources. With the exception of the construction of four nationhood models in I. 2., these first two chapters do not have any other ambition than to make a clear synthesis of the results brought in to the field by other researchers. Such a synthesis seemed to be required by the fact that there has still not been a comprehensive discussion of migration and integration issues among Czech politicians, policy-makers and the general public. Starting at the zero point, the Czech debate should develop against the backdrop of major normative arguments and historical experiences available in the “West” which we are about to join.
  
      The methodology used changes sharply, however, once the paper enters the recent phase of developments in France, Britain and Germany and the emerging EU framework in chapter 3. Although the thesis of convergence of these developments has been suggested by several recent works, given the open-ended nature of the present processes and new facts accruing on a monthly basis, my efforts to substantiate this thesis have had to rely mainly on primary sources such as official documents, pieces of legislation and consultations with experts from these countries. This holds good even more strongly for the last chapter, the main part of which is devoted to the changes in Czech policies over the last four years. Here, my own “first hand” analysis of recent official documents and consultations with experts and government officials (both from the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Social Affairs) have been absolutely necessary. While the recent migration flows on Czech territory have already been analyzed by Czech demographers, I have had to rely on myself as far as migration and integration policies and their characterization and breakdown into “periods” or “phases” are concerned. Obviously, the same may be said about my conclusions and recommendations.
      
      
    I. Normative Theories and Models of Nationhood

    I. 1. 1. Two Contradictory Principles of the Liberal Nation State

    The contemporary international system has been progressively built up since the 17th century, when the principle of territorial sovereignty of states became entrenched in Europe. In the same century, the modern doctrine of human rights was formulated. This doctrine became the foundation of the liberal-democratic institutions which have been subsequently developed in the states of western Europe and northern America. The synthesis of the principle of territorial sovereignty with the principle of human rights brought about a specifically modern political form - the liberal nation-state. The two principles at its foundation are, however, potentially conflicting. One establishes a special ownership claim for members of a particular national community to a given territory, the other establishes the right to equal treatment (or concern) for all members of the universal community of humankind. The principle of national sovereignty requires the state to care for the well-being of one particular nation, rooted in a particular territory, the principle of human rights requires the state to respect the rights of human individuals, regardless of their national membership. The predicament of the liberal nation-state consists in a permanent effort to meet those two obligations which are, most of the time, at cross-purposes with one another.

      This tension between the particularistic and collectivistic mandate of states and the universalistic and individualistic spirit of their liberal constitutions is exemplified acutely in the dilemmas of their migration and integration policies. Wavering between the two poles is inescapable since – as the very expression adumbrates – the liberal nation state has to ensure both the collective goods of members of a particular nation, and the individual rights of members of the universal community of humankind (once they find themselves under its jurisdiction). In so far as these two memberships coincide, everything may run smoothly. The predicament begins when the state needs to adjudicate between claims of people who are nationals and claims of people who are not.

      Precisely this is usually at stake in immigration and integration policies. We can locate these policies on a continuum spanning the two poles. The predominance of the universalistic consideration amounts to the readiness of a state to open its gates to ethno-culturally alien immigrants and to include them among its citizens. The predominance of the particularistic consideration amounts to the closing of the state’s borders and the reserving of its own territory, resources and institutions for the members of its own nation, already living on the territory. All liberal nation-states try to strike a balance between these two poles and, thus, their immigration and integration policies are situated somewhere in the middle of this continuum. As stated above: being both “liberal” and “national”, they have to find a compromise between the individual rights of the person as a member of the human species and the specific claims of their own nationals.

      Normative theories reflect the predicament of the liberal nation-state. In looking for their premises they cannot but choose between the two general standpoints which are embodied in the two poles – universalistic individualism and particularistic collectivism. The first stance takes as its last reference point an individual as a member of the human species, the second stance takes as its last reference point a nation or an individual as a member of a nation. The first approach is deontological, that is to say, it gives priority to rights and principles over goods and consequences. The second approach is teleological or consequentialist, that is to say, it gives priority to goods (or goals) and consequences over rights and principles. In other words, the first stance focuses on rights of  members of the universal community of humankind and looks for principles which uphold them, the second stance focuses on the well-being or welfare of the members of a community and the consequences of state behavior for these values. Each of the two normative views is specified by two political theories: libertarianism and (egalitarian) liberalism make up the two wings of the first, communitarianism and (political) realism coexist in the second. Rather than concrete traditions (which they are as well) I will take these theories as ideal types, that is to say, as abstract models of reasoning with specific premises and theorems. My presentation relies on the general characteristics of these positions as they are used in contemporary political philosophy (Kymlicka 1990; Goodin, Pettit, 1993) and on their specification for the issues of migration and political membership as provided by Steiner (1992), Carens (1992), Walzer (1983) and Hendrickson (1992).     
    
    I. 1. 2. Libertarianism

      The basic premise is the right of individuals to have at their free disposal their lives (self-ownership)  and possessions to which they are entitled either by the legitimate appropriation of common natural resources or by consensual (i.e. voluntary) transactions with other individuals. From this point of view, a state is the mere result of contracts concerning the security and lawfulness of the given society: individuals give the state certain powers and resources so that it ensures their right to own themselves and their legitimately obtained goods, and that it enforces their contracts. Individuals do not owe anything to any association (including the state) unless they have promised it within the terms of a voluntarily agreed deal. As a result of free association of independent individuals the state is to serve those individuals, rather than  vice versa.
 
      Freedom of movement is part of the right of (self)ownership and, therefore, can be restricted only by the equal right of another individual or of an association of these. The free transactions of individuals should not be hindered by state borders since these are no more than the frontiers of jurisdiction agencies, established by free individuals to ensure their property rights. In an ideal world of libertarian principles the difference between moving within the borders of one’s state and across the state borders should be merely formal – crossing under the jurisdiction of another law enforcing agency. To the extent that individuals living in the realm of one agency (that is, of one state) agree to make contractual exchanges which entail the free movement of migrating individuals, there should be no restrictions on these movements.
   
    This quasi-absolute freedom of movement may be limited, however, if a libertarian accepts a Lockean proviso on the appropriation of free (that is, not yet owned) natural resources which stipulates that one can appropriate parts of them only to the extent that they are left “as good and enough” for the others. That would require that each human being has equal initial share in natural (that is, material) resources. It could imply a duty of redistribution on behalf of those who were born without any resources, including the possibility that they are allowed to enter a wealthy country where they have more opportunity to obtain their fair share of resources. By taking into account the initial distribution of material resources, and hence the conditions of possibility for the full exercise  of one’s right of (self)ownership, this modified version of libertarianism would move half-way towards (egalitarian) liberalism.
    
    I. 1. 3. Liberalism

    The basic premise of (egalitarian) liberalism is that each human individual has, morally speaking, equal moral worth or dignity and is, therefore, entitled to be treated on the same footing as others. This basic assumption of the equal dignity of all human beings is translated into the requirements of equal liberty, equal opportunity and fair share in material and social resources which ensure that freedoms and opportunities that are formally guaranteed may be exercised in reality. Given its stress on the fair distribution of opportunities and resources, liberalism has to give a much more important role to the state than that assigned to it by libertarianism. If the state wants to meet the basic requirements of liberal justice as they flow from the basic premise of equal dignity, it must equalize distributive inequalities. Although these requirements have a universal scope of validity and application (they are valid for and concern all humans), due to the division of humankind into many nation-states, they have to be realized first by one state vis-a-vis its own citizenry. In other words, in the absence of the universal polity, universal values have to be realized by a particular nation and human rights have to become civil rights.
   
      Despite its universalistic and individualistic moral  foundations, therefore, liberalism has to draw a line between the mutual rights and obligations of individuals belonging to a particular community and their obligations towards outsiders. This line can be thin and rather formal, or, alternatively, thick and rather substantive. The first view is taken up by those who pay lip-service to the practical expedience of the nation-state but still insist that it should conceive its obligations towards insiders and outsiders as basically equal. In terms of immigration policy it means that the only legitimate reason for the restriction of immigration is that it would jeopardize the human rights of insiders and/or the liberal nature of their society and, thus, the interests and rights of outsiders would be given more weight than the interests and rights of insiders, which would go against the principle of equal treatment.
      
      The second wing of liberalism, led by John Rawls, gives the line between insiders and outsiders more substantive implications. This is because  it conceives mutual rights and obligations as derived not only from a common humanity but also from principles of mutually advantageous cooperation, the product of which each of its participant should have a fair share. Since a nation-state provides the legal and political framework for a relatively closed system of cooperation, the obligations of its citizens towards one another are  qualitatively different and thicker than their obligations towards those who are outside  the common cooperative scheme – the outsiders do not contribute anything to the social product, and, therefore, they should not have any entitlement to it.
 
      Here the interests and rights of insiders are given clear precedence over the interests and rights of outsiders. Nevertheless, once the rights of insiders have been ensured the state has free leeway to accept as many immigrants as it can. Besides, it has a duty to accept those fleeing from persecution by states which deprived them of basic human rights. It should also accept people fleeing from natural catastrophes or civil wars and other violent conflicts which threaten their rights, lives and property. As long as it has already given assistance to its own needy people and still has free resources at its disposal it should help needy and starving people living outside its territory, either by assisting them in places they live in or by accepting a bearable number of them on its own territory.

      Roughly speaking, whereas the liberal state as conceived by Rawlsians is bound to ensure the full set of liberal rights (including welfare rights) of its own citizens, it is bound to ensure only the basic human rights of outsiders if they find themselves in emergency situations in which those rights are threatened. The obligation to help the needy is contingent upon its fulfilment within the given political community in the first place. In sum, the duties to outsiders are much thinner and weaker than the duties to insiders. This brings this type of liberalism closer to approaches which stand on the other side of the moral fence that separates  individualistic universalism from the collectivistic particularism.
      
      I. 1. 4. Communitarianism

        The basic premise of this theory is that an individual cannot live a valuable life unless he is a member of a thriving ethical community. His good is interwoven with the common good of one large cultural group – nation – which governs itself through a state. Participation in the common life generates a thick web of mutual claims and obligations which sharply contrasts with a very thin web of moral ties linking an individual of one national community to individuals of other national  communities. The thin moral ties do not stem from a cultural and political membership in one particular group but rather from a natural membership in the human species. Unlike the communal obligations, the universal ones are formulated negatively (Do not harm the other! Respect his property!)  and imply a positive action only if one encounters a stranger in some emergency situation in which his life, property or basic human rights are threatened. It follows that  communitarianism allows the closing of doors to any immigration claims which are not based on urgent needs such as the claims of people fleeing a war, natural catastrophe, starvation etc., i.e. situations where their very life and the fulfilment of their basic needs are jeopardized.
    
        I. 1. 5. Realism

        While communitarianism supposes that people are tied to one another by their common striving to better ethically their lives and cultivate their shared values, political realism supposes that people are tied together in one community by their common interest in securing themselves against a possible attack from without. Though realists do not deny the existence of other common interests (economic, cultural, ethical), they consider an interest in security and stable order as the hard core of the national interest. All other concerns are, in the last analysis, conditioned by the safe and predictable social environment and ensured by the state monopoly of the means of coercion which is capable of sustaining “law and order” inside the given territory and protecting borders with other states. All other values and interests of the citizens – material welfare and ethical well-being, prosperity and human rights – are ultimately contingent upon the security provided by the state. As long as the particular national interest is secured, the universalistic principles of humanity may be respected. Once there is a clash between them, however, the national interest should take precedence. This applies to all external relations towards people of other societies, including their claims to immigration. This tenet does not prevent realists from allowing help to needy outsiders whenever it does not collide with the particular interest of the nation, not to speak of those situations when to open doors to foreigners is not only neutral to the national interest but indeed promotes it (e.g., in the periods of labour shortage).  

        I. 1. 6. Grounds for Openness and Restrictiveness
     
        The immigration policies of liberal nation-states operate on a continuum between individualistic universalism and collectivistic particularism: the more they alleviate the sharp distinction between citizens and aliens – that is, the more they make possible an easy passage from the first status to the second via open doors to immigration and readiness to naturalization - the more they move towards the universalistic pole; the more they strengthen this distinction – that is, the more they make difficult to immigrate and get citizenship - the more they move towards the particularistic  pole. We can call the former kind of immigration policies liberal – be they motivated by libertarian or egalitarian principles - and the latter kind of immigration policies nationalist or restrictionist – be they motivated by communitarian or realist principles.
 
      If the political membership is to be liberal and democratic at the same time, it has to grant both individual rights, ensuring the independence and equal status of persons, and the collective right of self-determination. In the modern international system the universal rights of persons can be ensured only through their membership in particular national communities. Hence the two faces of citizenship – it amounts both to a legal status (with the rights and obligations it entails) and to a national identity. The terminology speaks for itself: nationality is usually merely another term for citizenship. While the contingencies of national domestic politics may let the pendulum swing in one direction or another at any given time, the long-run tendency is to settle somewhere in the middle.
 
      This long run “centrism” relies on the double normative grounding of modern politics adumbrated in I. 2. 1. Despite of the theoretical incompatibility of the premises of the two standpoints, there may be a substantial practical overlap between them. Only extreme forms of moral individualism and collectivism - such as libertarianism without a Lockean proviso and vulgar realism - exclude the opposite view altogether. Moderate versions of the two standpoints allow an incorporation of the opposite view on a subordinate level once the precedence of the favored perspective has been ensured. Thus according to liberals the collective interests or values of the community may be promoted so far as a full range of universal  individual rights is safeguarded, whilst according to communitarians, on the other hand,  individual rights should be guaranteed as long as their exercise does not clash with the common good.

      The promotion of the opposite value may even be found instrumental to the long run promotion of the prioritized value: thus, liberals may acknowledge that the universal principle of human dignity can be realized only in a stable and secure nation-state (realist view) and in a thriving cultural-political community (communitarian view), especially if the values of individual freedom and ethical pluralism belong to the primary set of common goods. On these grounds, normative individualism and universalism may justify sharper distinctions between insiders (citizens) and outsiders (aliens), and consequently more policed, or even closed borders, if it is arguably necessary for the advancement of individualist values. Normative collectivism and particularism, on the other hand, may justify the equalization of the standing of insiders and outsiders, and consequently less policed and more open borders, if it is arguably necessary for the advancement of the common good or of the national interest.
      
        I. 2. Nationhood Models
 
        I. 2. 1. Four Ideal Types
      An exact place on the continuum between liberal immigration (and integration) policies on the one hand and nationalist or restrictionist policies on the other is contingent not only upon outcomes of political decision-making processes but also on the historically constructed identities of nations and their states. The different genealogies and self-understandings of different nations tend to move them closer towards one or the other of the two normative standpoints which they have to combine. We can order various articulations of the two poles from the more universalistic, inclusive and liberal identities (and attitudes towards immigration and integration) to the more particularistic, exclusive  and nationalist identities (and attitudes towards immigration and integration).
 
      I propose a typology that rests on two oppositions. The first is that between the countries of the New and the Old World. Whereas in the former nation-building coincided with immigration and the settlement of a land, the latter conceived of themselves as endogenous, that is, as descendants of those who used to live on the national territory continuously up to the present since some mythical time of arrival and rooting. While for the nations of the New World, belonging was a result of free choice with an eye to the future, for the nations of the Old World, belonging was a result of historical destiny. The second opposition is that between ethnic and civic nations – the former vesting the criteria of membership in blood lineage, the latter in political belonging to the territorial state. By combination of the two oppositions we arrive at the following table.

      Table I.1
Four Ideal Types of Nationhood



 immigrant-settler
 endogenous
civic
 USA
 France, Britain
ethnic
 Israel
 Germany

 
      
      At first glance, the ethnic nation is nearly an absolute opposite of the immigrant nation – it is based on destiny rather than on free choice, and it is past-oriented rather than future-oriented. In this view, the civic nation strikes a middle ground between those two mutually exclusive options. The absolute opposition between immigrant and ethnic nations is, however, problematised by many examples of immigrant-settler nations which, within the process of modern European colonization, claimed an ethnic pedigree. Israel is chosen as a prime empirical prototype since unlike the others (such as Africaners in South Africa before 1994), Israel wants to be a liberal-democratic, “western-type” nation-state. To include Israel under the category of the immigrant ethnic nation presupposes that we make a qualitative difference between a modern Israeli identity, linked to the Zionist state-building project, and a pre-modern diasporic Judaism that referred to statehood only in relation to the biblical past or the messianic future. (Attias, Benbassa: 2001) The secularization or politicization of the religious concept of the statehood into the Zionist project of return and state-building amounted to a radical transformation of Jewishness: migration and settlement in Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel there coincided with the creation of the national identity in the modern sense of this word. As the title of the play by Theodor Herzl – Das Altneuland (1907) - intimates, the Zionist project combines the opposite traits of the New- and Old-World identities: a community of destiny was to be realized as a community of free choice and radiant future. Unlike the revolutionary French or Americans, who conceived of their republics as the homelands of all humankind, Zionists conceived of Israel as the homeland for Jews only as they are defined by blood lineage and religion.
      
      I. 2. 2. The Immigrant Civic Nation: USA

    In the USA, Australia  or Canada, immigration and the settling of immigrants coincided with nation-building. As these nations were created out of the people who originally belonged to other nations, their immigration and integration policies have been in the long run closer to the universalistic and inclusive end of the continuum. They have encouraged permanent immigration and treated most legal immigrants as future citizens. Once ethnic and racial prejudices were overcome in the last quarter of the 20th century, the USA, Canada and Australia came progressively to conceive of themselves as “multicultural” (that is, multi-ethnic or multi-racial) nations. (Glazer 1994; Takaki 1993; Kymlicka 1997)
      
      I. 2. 3. The Endogenous Civic Nation

      I. 2. 3. 1. Assimilationist Republic: France

      France is a good example of how a civic nation in Europe may occupy a middle position between an immigrant civic and endogenous ethnic nationhood. The French founded their modern identity not only on past ethnic history but also on the projected political future, that is, on a conscious choice of the republican form of government. This political form allegedly expressed universal values of humankind so that, in principle, France was supposed to be the true fatherland of all freedom-loving people across the whole world. Since the times of Napoleon, this revolutionary universalism provided an ideological cover for the French colonial project, and, simultaneously, made France quite open and inclusive as far as immigration was concerned. The integration pattern, however, had been distinctly assimilationist. The inclusion of others (be they colonized or immigrants) required that they abandon their particular ethnic identities and fully buy into the French national culture which allegedly incarnated universal values of humanity. (Brubaker 1992; Dumont 1990; Favell 1998)    
      
      I. 2. 3. 2. The Pluralistic Empire: Great Britain

      A different example of the civic nation is Great Britain. As an empire, Great Britain was supposed to be a universal commonwealth for many particular regional, religious or ethnic groups. They could retain their differences under one imperial roof, albeit under the condition that they respected the superiority of English culture. The development of liberal norms with their antiracist and antidiscriminatory thrust brought about a transformation of this hierarchical cultural pluralism into a liberal multiculturalism. The latter view conceives of partial ethnic identities as complementary to an overarching Britishness. Since Britain was traditionally a country of emigration, rather than immigration, liberal immigration policy towards oversees “subjects” between 1948 and 1962 was not motivated by a genuine openness towards them but rather by the goal of keeping the Empire. Once this goal proved unattainable during the 1950s, Britain subscribed to a zero-immigration tenet. (Favell 1998; Grillo 1998; Hansen 2000; Parekh 1990)
      
    I. 2. 4. The Endogenous Ethnic Nation: Germany

      Whereas political membership in Britain and France was traditionally conferred by ius soli (that is, on the basis of the place of birth), in Germany it was conferred by ius sanguinis (that is, on the basis of blood lineage). This constitutive element of German nationhood was further strengthened by the homeland role which the Federal Republic of Germany played for East Germany and the East European German diaspora: this role meant that West Germany had to care for all ethnic Germans no matter where they lived or whether they were formally German citizens or not. This implied very exclusivist and particularistic attitudes to immigration and integration in the years of post-war reconstruction. Whereas Germans conferred an automatic right to citizenship on all ethnic Germans, regardless of whether they had ever lived in Germany, they denied this right to their labour immigrants even if they had resided in the country for a long time. (Brubaker 1992; Dumont 1983, 1985; Joppke 1999)

    I. 2. 5. The Immigrant Ethnic Nation

      Since the establishment of Israel, Jewish immigrants (and their family members), called “returnees”, have been given automatic citizenship and large assistance has been provided for their integration - over two million Jews have arrived and been absorbed into Israeli society since 1948. The right of return has been denied to the Palestinian exiles of 1948 - originally more than 700 000, now around 3,5 million. The Arabs who stayed – originally 186 000, now more than 1 million – have been given citizenship but many of their rights have been curtailed (the right of movement, land property rights, political rights etc.) and the development of their communities has been barred by many formal and informal measures. There is no other avenue for immigration and naturalization than the ethnoreligious one. Since the first Intifada (1987 – 1993) which caused the frequent closure of the territories occupied in 1967, and especially since 1991, when the Israelis began to regulate entry into Israel proper from the territories, a growing number of guestworkers has been accepted (around 200 000 of them were in Israel in 2003) with no opportunity to integrate and naturalize. (Dieckhoff 1998; Kimmerling 1989; Lustick 1980; Smooha 2001)

    Chapter II

    II. 1. United States of America

    II. 1. 1. Immigration Policies

    The universalistic and liberal potential of the immigrant civic nationhood of North Americans was captured by G. Washington’s expression “an asylum of all nations” and by W. Whitman’s expression “nation of nations”. (Whitman, 1926: 38) For the most part of American history, however, this open and inclusive identity was superseded by a closed and exclusive one. Whereas the former identity derived nationality from immigration and a liberal-democratic creed, the latter hypostasized an ethnic core of White Protestant Anglo-Saxonism. This conception was epitomized by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese labourers from entering the United States and those who had already been in the U.S. from becoming naturalized. (It was repealed in 1943.) The National Origins Act of 1924 restricted immigration to a few Northern European source countries. It established a quota system which was supposed to reproduce existing ethnoracial proportions as determined by the 1920 census. By contrast, the Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act of 1965 established source-country universalism and thus opened the door to the large-scale immigration from the Third World. “The new act established an Eastern hemisphere ceiling of 170 000 new immigrant visas per year (complemented by 120 000 visas for the Western hemisphere), distributed according to a seven-category preference system prioritizing family reunification, and stipulating that from no country the total number of new immigrants was to exceed 20 000.” (Joppke, 1999: 27)
 
      The cap of 120 000 per year for Western hemisphere immigrants, whose number was not restricted before, unleashed illegal immigration over the Mexican-US land border. This problem was tackled by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 which legalized the status of about three million undocumented immigrants in the country but failed to stop the further inflow which was fuelled by the client politics of Mexican and employers’ lobby groups (for client politics see I. 1. 8.) Those groups’ pressure ensured a toothless sanctions scheme that was partly defended with reference to the civil rights imperative of non-discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity. It was thus client politics in combination with civil rights discourse that stood in the way of effective immigration control.
      The Legal Immigration Act of 1990 was a result of efforts to balance family-based with skill-based immigration and thus, among other things, to redress an imbalance in the national origins of post-1965 immigration, which was skewed towards a few Third World countries, especially Hispanic and Asian. Attacks against the alleged racism of this project prevented the skill-based criterion from overtaking the family-based criterion and ultimately a compromise was found by “expanding the pie”, that is, by an increase in legal immigration to the United States by almost 40%.

      Since the 1960s and 1970s the civil rights movement has strengthened progressively the rights of ashore aliens, including illegal ones and asylum seekers, against the American government whereby it enhanced the universalistic and liberal as against the particularistic and nationalist pole of immigration politics. Classical immigration law – dominant in the 1880s and 90s, had its crux in the latter pole. The state had no obligations to the alien except those explicitly consented to, and it had a sovereign, unfettered, “plenary power” over the admission, expulsion and naturalization of aliens. This sovereignty was exerted on behalf of an ethno-racially defined national community. By contrast, postclassical immigration law conceives of individuals as invested with inalienable human rights and social ties to the community (represented by the state), even if the community did not consent to his/her entry to the territory. (Joppke, 1999: 45)
 
      While civil rights discourse penetrated the courts and  pushed them in the liberal direction, public opinion reacted and tried to swing the pendulum back towards the nationalist pole in the 80s and 90s. The symbolic hallmark of this change is the passing of Proposition 187 by Californian voters in November 1994. This proposition, dubbed as the “Save Our State” (SOS) initiative, wanted to “bar illegal aliens from most state-provided services, including non-emergency health care and school education.” (Joppke 1999: 55) Subsequently, it was blocked by courts. The nationalist movement was supposed to be enshrined in the Immigration Control and Financial Responsibility Act of 1996. The client politics and civil rights opposition watered down its original restrictive impulse to a quite benign modification of liberal openness.
 
    The anti-immigration populist wave of the 90s was accompanied by intellectual challengers to immigration liberalism who argued both from economic premises (immigrants as a burden to the welfare system), social premises (immigrants as a threat to the country’s own low-skilled workers), and moral and cultural premises (immigrants as eroding the values on which the cohesion of the American republics rests). These restrictionist opinions were voiced across the whole ideological mainstream from the left liberals (Lind, 1995), through the conservative liberals (Glazer, 1995) to the right-wingers (Brimelow, 1995).

      II. 1. 2. Integration Policies

      II. 1. 2. 1. Ethnic Pluralism

    The idea of many people from many “endogenous” nations coming together and forming freely a new “nation of nations” found its expression in Israel Zangwill’s notion of America as “the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming”. (Zangwill, 1909) This idea evoked “the bi-directional adjustment of immigrants and receiving society” while covering up “the uni-directional assimilation of immigrants into an already established Anglo-American culture.” (Joppke, 1999: 147) Against the melting-pot ideology, Horace Kallen proposed to conceive America as a “federation of nationalities”, in which particular ethnic differences should co-exist with an overarching civic identity. (Kallen, 1956; 1996) Kallen gave a lofty normative meaning to the process of ethnic networking which has always existed among American immigrants for whom ethnicity was a major resource of economic and social integration.

      The sociology of integration of the 30s and 40s assumed a progressive waning of ethnic consciousness with the second and third generation – the self-help networks of one’s ethno-cultural group should serve only as an “ethnic cushion” on the way from exclusion to full integration amounting to cultural assimilation (Park, 1950) Against this assumption, Kallen and his multiculturalist followers have conjured up a permanent ethnocultural pluralism. Recent theories of “symbolic ethnicity” described the processes of ethnic revival in the 60s and 70s which correspond to this idea. (Gans, 1979; Waters 1990) These theories could take cue from an old observation of Marcus Lee Hansen that the third generation tries to remember what the second generation tried to forget (Hansen, 1996) In other words, while ethnic identity was a resource of integration for the first generation, and often a burden for the second generation, it is a voluntary choice and a means of self-fashioning for the third generation.
    
    II. 1. 2. 3. Racial Pluralism

      A voluntary pluralism of symbolic ethnicity for European Americans is complemented by the pluralism of racial groups whose difference is grounded in their uneven position within the social division of labour stemming from the period of colonization or enslavement. (Blauner, 1994) Since the adoption of the new regime of immigration in 1965 the ethnoracial composition of immigrants has been reversed in favor of non-Europeans: “Whereas almost 80 per cent of the older immigrants were European, about 84 per cent of post-1971 immigrants came from Latin America (49, 6 per cent) and Asia (34.5 per cent).” (Joppke, 1999: 150) They have followed only partly the ethnic pattern of integration, typical for previous waves of European immigrants. One of the causes has probably lain in the social meanings which certain physical traits had in the American racist past, the meanings which survived deep in the post-civil rights movement era. But part of the responsibility for the persevering of racial categories lies with the radical fringe of the civil rights movement itself. Out of this fringe emerged a movement of racial liberation (Black Power) which reversed the original thrust to civic inclusion and equality of individual rights and opportunities and began to profess the separation of racial groups. (Carmichael, Hamilton, 1967) To this reversal, perverse effects of affirmative action programs added up: these programs were supposed to enhance the integration and equality of individuals from previously excluded race groups, but their emphasis on racial characteristics actually reinforced racial divisions by giving incentives to these individuals to assert and claim their racial distinctiveness rather than to shed it. The separatism of radicals, the perverse effects of affirmative action and debates about bilingual education in the Southwest have been compounded by “culture wars” in the U.S. campuses where the term “multiculturalism” has been used mainly in connection with the curriculum battles about new programs of ethnic studies of racial groups. (Takaki, 1994; Gutierrez 1994)
 
      All these factors reinforced the tendency of racial groups to entrench themselves in their specificity and encouraged newcomers, whose bulk came from Latin America and Asia to adopt “Asian” and “Hispanic” identity even though these identities, unlike European ethnic identities, had anything but a real cultural or psychological basis and had no meaning beyond the American domestic sphere: rather than being transplantations of a specific cultural heritage, they have been produced by “the structural positioning of immigrant groups in the receiving society” (Joppke, 1999: 178). Racial identity is panethnic in the sense that it may cover quite disparate and heterogeneous ethnic or national cultures: what is the shared cultural basis between Koreans, Chinese and Japanese which makes them all “Asian”? And what - save the Spanish language - do Puerto Ricans and Mexicans have in common so as to invite the single category of “Latinos”?

      In the last quarter of the past century, “race” has ceased to be exclusively a form of discrimination and has become a source of opportunity as well -  especially for those already advantaged members of groups disposed to racialization. Ethnic entrepreneurs and power-brokers are racializing ethnic boundaries so that they can “model their immigrant constituencies as victimized clients of the state, and to clamour for affirmative-action privileges: preferential college admission, government jobs and business contracts, and political representation in majority minority districts ... However, contrary to scare scenarios of ‘Balkanization’, multicultural élite discourse should not be mistaken for the common immigrant’s unwillingness to integrate, of which there is little evidence. On the ground, ethnicity functions much as it always did, as a source of adjusting to the new society.” (Joppke, 1999: 185)

        II. 2. France
 
      II. 2. 1. Immigration
 
    In contrast to nations of immigrants-settlers (be they civic as USA, or ethnic as Israel) for the French national identity immigration did not play a constitutive role. Still, France is the only society in the Old World which was a country of immigration from the mid-19th century to the 1960s. Without being a nation of immigrants, France has been, nevertheless, a country of immigration. (Geddes, 2003: 52) The positive acceptance of immigrants was allowed by the universalistic thrust of modern French identity as it was created at the end of the 18th century. The French nation was constituted in 1789 as a result of democratic rather than ethnonational revolution. That is to say, the raison d’etre of the republic was not primarily political self-determination by an ethnocultural group but rather the realization of moral principles - égalité, liberté, fraternité. Given the assumption that these principles were universal, that is, valid for every human being, France was a universal republic of humankind. No wonder that for a short period of time after the French Revolution, every foreigner who entered French soil and was ready to subscribe to the founding values of the Republic was immediately entitled to French citizenship. (Moreau, 1999:  321)
 
    There have been three major waves of immigration to France. The first wave of immigration began in the wake of the Napoleonic wars and achieved its momentum from the 1850s onwards during a period of high-intensity industrialization accompanied by the rising demand for unqualified labour and a simultaneous drop in the birth rate (due to the use of techniques of natural contraception). (Bernard  2002, 66) The second wave of immigration, after the First World War, was already run by the State, though through a non-governmental organization Société générale d’immigration (SGI) that was in charge of recruitment from 1924. In the 1920s. the influx of foreigners was proportionally greater than in the United States. (Bernard, 2002: 71) During the 1930s, due to the economic crisis, the first restrictive measures were taken and supported by flurries of populist xenophobia. In the first two waves, Europeans prevailed, in the former coming mainly from the border countries of Belgium, Italy, Spain, Germany and Switzerland, in the latter coming mainly from Poland, Portugal and Eastern Europe. The number of Africans was insignificant.

    The third wave was the post-war immigration of Les trentes gloriouses. In this influx, Spanish and Portuguese were progressively outweighed by North Africans,  especially Algerians: ”between 1949 and 1955, 180 000 Algerian Muslims settled in the metropole compared to 160 000 workers of other nationalities.” (Bernard 2002, 79) Despite the original idea of national and regional criteria of selection (with preference for North Europe and northern regions of Italy and Spain), a government ordinance of November 2, 1945 did not mention any. The new governmental organization was set up after the liberation to recruit and settle the immigrants – Office national d’immigration (ONI), that will become Office des migrations internationales (OMI) in 1984. In 1952 another institution was established: Office francais de protection des réfugiés et des apatrides (OFPRAH).

      Having French nationality, Algerians have been allowed to migrate freely in their colonial metropolis since 1946. Nevertheless, from 1954, when their nationalist uprising in Algeria broke out, until 1962, when de Gaulle signed the Treaty of Evian on Algerian independence, Algerian immigrants in France found themselves in the enemy’s territory, torn up by the violent struggle of two main nationalist groups – Front de libération nationale and Mouvement national algérien – which tried to get control over the Algerian population in France and, to a certain extent, export civil war to the French territory. Even after the Treaty of Evian, the influx of Algerians did not abate.

    Due to the oil crisis of 1973, labour immigration stopped in 1974, after the election of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing as French president.  The second half of the 70s were characterized by systematic and unsuccessful efforts to have immigrant workers returned to their countries of origin. The Bonnet Law of 1980 modified the law of 1945 by strengthening control and repressive measures for the breach of regulations. These measures included expulsions for non-regularized immigrants, threatening even the second-generation  immigrants who had grown up in France – called since the early 80s les beurs. Francois Mitterrand took presidential powers in 1981 with a strong antiracist rhetoric: he promised to abolish expulsions of second-generation immigrants, to fight their discrimination and to interrupt the program trying to encourage immigrants to return to their places of origin. In 1982, a measure was taken allowing 130 000 clandestine immigrants to regularize their stay in France. Mitterrand also raised the issue of immigrants’ right to vote at municipal elections. These xenophilic gestures and rhetoric were intended to unify the left-wing camp and to split the right-wing camp even if at the cost of strengthening the popularity of Jean Marie le Pen’s Front National. (Mitterand’s xenophilic rhetoric  represents a case of left-wing populism, unique in Europe and allowed obviously by the universalistic foundations of French identity.)
 
    Mitterand’s Machiavellian moves brought about some real results such as the law of 1984 introducing la carte de séjour de dix ans (a green card for ten years) that put an end to repeated applications for a prolongation of stay on the basis of employment. After that, however, Mitterand’s Machiavellianism backfired and the far right pushed the left onto the long-term defensive. The far right exploited the slogan le droit a la différence (the right to be different) - originally coined by parts of the Left - to stress the inassimilability of (North) Africans. The Chirac government (taking power in 1986) made a clear U-turn when it set up conditions for the renewal of la carte de séjour, justified expulsions of non-regulars, introduced expulsion as a form of second punishment (double peine) for immigrants who commited a crime (abolished only by Nicolas Sarkosy in 2003) and abolished the automatic acquisition of nationality for persons born in France to foreign parents. This tough approach to immigration was symbolized by the Minister of the Interior Charles Pasqua. The  softening corrections were brought about by the Law Joxe (after the left wing Minister of the Interior) in 1989. The return of the Right (with Pasqua again heading the Interior) in 1993 brought again a hardening of immigration control – restricting jus soli by additional conditions, giving additional powers to the police in its handling of immigrants and having its peak in the Law Pasqua modifying the ordinance of November 2, 1945 with many restrictive measures focused on making difficult the entry and stay of immigrants and the reunification of their families (some of these measures were subsequently blocked by the Conseil Constitutionel). (Geddes, 2003: 62)
  
    In 1996, the so-called sans-papiers (undocumented) entered the public scene. (The very word reverses the burden of blame since instead of being “down-by-law”, that is, culprits themselves, they are portrayed  rather as victims, people who are in need of official status.) The Law Debré (after the Minister of the Interior of the right-wing government) of 1997 was passed in a period of heated public controversy and mass mobilization of solidarity with non-regulars. In the spring of this year the right lost the elections and the government of Lionel Jospin made immediately positive gestures in the direction of sans-papiers and vowed to overhaul the whole immigration question. Patrick Weil was summoned to suggest a set of guidelines for future politicies of immigration and nationality. Two laws resulted from these efforts at the beginning of 1998: the Law Guigou on nationality and the Law Chevenement on immigration. The latter scrapped some of the restrictive conditions of the Law Pasqua on acquisition of la carte de séjour and made easier family reunification. The Law Guigou lifted up the restriction on jus soli and thus went back to the legislation before 1993: children born in France to foreign parents became French when they reached the age of majority unless they wished otherwise. However, their parents have the right to get the citizenship for them only when they reach the age of 13 and not – as it was the case before 1993 – immediately after they are born. (Bernard 2002, 106)

    II. 2. 2. Integration Policies

    II. 2. 2. 1. Assimilatory Integration

    The reverse side of the openness and inclusiveness of the French republic has been an assumption that universal values are embodied not only by the political regime but also by the particular form of French culture and that, therefore, to accede to these values requires that an individual imbibe this culture. This combination of political inclusiveness with cultural imperialism was the leading thread of French integration policies, no matter whether they concerned regional subcultures (like Bretons, Basques, Corsicans), immigrants to France or populations swept by the mission civilisatrice of French colonialism. (Grillo, 1998:  107 – 110) All these groups were supposed to be stripped of their particularities and garbed in the new cultural clothes of the French nation – its language, memories of past tribulations and the project of a glorious future.
 
      The first wave of immigration was in full flow when the Third Republic renewed the French creed of la nation, une et indivisible and set out on the route to the systematic homogenization of French society, still at that time permeated by regional, linguistic and other cultural differences. (Weber, 1976) The main vehicles of this project were the school, army, trade-unions and left-wing political parties. All these institutions moulded Frenchmen not only out of Bretons, Basques, Occitans or Jews but also out of the children of Belgians, Spanish, Italians or Swiss who decided to immigrate. The nationality laws relying on jus soli endowed the children of foreigners born in France with the opportunity to get citizenship with a minimum of additional conditions required.
 
    “The French cultural Jacobinism” (Schnapper, 1994: 92) considered cultural group differences as a barrier to civic freedom and equality. Not communities but individuals were supposed to be integrated, that is to say assimilated. In the 70s the word assimilation went out of fashion and was replaced by “integration”, but the regulative ideal was still the same. The measures of social integration, including welfare provision, were formulated systematically in a universal language and in color-blind fashion – targeted are “disadvantaged neighborhoods” or “the poor” and “the excluded” rather than racial, ethnic or national groups. Policies of integration passed as part of the politique de la ville (urban policy). (Geddes, 2003: 67) The French have had problems even with the gathering of statistical data about immigrants since it has been conceived as inappropriate to take into account the ethnic background of immigrant groups. The very “concept of minority is absent from French law with policy-makers finding it very difficult to think about the notion of minority groups” (Geddes, 2003: 66). This causes difficulties to the French when it comes to coping with certain EU anti-discriminatory directives which expect that the government gathers data about the ethnic makeup of the population.

    With growing awareness of the difficulties of integration of large numbers of non-European and non-Christian immigrants, neo-republican discourse evoked a threat of “lebanonization” or “balkanization”  which would fragment France into a “juxtaposition of communities” or “ghettos”. With its task to fight this “ethnicization” of public life, a disease called in French pejoratively communautarism (“communitarianism”), “the Haut Conseil a l’Intégration was established as a think tank in 1990 under the direction of a Secretary-General for Integration based in the Prime Minister’s office … [its] first report in 1991 was entitled ‘For a French model of integration’ informed by ‘a logic of equality and not a logic of minorities’.” (Geddes, 2003: 70)
    
    II. 2. 2. 2. Islam

      Since the end of the 80s the problem of the cultural integration of immigrants was epitomized in the so-called affaire du foulard (headscarf affair). The ideal established by the Third Republic stipulates the secular nature of the educational institutions in which no visible symbols of religious differences are allowed. Public spaces such as the school must stress commonalities based on secular values of liberty and equality, not divergences stemming from specific ethnic or religious loyalties. That is why some headmasters and school directors did not allow Muslim girls wearing headscarves to enter their schools. The first case took place in November 1989 in a school in Creil, but since then, several other conflicts have followed, surrounded by several waves of heated public discussion. A related issue is the unwillingness of Muslim parents to allow their children to participate in sport classes where boys and girls exercise together only in light sportswear. Both instances are highly symbolic since they pertain to two issues in which the traditional Muslim cultures clash with the modern definition of the French nation – the separation between religion and politics, and the principle of equality between, and integration (as opposed to segregation) of, sexes. (Castles, Miller, 1993: 241 – 242; Khosrokhavar, 1997)

    Since the early 90s there have been attempts – both from the Right and from the Left - to create a French Islam and to incorporate representatives of France’s Muslim communities into the State by means of special advisory or representative bodies. This concern took on greater urgency after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington: special unease has been aroused by the fact that “many mosques, Muslim schools and Islamic cultural centres were financed by the governments of Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia and Algeria … Many imams were trained outside Europe.” (Geddes, 2003: 71) Hence, the critical question of current debates is how to shift the organizational and cultural centre of gravity of spiritual life of French Muslims to Europe, hopefully resulting in a mellowing of some of those Islamic tenets that are incompatible with a liberal-democratic societal structure.
        
      II. 3. Great Britain

     II. 3. 1. Immigration Policies

      Britain's advantageous position as an island has given her an opportunity to develop a system which has combined strong external frontier controls with a much weaker internal control regime (signalled for instance by the absence of identity cards). A similar kind of duality has pertained in respect to non-White minorities immigrating in huge numbers after W.W.II: “British ‘race relations’ policy has been centred on the strict control of immigration defined as unwanted (from African, Asian and Caribbean people in the 1960s and 1970s and by asylum seekers more recently) coupled with anti-discrimination laws that tackle both direct and indirect discrimination and allow for positive action to tackle inequalities.” (Geddes 2003: 30)

      Unlike the United States and, to a certain extent France, Great Britain has never conceived of itself as a country of immigration. For a long period it was rather a country of emigration – so long as the empire expanded, British colonists set out to settle newly acquired lands. The post-war reversal of this flow – that is, the immigration from the New Commonwealth - was perceived as an unpleasant price for the maintenance of Empire. The legal act passed after the war in reaction to the independence of India in 1947 – the British Nationality Act of 1948 - invested some 600 000 000 subjects with equal right of entry and settlement in Britain. Everything was done, however, to avoid this happening in practice.
 
      Not that there was no labour shortage. The opposite was true. In the face of it “the Royal Commission on Population recommended in 1949 to recruit some 140 000 young immigrants, but only if they were ‘of good human stock and ... not prevented by their religion or race from intermarrying with the host population and becoming merged in it’ (...) While rejecting any concerted effort to recruit black immigrants, Britain engaged in its one and only active immigration policy in the postwar period, luring some 350 000 European Volunteer Workers – mostly Poles and other Europeans ‘displaced’ by the war – into the country. They were welcome, and not just as German-style guestworkers. As a civil servant in the Ministry of Labour explained, the EVW’s ‘are coming definitely for permanent settlement here with a view to their intermarrying and complete absorption into our own working population’. Aliens being preferred to fellow subjects of the Crown – never was the disjunction between formal membership status and identity more obvious.” (Joppke 1999: 105)
 
      How then to explain the fact that Britain maintained the BNA regulation until 1962? Two factors combined: a real and sentimental attachment to the Old Commonwealth of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (a sort of “greater Britain”), and a reluctance to apply officially racial criteria by which the population of these countries would be distinguished from that of the New Commonwealth countries. Unable to introduce such measures, “British politicians faced the choice of casting the net of migration control over the whole of the Commonwealth or accepting New Commonwealth migration as the unavoidable corollary of the Old; they chose the latter. Policy-makers accepted the transformation of  the United Kingdom into a multicultural society as the price of supporting the ties between Britain and the Old Dominions.” (Hansen 2000: 19)

      During the 50s, and especially after race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill at the end of 1958, voices had been rising about the necessity of curbing the unstoppable inflow of non-Whites allowed by the BNA of 1948. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 established the notion of belonging – i.e., birth and ancestry – to filter the colored from the Anglo-Saxon whites. The Commowealth Immigrants Act of 1968 took away the right of entry from 200 000 East African Asians with UK government passports, who found themselves victimized by the Africanization drive of independent Kenya. “Britain thus came close to violating one of the fundamental norms of the international state system: the obligation of states to accept their own nationals.” (Joppke, 1999: 109) The justification for it was couched in terms of preventing social conflict stemming from an implantation of people of different habit, religion and culture.

      According to the Bill of 1968, to be allowed to enter the United Kingdom, UK passport-holders had to prove a “substantial connection” with the UK – besides a birth in the UK also a parental or grandparental connection. Inclusive legal status (citizenship) was narrowed by an exclusive criterion of belonging. De iure criterion was ancestry and birth, de facto criterion was race: the non-White subjects of the Empire had to stay out. Free immigration was to be possible only if it could be conceived of as a return, that is, if those who came were descendants of white British settlers.
 
      The Immigration Act of 1971 dealt for the first time jointly with aliens and Commonwealth citizens, lowering the status of the latter almost to that of the former. For this purpose it introduced “the notion of patriality to determine who had the ‘right of abode’ and thus was exempt from immigration control. Building on the concept of substantial connection in the 1968 Act, patrials were all citizens of the United Kingdom and colonies born in or with an ancestral connection to the UK, citizens who had settled for at least five years, and - this was a novelty - any Commonwealth citizen with a parent or grandparent in the UK. The last clause finally realized the second objective of British immigration policy, first intimated in the grandfather clause of 1968, to prioritize the re-migration of British settlers.” (Joppke, 1999: 111)

      Distinguishing between those citizens of the Commonwealth  with and without the right to enter was, however, a rather uncommon relic of the politics of Empire: it removed the distinction between the control of aliens and of citizens and thus severed immigration law from the citizenship law. The British Nationality Act of 1981 was supposed to remove this anomaly and thus completely normalize the British system, that is, get it out of post-colonial orbit. The old composite “citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies” was broken up into three separate citizenships of which only one – British Citizenship (having incorporated and replaced the category of patriality) – entailed the right of abode in the UK while the two others – British Dependent Territory Citizenship and British Overseas Citizenship – did not entail this right, even if the government acknowledged certain “moral and constitutional responsibilities” to their holders. The most contested concept of the BNA of 1981 was  the restriction of jus soli only to children born to parents with British citizenship or settled in the UK. This was justified by reference to the fact of greater transnational mobility which supposedly made the place of birth a mere accident that should not entail automatically the right of abode. This general argument about national belonging notwithstanding, “the true animus of restricting jus soli was effective immigration control. Once endowed with citizen children, non-citizen parents who had entered illegally or overstayed might be more difficult to deport.” (Joppke, 1999: 113)
 
      After the 1971 immigration act reined in primary immigration, secondary immigration – that is, family reunification – and asylum seeking became the main sources of immigration. In both instances the state does not accept foreigners according to its sovereign discretion but rather is compelled to do so by family and asylum rights. In Britain, however, due to the absence of a written constitution, for a long time, these rights had been not assured automatically. “Until the passing of the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act in 1993, there was no separate asylum law. Asylum was processed according to the Immigration Act of 1971 and the non-statutory Immigration Rules.” (Joppke, 1999: 129) This was reflected in the rhetorical and structural conflation of asylum and immigration policy: “The cleavages and discursive metaphors of immigration policy became exactly mirrored in asylum policy: asylum advocates calling racist the government's assumption that most refugees were economic migrants, and the government defending its get-tough approach toward asylum-seekers as in the interest of firm immigration control and good race relations.” (Joppke, 1999: 128) The 1993 Act was already anticipating the arrival of European standards granting an in-country right of appeal for all asylum seekers. Certain measures such as the fingerprinting of applicants or a “fast-tracking” of “manifestly unfounded” applications (e.g. these coming from “safe third countries”) became on the other hand forerunners of the common European asylum policy.

      The 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, pushed through by the Labour majority after the victorious elections of 1997, introduced vouchers for asylum seekers in place of cash-paid welfare benefits and established a system of dispersal of asylum seekers so that they did not concentrate in London and the south-east. A government White Paper of February 2002 proposed to abolish vouchers and to establish a network of induction, accommodation, detention and removal centres. (Geddes, 2003: 43)  
       
      II. 3. 2. Integration Policies

     II. 3. 2. 1. Pluralistic Integration

      The origin of British pluralistic integration lies with the history and idea of empire as a political roof encompassing many ethnic and regional cultures, albeit unequal and subordinate to English culture. The difference between this pluralistic imperialism and the French assimilatory imperialism is instructive. (Favell 1998, Grillo 1998)  The French conceived of their mission civilizatrice as a revolutionary transformation of the savage cultures into French culture, which was supposed to be the only true embodiment of universal civilization. The British felt endowed with a civilizing mission as well, but they respected particular cultures and ways of life as things to be polished rather than abolished and replaced by a ready-made external model. While the French assumed cultural assimilation as a precondition of socio-economic and political integration, the British tried to articulate integration at the socio-economic and political levels with the maintenance of group differences at the cultural level. In contrast to both the French model of assimilation and the American model of “melting-pot”, Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins defined integration in 1966 as “equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.” (qtd in Geddes, 2003: 44) The report produced by the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, which was established after Labour's 1997 election victory, updated the same vision when it called for employers to be required to produce employment equity plans (i.e. to mend “indirect discrimination”), for political parties to put on their electoral lists members of ethnic minorities, and evoked the idea of the UK as a “community of communities” (Parekh 1999) (The last expression nicely encapsulates a difference with the French neo-republicans who would take it as a national catastrophe if France was seen this way.) British integration policies have combined measures of multicultural accommodation on the one hand with measures of anti-discrimination and equal opportunity on the other. I will examine both types of policies in the two following sub-sections.
       
      II. 3. 2. 1. 1. Official Multiculturalism

      Jenkins’ speech quoted above marked a symbolic beginning for official multiculturalism. The pragmatic common-law approach enforced minimal limits to diversity while allowing a wide range of non-European practices: it outlawed  polygamy, forced marriage, female circumcision, and some Muslim divorces while giving many exemptions which allowed ethnoreligious groups to continue their ways of life: “Turbaned Sikhs, for instance, are exempted by the Employment Act 1989 from the Construction (Head Protection) Regulations of 1989 ... The Slaughterhouse Act 1974 and Slaughter of Poultry Act 1967 contain exemptions for Muslims and Jews from the legal duty of stunning animals before killing them, enabling them to comply with their religious laws and traditions … In Mandla v. Dowell Lee (1983), the House of Lords ruled against a headmaster who had refused to admit a Sikh boy as a pupil solely because he was wearing a turban and thus in violation of the official dress code. In this British ‘turban affair’ that never was, the Law Lords found the headmaster's refusal ‘indirect discrimination’ according to the 1976 Act [see further] – a notionally neutral measure having a disproportionately negative effect on an ethnic minority that was not  ‘justifiable’ on non-racial grounds ... Similar help from the ‘indirect discrimination’ clause came in the area of employment. Religiously prescribed beards, headgear, and time-outs for prayer and religious observance are no longer easily discriminated against in the name of safety, hygiene, or work schedules.” (Joppke, 1999: 233 – 235)
           
    In the area of education, the government report Education for All (delivered by a commission headed by Lord Swann in 1985) asked the state to help ethnic minorities to maintain their distinct identities  and regarded ‘colour-blindness’ “as potentially just as negative as a straightforward rejection of people with a different skin colour since both types of attitude seek to deny the validity of an important aspect of a person's identity.” (qtd in Joppke, 1999: 236)  
      
    II. 3. 2. 1. 2. “Race Relations” and Antidiscrimination

      Whereas in the U.S., the politics of race was an outgrowth of a vast social movement, in Britain it was rather “an anticipatory move by élites who were eager to avoid the explosive race dynamics of the United States ... As a result, the smell of élite paternalism has always tainted British race relations law and institutions.” (Joppke, 1999: 226) The first Race Relations Acts of 1965 and of 1968 were supposed to outlaw racial discrimination in places of public resort, housing, employment and insurance. The Race Relations Act of 1976 established a Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) and made a step toward American ways of dealing with racial matters by stressing indirect discrimination as evidenced by the unequal impact of formally neutral measures upon minority members and the disproportionate representation of racial groups in certain social or occupational positions. The latter aspect implied that equality of opportunity was measured by equality of results; if taken to its logical conclusion it could result in “equal opportunity policies” setting up goals and timetables and employing special treatment of racial groups in educational, occupational and other spheres. On the other hand the Act dismissed affirmative action measures which discriminate in favour of a particular racial groups. It nevertheless allowed  some exceptions to the principle of non-discrimination - called “positive actions” – such as providing special job training for an underrepresented minority employees or the priority hiring of minority members under circumstances related to the nature of the job (e.g., social work). “In contrast to American affirmative action, British positive action is permissive rather than mandatory; an employer or local authority may engage in it, but is not required to do so.” (Joppke, 1999: 230)

      The reluctance towards affirmative action was tempered by the Brixton race disorders in April 1981. These also provided an incentive to gather data about the ethnic composition of the population and the acceptance of ethnic group questions in the 1991 census. By that time “ethnic monitoring” was already standard practice at the local authority level after the hot debates of the 1980s. “With the introduction of an ethnic-minority question in the 1991 census, Britain is now – next to the Netherlands – the only country in western Europe to recognize ‘ethnic minorities’ of immigrant origin in law and official statistics. Under the sway of combating indirect discrimination through positive action and ‘equal opportunity’ policies, Britain's precarious balance between social-citizenship universalism and racial-group particularism has shifted toward the latter pole. No wonder that the Commission for Racial Equality's battle of the 1990s is to accomplish the half-step from positive to affirmative action ... the CRE’s Second Review of the Race Relations Act 1976  (1992) calls for legally binding ‘goals and timetables’ to check the achievement of ‘equality of opportunity’ employment.” (Joppke, 1999: 232 – 233)

      In the Race Relations Act of 1976, “race” has been used as a highly indeterminate and over-inclusive notion, covering groups defined by reference to colour, nationality or ethnic and national origins. Race tried to capture both objective patterns of discrimination or disadvantage and a subjective sense of group identity: Afro-Caribbeans preferred a self-definition stemming from their socio-economic and cultural disadvantage in Britain as “black” or “British black” which would blur the difference between West Indian and African blacks. South Asians preferred to be defined by their particular descent and ethno-regional or ethno-religious origins – Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sikhs. “After intense negotiation with the affected minority groups, the 1991 census finally settled for six discrete ‘ethnic group’ categories: White, Black-Caribbean, Black-African, Black-Other, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, and a seventh ‘any other group’ category.” (Joppke, 1999: 249) Case law disputes coped with the problem to what extent religious groups are to be given the status of a racial group – Sikhs and Gipsies were given this status, Rastafarians not. (Joppke, 1999: 249)
      
      II. 3. 2. 2. Islam
 
      Muslims were not given the status of race because of the universal character of their membership – the umma encompasses many different ethno-cultural groups and is not tied to a particular territory. Until the Rushdie Affair, South-Asian immigrants of Muslim confession were instead divided along ethnic, clan and sectarian lines which amounted to the primary network of immigration and social integration in Britain. Only with the second and third generation did religious observance become more important as a stabilizer of group identity, partly replacing the myth of return and thus helping to shed a diasporic identity. In other words, with the second and third generation, there has been a shift from a particular diasporic Muslim community, glued together by a clan, traditional habits, a culture and region of origin, still cultivating memories of the sending country (or locale) and/or even a myth of return, and a new, universal Muslim community – umma – deterritorialized and fuelled by the new electronic media of the 1990s – the internet and satellite TV channels. The Rushdie affair may be seen as a marker of this “shift from a diasporic to a universalist Islam“, from non-European Islam to EuroIslam. (Roy, 2002) The radicalization of British Muslims stepped up with the first Gulf war - Western soldiers on the holy land of Hijaz – and with the Bosnian civil war. The official political reaction both from Labour party and Tories to the mass anti-Rushdie protests of British Muslims was to stress the common denominator of British political identity, allegedly shared by British Muslims as well, which entails tolerance for pluralism, rule of law and respect for free speech. This minimal sense of Britishness is supposed to support peaceful co-existence between various ethnic and religious identities.  

      Many young Muslims – be they young professionals or poor unemployed feel uprooted from their non-European moorings and, simultaneously, neither assimilated into European nations nor integrated as “hyphenated” citizens in the above suggested sense of dual identity. Lacking real ties, they construct an imaginary, “virtual ghetto” based on the universal umma. From the point of view of the national security of western states, the worst scenario is the radicalization of such people, exemplified by the organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, based in Britain and close in its programme to Al-Qaida. Many other Muslim associations – both in Britain and elsewhere in Europe – have  much more moderate programmes: they want to be recognized as a special religious community by the larger society and want to negotiate their status in it including their habits (e.g. hallal food, dressing habits) and moral norms. “They may evolve into a sort of Muslim church in Europe, which would pose little or no security threat, and would advance a conservative agenda in terms of moral and social values.” (Roy, 2003: 69) The third pattern is represented by sects such as Tablighi Jamaat, a South Asian organization with branches in many European countries, which is separatist and fundamentalist, rejects integration, but on the other hand does not have a militant political agenda focusing on the larger society. The development of the first and the third type of Muslim organization in Europe has cast huge shadows on the possibility of pluralistic integration as embodied in British multiculturalist and anti-discrimination policies.
 
        II. 4. Germany
 
      II. 4. 1. Immigration Policies

       II. 4. 1. 1. Ethnic State as a Country of Immigration

      Between 1950 and 1993, net immigration in Germany was 12.6 million, which amounts to 80 per cent of the country’s population growth. (Joppke, 1999: 62) Germany became one of the largest countries of immigration while still sticking to its self-conception as an ethnic nation which is by definition kein Einwanderungsland – not a country of immigration. This German “idiom of nationhood” (Brubaker, 1992) was reinforced by the division of Germany after W.W.II and huge German diasporas in communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In this context, the Federal Republic conceived of itself as “a vicarious, incomplete nation-state, home for all Germans in the communist diaspora. This mandate is expressed in the preamble to the Basic Law: ‘The entire German people remains asked to complete the unity and freedom of Germany in free self-determination.’ Much like Israel was the homeland of all Jews (West) Germany was the homeland of all Germans, and it prioritized the immigration of co-ethnics. This is enshrined in Article 116 of the Basic Law, which assigns automatic citizenship to ethnic German refugees from communism. Opening the national community to foreigners would have posed the risk of a redefinition of national identity, and of diluting the Federal Republic’s historical obligation to its dispersed and repressed co-ethnics in the East.” (Joppke, 1999: 63)
 
      Since the ethnic nation was still not covered by one political roof, the State had to define itself accordingly as a privileged political instrument of self-determination and protection of German co-ethnics no matter where they lived. The situation has changed since the re-unification and the opening of borders in the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries: this gave an opportunity for the German diaspora to return and to the German state to fulfil its ethnic mission. After this “normalization” the possibility of de-ethnicization of nationhood could step forward, and with it the chance to open of immigration and integration policies to other ethno-cultural groups. In the course of the 1990s Germany did indeed seize this opportunity.

      Until 1955, vacancies in the labour market had been filled by ethnic Germans coming from East Europe, especially from the GDR. Between 1955 and 1968 Germany signed recruitment agreements (Anwerbeabkommen) with a number of countries – Italy (1955), Spain and Greece (1960), Turkey (1961), Portugal (1964) Tunisia and Morocco (1965), Yugoslavia (1968). “A pure form of client politics followed, devoid of parliamentary involvement or public debate, which involved only employers, the labour-recruiting government  bureaucracy, and trade unions (whose initial reservations were quietened by securing the primacy of the domestic workforce in the filling of job openings, and by guaranteeing equal wages and social benefits to the recruited foreign workers).” (Joppke 1999: 65) The general assumption was that the workers will return to their sending countries. This guestworker regime was entrenched in the Foreigner Law of 1965. Only in 1978 were legal conditions specified under which a foreigner is entitled to apply for permanent residence status (unbefristete Aufenthaltserlaubnis). Only in 1981 were rules for reunifying foreign families devised.

      The loopholes in  the Foreigner Law were made up for by several articles in the Basic Law which drew lessons from the Third Reich period by subordinating state power to the rights of individuals and granting the most fundamental of these rights regardless of nationality and citizenship. The Foreigner Law of 1990 (going into effect in January 1991) partly adjusted to these constitutional tenets when it limited the discretion of the state concerning the residence and family rights of immigrants. It also left out the formula of kein Einwanderungsland which had been an explicit part of German immigration policies since 1977. Though it was much more liberal than the previous law, it replicated the fundamental distinction between ethnic Germans without citizenship and foreigners, conceived of the recruitment of guestworkers as a “historically unique event” (qtd in Joppke, 1999: 84), and sought to prevent the permanent immigration of non-EU nationals in the future.
      
      II. 4. 1. 2. Asylum Debate

      The relative softening of guestworker-related policies in the 90s was counterbalanced by a toughening of asylum policies in the same period. “This opposite movement  must be seen in the context of uniquely impaired state sovereignty in asylum policy. Alone in the world, the German constitution provides a subjective right for political refugees to be granted asylum. Article 16 of the Basic Law stipulates: ‘People who are politically persecuted enjoy the right of asylum.’ In Germany, the right of asylum is not, as everywhere else, the right of the state to grant asylum, to be held against the persecuting state, but the right of the persecuted individual to be held against the receiving state ... It invalidates the sovereign right of the state to deny access to its territory ... Germany was the only state in the world that granted not only its own nationals, but literally the whole world a right of entry. The  ‘quick and dirty’ border-screening, practised by all other states in the age of mass asylum-seeking (...), has not been an option here … Ironically, only European integration would eventually allow Germany to recover its sovereignty in asylum policy.” (Joppke, 1999: 85)

      In the early 90s especially, after the reunification of Germany and with the mass inflow of asylum seekers and eruptions of xenophobic violence, the debate between the German Left and Right focused on the question posed by Article 16 of the Basic Law: whose is the German State? The dilemma of each liberal nation state was thus made thoroughly explicit. Is the state obliged primarily to human-rights principles (protecting all human beings) and only secondarily to the people who constitute it, or vice versa? Whereas for the Left, the primary source of obligation and responsibility was universal humanity, for the Right, it was the German people. Thus, the Left stressed the liberal side of the nation state, and, accordingly, defended Article 16: the state should be accountable to all humans and give their basic rights priority over any other value. The Right stressed the national side of the nation state, and, accordingly, attacked the Article 16: the state should be accountable to the people by which it is constituted and give its national interest (including the rights of its members) priority over any other value.

      The so-called “asylum compromise” of 1993 amended Article 16 by the insertion of proviso clauses enabling the state to reject apparently fraudulent asylum-seekers at its borders: the access to territory and to the constitutional asylum process was restricted through “two interrelated clauses: first, asylum-seekers arriving through ‘safe third states’ (including Poland and the Czech Republic) are by definition excluded from the asylum process and are denied entry or subjected to immediate deportation; secondly, asylum-seekers from ‘safe countries of origin’ are considered not politically persecuted and face an accelerated recognition procedure that generally ends in a rejection of their claims as ‘obviously unfounded’.” (Joppke, 1999: 93 – 94) This amendment helped to solve the political crisis. As a result, the flow of refugees narrowed substantially  to “around 125000 in 1994 and 1995, which is 70 per cent less than in 1992.” (Joppke, 1999: 94)

      In the asylum debate, the asylum issue was conflated with that of immigration, and thus brought to the foreground deeper questions concerning the definition of the German nation. “The massive exit of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union since the late 1980s, which occurred exactly parallel to the dramatic increase of asylum-seekers, made plainly visible that Germany preferred some immigrants over others.” (Joppke, 1999: 95) While the German Right explicitly approved the immediate citizenship conferral on ethnic Germans as legitimate, the radical fringe of the Left claimed that they did not deserve any priority treatment. “What may appear as an obscure struggle over classifications, was a struggle over the soul of Germany: ethnic and Volk-centred, as in the discourse of Aussiedler advocates; or civic and post-national, as in the discourse of ‘immigrant’ advocates.” (Joppke, 1999: 95)

      This special treatment was justified with reference to post-war discrimination and repression against Germans and/or by the pressure to expel them – Vertreibungsdruck. That this “expulsion pressure” is not automatically assumed was the novelty of the Law on Removing the Consequences of the War (Kriegsfolgenbereinigungsgesetz) of 1992. The law limited the right to claim the  status of Aussiedler and “imposed a limit of 225 000 ethnic Germans to be allowed in every year, which makes the intake of ethnic Germans appear much like regular immigration. After phasing out the privileged Aussiedler category, while approximating the reception of Aussiedler to quota immigration, a window of opportunity has opened up to transform an ethnic-priority into a general immigration policy.” (Joppke, 1999: 96) This was a part of the asylum compromise accepted by the German Right: it accepted a small in-migration quota – Zuwanderungsquote – while still refusing to head toward an adoption of a comprehensive immigration law – Einwanderungsgesetz – as demanded by the Left. The linguistic distinction of the 90s was principled: “Zuwanderung, the term preferred by restrictionists, means unwanted immigration that is tolerated for constitutional and moral-political reasons. Einwanderung, by contrast, connotes actively solicited, wanted immigration.” (Joppke, 1999: 97)
      
      II. 4. 2. Integration Policies

     II. 4. 2. 1. From Ethnic to Civic Nationhood

    The original idiom of the German nationhood is ethno-genealogical. Membership in nation and its state is acquired by descent and primary socialization in one’s family. As was said in the previous section, this ethnic delimitation of nationhood enhanced and was itself enhanced by the position of Federal Republic as the homeland of all Germans left over in the Soviet bloc – concentrated in the GDR and scattered in other Eastern European countries. These two features reinforced each other in the push to the exclusion of immigrants from citizenship and in the emphasis on the maintenance of their group differences. When in 1973 the German government attempted to formulate guidelines for a desirable modus vivendi with immigrants, it came up with the idea of Integration auf Zeit (temporary integration) whose main point was to assure a stable niche in the hosting society while helping immigrants to maintain ethno-cultural traits and links to their homelands so that they could easily be repatriated. (Geddes 2003: 91) As was shown with the French example, the right to cultural difference has its reverse side – it may function as a wall against possible membership. The negative and positive sides of the right to be different manifested themselves respectively in the positions of the German Right and of the German Left. While the Right loathed the idea of assimilation out of a concern for ethnic purity, the Left loathed the same idea out of respect for different cultures and identities. Except for the anti-assimilationist disagreement, both camps parted ways sharply as they relied on two contradictory principles included in the Basic Law: self-determination for the German ethnic nation on the one hand and protection of the fundamental rights of every human person regardless of nationality or of citizenship status on the other.

      This constitutional contradiction had a decisive impact on the situation of ethnically alien immigrants residing on German territory. While the first principle closed the doors to their political membership in the nation, the second principle helped to ensure their civil and social rights on a par with German citizens. Thus, “an ultra-restrictive citizenship regime” co-existed with “a liberal foreigner-rights regime”. (Joppke, 1999: 200) The radical fringe of the Left wanted to extend foreigners’ rights to the political sphere as well, not giving proper consideration to the need of membership in a nation: as if there could be political rights, that is, democracy, without nationhood, and,  hence, without duties to one’s fatherland. This idea is epitomized by the proposal for a Niederlassungsgesetz (residence law) - presented by the Greens for the first time in 1984 – which would confer all rights including political ones only on the basis of permanent residence. Against this idea of severing cultural-political identity (nationality) from legal-political status (citizenship rights), the German Right defended their strong interdependence from which, within the paradigm of the ethnic nation, it followed that  immigrants should be given neither political rights nor nationality.
  
    These political debates notwithstanding, the fact of the matter was that foreign residents enjoyed the same social rights as German citizens while not being members of their ethnically defined Nation, whereas ethnic Germans living abroad in East Europe were members of that nation while not having access to these rights. (Geddes, 2003: 90) This disjunction between community of descent and community of residence ceased to be sustainable after the opening of the Eastern borders in the late 1980s brought into the country millions of Germans who found themselves face-to-face with millions of immigrants of the second and third generation: “Now you had the grotesque dissonance of de facto foreigners automatically classified as Germans and of de facto Germans still classified as foreigners.” (Joppke, 1999: 200)

    Only the introduction of as-of-right naturalization in December 1992 made a decisive step in the direction of a liberal citizenship regime. Until that point, citizenship was acquired by descent or by assimilation as evaluated by state officials. The Naturalization Rules (Einbürgerungsrichtlinien), passed under a Social-Democratic government in 1977, stated clearly that “the Federal Republic is not a country of immigration” and that, therefore, it is not intent on “deliberately increasing the number of German citizens through naturalization” (In Joppke, 1999: 201) If an alien resident after ten years of residence and after fulfilling all required formal conditions wanted to be naturalized, it was at the discretion of the state official to decide whether the person had been sufficiently assimilated and had a positive commitment to the German people and state to the extent that it was in the public interest to accept her as an adoptive daughter of this people.
 
      The above mentioned shift to the as-of-right naturalization occurred in the context of the Asylum Compromise: it abolished the absolute discretion of the state to judge cultural assimilation and let it be deduced instead “from the applicant's length of residence ... This means that ‘assimilation’ is effectively void as a criterion for being granted citizenship. Membership in the German nation-state is no longer premised on being part of the ethno-cultural nation. This allows two interpretations: first, that state and nation are effectively decoupled, because membership in the latter is no longer a precondition for membership in the former; or, secondly, that the meaning of German nationhood is itself undergoing transformation, because it can no longer be defined in ethnic terms, but now will have to routinely include and absorb non-German entrants. Including the factor of time, both interpretations are really one. If the nation qua ethnocultural nation is no longer the basis of the German state, this does not mean that the latter is becoming a non-national state. Rather, it means that, over time, German nationhood will have to be defined more along civic-territorial than exclusively ethno-genealogical lines.” (Joppke, 1999: 203) This development was completed on the legal level by passing a new Nationality Law in 2000 that introduced jus soli.
      
      II. 4. 2. 2. Islam

      Three factors have shaped organized Turkish Islam in Germany.  First, while the Turkish government put a ban on the organizations of radical Islamism, they could develop easily in liberal Germany. Second, the omission of the Turkish state to care for the religious needs of its national diaspora allowed radical Islamist sects to enter the free space and attract the followers. This changed in 1982 when the Turkish Islamic Union (DITIB) was founded in Cologne as a German branch of Ankara’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). Third, the flourishing of the Quran schools, run by the radicals, was allowed also by the fact that German schools have failed to offer religious instruction to Muslim children. (Joppke, 1999: 215 – 216)

      Of the radical sects, operating on German soil, at least two are worth noticing. The Islamic Cultural Centres, founded in 1973 are a branch of the Süleymanci movement, which preaches an Islamic State enforcing sharia. That is why this sect is illegal in Turkey. This movement divides the world into the House of Islam and the House of War and calls on Turkish Muslims in Germany not to mix with German Christians and form, instead, a parallel society alongside German society. A much more influential sect, however, is Milli Görüs, a branch of Islamist Refah Party of the 1990s, to which then Turkish Minister President Erbakan belonged and out of which the current Minister President Erdogan also came. Similar to Süleymanci, Milli Görüs preaches the building of a parallel society and tries to catch the interest of the youth by offering education and computer courses, sports and cultural activities, and the like.

      According to Joppke, even the Turkish Islamic Union (sponsored by Turkey) promotes rather xenophobic ideas reducing “the host society to a world of hostile ‘Christian missionaries’, against whom Muslims have to be on guard. (Joppke, 1999: 217) Joppke notices some attempts by various Islamic umbrella organizations to be recognized as a “body of public law” (Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts), “which would put Islam on a par with the Catholic and Protestant Churches, and allow the former to collect taxes from their members and to provide mandatory Islamic instruction in the state schools.” As he adds, the problem is that due to “the lack of a hierarchical church structure and an established clergy in Islam” it would be next to impossible for the state “to decide which of the rivalling Islamic organizations can legitimately speak for the Muslims.” (Joppke, 1999: 217)   
 

    III. Convergence of European Policies and EU Framework

    III. 1. Four Waves of Post-War Migration to Western Europe

     Until recently, most scholars distinguished three phases or waves of migration flow in post-war migration to Europe: (1) labour or primary migration between the 1950s and 1973-4, (2) family or secondary migration in the 1970s and 1980s, and (3) post-Cold war migration with increased numbers of asylum-seeking and illegal immigrants in 1990s. (Geddes 2003: 17 – 19). Some recent studies, however, observe the emergence of the fourth wave characterised by the return of labour related migration, albeit in a new fashion, with an emphasis on a highly skilled migrants (Garson – Loizollon 2003: 2-5).

     The First Wave: Labour Migration and the Reconstruction of Europe

     In the period 1945-74 the immigration to Europe was in large part driven by the exigencies of economic reconstruction in western Europe in the aftermath of W.W.II. At that time, only France had experienced constant and significant immigration flow from the first half of the 19th century. For other European countries this post-war immigration was something completely new and unheard of. It was, however, desired and promoted by active government policies which, together with national firms, organized the recruitment of workers abroad. (The case of Britain stands out from this pattern since most of its migration in the 1950s was due to the British National Act of 1948 making citizens out of subjects living in colonies – II. 3. 1. In Germany, labour vacancies were at first filled by ethnic Germans fleeing East Germany and the recruitment began only in 1955 – II. 4. 1. 1.) The assumption of recruiting governments was that migration would be only temporary as it was linked to labour shortages in specific industries and sectors. Once the demand dropped, the workers would supposedly go home. This assumption proved wrong. The presumed temporary guest-workers stayed as permanent settlers. This became clear when the recruitment stopped due to the oil price rise and the subsequent economic crisis of 1973-74. Not only did those who had already come not leave, but many others were knocking on the doors. As European countries tried to stop the inflow of new immigrants, the only avenue which remained officially open was that associated with family reunion.   

    The Second Wave: Family Reunion Migration

      This kind of migration became predominant in the 1970s and 1980s. It pertained both to spouses and children left in the country of origin and to marriage partners brought in by already settled immigrants. As family migration became the main form of migration, the proportion of women rose hugely in comparison with the mainly male labour migration of the 1950s and 1960s. In the same period, the second generation of immigrants made itself socially and culturally visible as they were caught between the home country affiliations of their parents and the roots which they had developed for themselves in the receiving country (and its culture). No wonder that the political debates of this period began to centre on the social and political implications of permanent settlement by foreigners and the ways in which they could be integrated (if at all) into the receiving society. In response to this problem, the liberal and left-wing elites (save the French neo-republicans – II. 2. 2. 1.) coined the concept of a multicultural integration while the right-wing elites revived a nationalist and Eurocentric (if not straightforwardly racist) discourse. Even during the second wave, however, labour migration did not stop: its channel was merely narrowed to select high-skilled immigrants.
     
    The Third Wave: Asylum-seekers and Illegal Migrants

     The end of the Cold war brought about an increase in the proportion of asylum seekers and of those trying to enter and/or stay in European countries without legal permission. The migration issue became increasingly politicized as there was growing suspicion amongst the (right-wing segments of the) public that many asylum-seekers were, in actual fact, economic migrants using the asylum channel as the only available legal avenue. This period – from 1989-90 up to the turn of the millennium – has been characterized both by diversification in the countries of migrants’ origin and by enlargement of the receiving zone by Southern European and Central European countries (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic). (Geddes, 2003: 149 – 190)
     
     During all three periods France, Britain and Germany retained their national peculiarities in their handling of migration and integration of immigrants. Only during the 1990s and, increasingly, when the decade came to its close, did the differences between their national strategies begin to fade. Germany began to redefine its identity (i.e. nationhood) so as to allow it to confer political membership (i.e. citizenship) on the members of other ethno-cultural groups if they reside permanently on its territory. Germany, that is, has moved closer to Great Britain and France. These countries, in turn, began to formulate their immigration and integration policies in the language reminiscent rather of the language of the classic countries of immigration such as the USA or Canada. The latter countries, on the other hand, began to regulate their entrance gates much more systematically and restrictively than ever before in their history. In sum, both the difference between “ethnic” and “civic” nations in western Europe and the difference between the Old and New World began to wane as the last century was coming to its close.
     
    The Fourth Wave: the Return of Employment-related Migration with the Preference for Skilled Workers

      According to the 2003 OECD study (Garson – Loizillon, 2003), one striking change in the past few years concerns the increase in permanent, and especially temporary, employment-related migration. The increase in employment-related migration is explained as result of several factors: on the one hand, the intensity of the late 1990s expansion phase and, on the other, the development of the information and communication technology, health, and education sectors, which require skilled and highly skilled labour in shortage in some countries. Since 1998, especially in the Germany and UK (as well as some other countries), temporary migration categories have been on the rise. In addition, Germany and the U.K. launched various pilot projects to attract highly skilled immigrants, who may qualify as new permanent immigrants.

    III. 2. Recent Developments in France

    A report ordered by the socialist government of Lionel Jospin from Patrick Weil Conditions d’application du principe du droit du sol pour l’attribution de la nationalité francaise et pour une politique d’immigration juste et efficace (31 July 1997) and two statutes stemming from it – the Law Guigou and the Law Chevenement (1998) – drew to its consequences the universalist strand of the French tradition with its roots in the ideology of 1789 and of the Third Republic. This recapture of the republican origins was consistent with pragmatic considerations: the aim of zero-immigration declared by the previous government of the Right (and expressed with tough anti-immigration measures of the Law Pasqua and the Law Debre – II. 2. 1.) proved unrealistic. Therefore immigration was not to be suppressed but rather regulated. Measures were adopted facilitating the entry and integration of desired immigrants such as highly qualified professionals or artists. Dignified procedures of family reunifications and asylum-granting were established. Another set of measures was adopted to fight illegal immigration more efficiently.
     
    The reforms tried to strike a balance between the two contradictory principles of the liberal nation state (I. 1. 1.) It was no surprise, therefore, that neither the universalistic Left nor the particularistic Right was satisfied: the reform amounted neither to a complete liberalization of immigration, nor to the closing of the gates. Rather it opened the borders to those who can contribute to the cultural and economic development of France and to those who are persecuted in their own countries or have a rightful claim via the members of their family; at the same time, it closed the borders to undesired categories, that is, those who can neither contribute to the economic or cultural wealth of France, nor can raise a claim related to persecution. Accordingly, the Law Chevenement (11. 5. 1998) is two-pronged: on the one hand it eases up on, and simplifies, procedures of entering the territory so that elite immigrants may enter the country as easily as possible. New categories specifying the bearer of the carte de séjour (the green card) are introduced such as scientifique (scientist) or profession artistique et culturelle (artistic and cultural profession). On the other hand, the statute gives the state efficient instruments allowing a much tougher approach towards illegal immigrants, e.g., a prolongation of the length of administrative retention. (Guyomar 1999: 306 – 309)

      Under the Jospin government, moreover, French reluctance towards a minority-oriented approach loosened. In October 1998, Martin Aubry, the Minister of Employment and Solidarity, declared the fight against racial discrimination as one of the government priorities and “the Haut Conseil a l’Intégration proposed an anti-discrimination body with some similarities to the UK Commision for Racial Equality (CRE).” (Geddes, 2003: 74) Finally, “the French government has adopted the June 2000 EU Directives based on Article 13 of the Amsterdam treaty dealing with direct and indirect discrimination on grounds including race, ethnicity and religion. The significant point is that France accepted EU legislation that brought practices and ideas that seem to be more associated with Anglo-Dutch ‘ethnic minorities’ policies into its national legislation.” (Geddes, 2003: 77)
 
      In 2002, the subsequent right-wing government announced a new immigration and integration strategy that was to be based on three elements. (1) a revised and more vigorous integration policy, (2) an active government campaign against discrimination and (3) a more open immigration policy toward the skilled labour force. The first move in the implementation of the strategy was the law prepared by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Loi no 2003-1119 du 26 novembre relative a maîtrise de l'immigration, au séjour des étrangers en France et la nationalité, modifies the existing aliens legislation.
 
      The law creates a basis for more strategic planning in the area of migration. Every year the Government shall submit to Parliament a report of the mid-term orientations of immigration policy. Several bodies (L'Office français de protection des refugiés et apartides, le Haut Conseil  a l'intégration, l'Office des migrations internationale and la Commission nationale de contrôle des centres et locaux de retention et des zones d'attente) shall contribute jointly to the report. The issuing of the first residence card (la carte de résidence), which is valid for 10 years, is conditioned explicitly by the “republican integration of the foreigner into French society”. The integration shall be gauged mainly by the sufficient knowledge of the French language and of the principles that govern the French republic. The residence card can be issued after five years of continuous legal residence in France. The applicant has also to demonstrate the intention to live in France permanently and to have sufficient resources. To evaluate whether the conditions of the integration are met, the representative of the State in a department (in Paris the Police prefect) may consult the mayor of the municipality where the foreigner lives. Stricter consideration of the fulfilment of the integration criteria applies also to those, who apply for their family members to be reunited. The law also introduced a number of other changes, e. g., it replaced the “territorial asylum” with a new EU concept of “subsidiary protection” and introduces a number of measures to combat and prevent the illegal entry and stay of foreigners. On the other hand, the law addresses the problem of “double punishment” (double peine). It limits the expulsion of foreigners who have committed crimes, but already have significant relations with France, e.g. lived in France before 13, have lived there more than 20 years, or 10 years in the case that they have a family in France.

      In order to foster integration of immigrants, the Chirac government reinforced robustly the program of “acceptance and integration” in 2003. The programme as such is not entirely new. It was created in 1993 and 20,000 persons have made use of it. What is new is the planned strengthening of the capacities to carry out the programme countrywide. The core of this integration programme is a “contract of acceptance and integration” which shall be offered to all immigrants. The Minister of Social Affairs François Fillon hopes that by spreading the values which are the foundation of the national community, the proposed measures will combat the threat of splitting the society into culturally distinct communities, which would endanger the French national identity (so-called communautarisation). To achieve this, the government needs to shift financial support from associations that supported the immigrants in preserving their cultures and traditions to associations devoted to the spread of traditional French values and norms amongst immigrants.

Box  III.1
France: New Integration Policy
Plan of the Ministry of Social Affairs, Labour and Solidarity of 8 December 2003: Notre politique d´intégration Ministere des Affaires sociales, du Travail et de la Solidarité, 8 decémbre 2003

Integration is not only the task for immigrants or the French of foreign origin. It is the task for all living in France. Integration policy is directed toward three areas:
(1) establishing the procedures of the integration of new immigrants,
(2) support of individual social and professional advancement and
(3) acting against intolerance and in support of equality of rights.

The project for the establishing of the mechanism of integration is ambitious. It involves three elements:
> Introducing a public service of reception. In 2004, a new central agency for reception shall be established, as well as a network of regional centres for reception, which shall cover all the territory.
> Creation of a “reception and integration contract”, which will be proposed personally to all newcomers. The contract shall offer immigrants the language education and other training. The immigrant has to agree to participate in the prescribed courses and promise to respect the values of the Republic (democracy, secularity, the equality of men and women).
> Coherent measure to provide support for incoming families.

In 2003, the programme was introduced as a pilot programme in 12 French departments. By 1 January 2006, the new policy shall include all new immigrants and all departments.

Sources:
http://www.travail.gouv.fr
http://www.migrationinformation.org, authors of articles: Sylvia Zappi and Patrick Simon

      

    III. 3. Recent Developments in Britain

      The first signal of the changing official attitudes to migration was the publishing of a comprehensive Home Office study Migration: an economic and social analysis in 2001. The study, which attempted to identify the overall economic and social outcomes of migration policy in the UK, brought about a set of inspiring conclusions. The report gave a positive picture of the impact of immigration into the UK and called for more migration and better integration. According to the authors' conclusions, migration is likely to enhance economic growth and welfare. Migrants in Britain are very heterogeneous, and have a mixed success in the labour market. They have higher average income than native-born Britons, but this average “masks the polarisation of experiences, with migrants over-represented at the top of the income distribution, but also highly concentrated at the lower end of the income distribution.” The study also showed, inter alia, that there is little evidence that native workers are harmed by migration; migrants create new businesses and jobs and fill labour market gaps. Neither do migrants disproportionately claim benefits: “on overage and overall”, the study concludes, “migrants are not burden on the public purse”. The study also emphasised what to an external observer is clear from the outset: the minority ethnic population accounts for only around a half of the migrant population.

      The study on migration was promptly followed by the government White Paper, Secure Borders, Safe Haven. Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain (February 2002), and the implementation of a series of measures, including, most notably, the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002.

      Despite the differences in the historical construction of French and British nationhood, the British White Paper Secure Borders, Safe Haven takes a very similar stance to that taken by the French in 1997-8. As the title suggests, those who seek refuge in the face of political persecution should be granted it. Those who jeopardize the security of borders and the stability of British society are given a clear sign that all measures will be taken to prevent them from their illegal activities. Migration is recognized as an unavoidable feature of the contemporary world and immigration as an inevitable feature of the British society. It may bring significant benefits as long as it is adequately regulated and the receiving society is sufficiently sure of itself and its own identity that it can reach out and embrace newcomers. According to the Paper: “If managed properly, migration can bring considerable benefits to the UK, including improvements in economic growth and productivity, as well as cultural enrichment and diversity. ‘Managing’ migration means having an orderly, organized, and enforceable system of entry. It also means managing post-entry integration and inclusion in the economy and society, helping migrants to find their feet, and enabling members of the existing population to welcome them into their communities.” (Secure Borders, 2002)

      Unlike the French documents mentioned above, the British paper explicitly refers to the concept of desired multicultural integration (“integration with diversity”), which takes its cue from the Parekh Report (Parekh, 1999). The core of this concept lies in the idea of ethno-cultural pluralism or “diversity” embedded in a common civic identity that is based on a shared set of values and loyalty to British political institutions. The British nation is a multi-ethnic nation, that is, it is not based on assimilation to a prevailing monoculture. At the same time it is “one” nation, unified by a common political culture and the active participation of citizens in it. The necessary condition of mutual reinforcement of cultural diversity and political unity is social and economic inclusion, which prevents ethnic (or racial) boundaries from becoming social (or class) boundaries. All those who have a contribution to make to Britain are welcome on the British territory. Their route from residence to citizenship should be made as easy as possible. The applicants have to fulfil, however, the basic cultural conditions (proficiency in English) and moral-political conditions (loyalty and a sense of civic obligations).

      As far as economic immigration is concerned, the emphasis is put on two categories of immigrants: the first encompasses highly qualified professionals and young people (especially students) of professional potential, that is, a category of those who are likely to revitalize British economy and culture. The second category encompasses workers or employees filling vacancies in specific sectors. The Paper draws on experiences with positive immigration measures introduced before the 2001 general election. Then, the Education Department’s overseas labour division began advertising a fast-track entry to Britain for people with information and communication technologies and other specialist skills, while immigration rules for other occupations such as nursing and teaching were also relaxed because of chronic shortages of labour in these areas. The Paper stresses the need to make the recruitment of those workers compatible with the program of skill-development of indigenous unemployed workers and their insertion into these shortage areas. Immigration should not harm or lessen the job or training opportunities available to the population.

    As far as the asylum procedure is concerned, the main aim of the reform is to distinguish clearly unfounded from well-founded applications and to efficiently fend off false claimants. “The ultimate aims of the asylum system are to determine who is and is not in need of protection. Providing a safe haven and integrating quickly into UK society those who are in need of such protection and to remove quickly those who are not.” (Secure Borders, 2002)
      In January 2002, the government launched a Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP) based on a Canadian-style points system for would be migrants. In a comparison to the classical immigration schemes, the HSMP is very selective and targets only individuals with exceptional personal skills and experience. The programme was initially set up as a pilot for 12 months. Following the success of the programme, it has been decided to extend HSMP indefinitely.

Box III.2
UK: Highly Skilled Migrant Programme

HSMP was launched as a pilot project in January 2002 and revised in October 2003, when it was turned into a permanently operating immigration scheme. The programme targets exceptional individuals who should help the UK to compete in the global economy. It allows “highly skilled individuals” to seek entry to work in the UK without having a prior offer of employment, or to take up self-employment opportunities. To make a successful application, the applicant has to score 65 points or more. The points are awarded for education, work experience, past earnings and personal achievements in the chosen field. For instance, the PhD. rates 30 points, Master's 25 and Graduate Degree 15. Past earnings also play an important role. For this purpose, all countries are divided into A-E categories. For instance, an applicant coming from countries rated as “B” (e.g. New Zealand, Argentina or the Czech Republic) gets 25 points for a year income of £ 17 500, 35 points for income of £ 43 750 and 50 points for £ 109 375 if he is 28 and over. After the revision, the programme sets modified criteria for young applicants under 28. Skilled partners (a spouse or a long-term partner) are also taken into account (10 points). The immigration status and the country of origin of the applicant do not play a role, individuals residing in the UK and abroad may apply. All applicants must declare they are willing and able to make UK their main home. (To qualify for permanent settlement in the UK, the accepted applicant must have spent a continuous period of four years in the UK.)
Source:
http://www.workpermits.gov.uk
Home Office. Immigration and Nationality Directorate. Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP). Revised Programme effective from 31 October 2003. London: Author.
.

      
      The UK also operates a flexible scheme of work permits for categories of workers who are included on the shortage occupation list. The shortage of resident workers is determined following consultations with relevant governing bodies for the industries concerned. The posts are acknowledged as being particularly difficult to fill. Hence, an employer may ask for work permits for workers from the listed categories without demonstrating that a vacancy cannot be filled by the resident labour force. In November 2003, the list included three categories (1) engineering shortage occupations, (2) healthcare shortage occupations and (3) other shortage occupation (e. g. teachers, all posts in England covering compulsory schooling, veterinary surgeons.) This system enabled the UK to react promptly to the changing situation in the IT field and to delete IT specialists form the list. However, as the 2001 study showed, the problem remains that the state does not provide any further care of  those who enter UK this way.

      Many of the changes proposed by the 2002 White Paper were incorporated into the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002, which was given the royal assent in November 2002. According to the Nationality and Immigration Minister Beverly Hughes “The Act is the most radical and far reaching reform of the UK's immigration, asylum and nationality systems for many years and provides a foundation on which to build a confidence and trust in the integrity of our systems. The Asylum Act will enable us to ensure that our borders are secure, to put in place an effective end-to-end asylum system and to make the acquisition of British citizenship more meaningful and celebratory for new citizens.” The Act is divided into eight parts (1. Nationality, 2. Accommodation Centres, 3. Other Support and Assistance, 4. Detention and Removal, 5. Immigration and Asylum Appeals, 6. Immigration Procedure, 7. Offences and 8. General).

      Major changes concern asylum. The Act allows for accommodation centres for asylum seekers, which will have services and facilities on site, to be established and operated. It requires asylum seekers living in the community to report regularly or risk loosing government support and curtails access to support for those who do not claim asylum at the earliest opportunity. It also introduces changes concerning the asylum procedure, e. g. it simplifies and streamlines the appeals process and ends the right of in-country appeals for those with clearly unfounded asylum or human rights claims. As regards nationality, the Act introduces citizenship ceremonies, a citizenship oath and pledge, and the requirement that those seeking to acquire British citizenship should have a sufficient knowledge of life in the United Kingdom. It also places more emphasis on applicants having a sufficient knowledge of the language (English, Welsh or Scottish Gaelic). The citizenship oath concerns allegiance to the Queen, while the pledge concerns loyalty to the United Kingdom, respect of its rights and freedoms, and upholding its democratic values, as well as fulfilling duties and obligations as a British citizen. According to the plans of the Home Office, published on 9 December 2003, the national symbols such as the union flag and the national anthem should feature in the new ceremonies. The first of the ceremonies will take place in 2004 in eight pilot areas, before being rolled out around the country (http://www.ind.homeofice.gov.uk/news.asp?NewsID=340).

      In order to advise the Home Secretary on the implementation of the new naturalisation requirements, an independent group of experts was appointed under the chairmanship of Sir Bernard Crick. The “Life in the United Kingdom” Advisory Group published “The New and the Old” Report in September 2003. The detailed report offers a number of recommendations on the method and implementation of the requirements. It takes as a starting point an explanation of what it means to be British. Recalling the British understanding of a multicultural society, the Report stresses that identities are not fixed but fluid. “All communities can maintain their historical identities without constraining their individual members” and “to be British does not mean assimilation into a common culture so that original identities are lost”. While there is a wisdom in the old saying “variety is the spice of life”, such variety “does not mean communities operating on the basis of series of a parallel lives. Parallel lives like parallel lines only meet in infinity” (Crick Report, 2003: 10,11). Integration means “neither assimilation nor a society composed of, as it were, separate enclaves, whether voluntary or involuntary. Integration means not only mutual respect and tolerance between different groups, but continual interaction, engagement and civic participation, whether in social, cultural, educational, professional, political or legal spheres” (Ibid, 12).

      The concrete measures proposed include, inter alia a wide distribution of the “Living in the United Kingdom” handbook, the mentoring and the establishing of a new authority, an Advisory Board on Education and Naturalisation. The report also outlines the content of a practical programme of studies of life in the UK for those seeking naturalisation. The programme should not include only information on the British national institutions, history and law, but shall also contain practically-oriented knowledge, such as a basic understanding of the employment, social security and tax rules or the way of paying bills and the needs for licenses for motor vehicles. The Report also suggests methods of language testing in order to bring to an end a situation when the language requirement was “undefined and in application varied, often perfunctory and sometimes uselessly minimal.” (Ibid, 4). An entitlement to free language courses should be available to all with the avenue to indefinite leave to remain even before they are in position to decide whether to apply for naturalisation. The language test, as a major component of naturalisation requirement, shall be based on the assessment of applicant's progress in developing language skills, rather than requiring a common language standard for all applicants.
      
    III. 4. Recent Developments in Germany
      
      Germany introduced some reforms of nationality legislation in late 1999. These changes reacted to the most urgent and sensitive problem, the situation of migrants' children born in Germany. The new legislation allows children born in Germany to foreign residents to acquire German nationality automatically. However, if they are dual nationals, they must choose one of the nationalities when they become adult.

Box III.3
Germany: Law to Amend the Law on State Citizenship of 15 June 1999

According to the amended legislation, as of 1 January 2000, children born to foreign parents in Germany will acquire German nationality provided that at least one of the parents had been living in Germany legally for at least 8 years. However, if the child holds dual citizenship, German and that of the country of origin of his parent, he or she is requested to make a choice. If he chooses German nationality, he has to give up the other nationality, at the latest when he reaches 23 years.
 The reform makes it also easier for adult foreign residents who wish to acquire German nationality. Now they have a right to acquire German nationality after they had been living in Germany for at least 8 years. Before, the period was 15 years. The eligible applicant has to demonstrate knowledge of German and of the German constitution.
The reform extended the toleration of dual nationality in certain specific personal circumstances, which also includes the toleration of dual nationality of some applicants, for instance for elderly persons. Immigrants of German origin acquire German nationality ex lege, without undergoing the bureaucratic procedure.
 Source:
Gesetz zur Reform des Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht vom 15 Juli 1999.


      In 2000, similarly to Britain, Germany reacted to labour shortages in information and communication technology by opening the gates to specialists who were offered their own particular immigration track and “green card”. Unlike in Great Britain this programme of the recruitment of the highly skilled has been limited to IT specialists. The main features and outcomes are summed up in the box bellow.

Box III.4
Germany: Green Cards Programme for Foreign IT Specialists

The “green card programme” for foreign IT specialists was introduced by a decree (Verordnung) of the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs as a pilot project limited to 3 years. In 2003, it was extended. (The extension was partly, due to the delays in adopting the new immigration legislation.) The programme allowed for issuing 20,000 work permits for foreign IT specialists from countries outside the EU without individual proof that there is a vacancy that cannot be filled by the domestic labour force. The work and residence permit is issued for 5 years. To qualify, the applicant has ether to have completed a university education in IT or to have an offer of a job in the sector for no less than 51,000 euro a year. The programme is also open for foreign graduates at German universities.
In the first 3 years, 13,566 “green cards” were issued. Most of the IT specialists came from India and Russia. The programme has not met the high expectations of the businesses. Yet, it is considered generally to be a successful test for introducing other immigration schemes concerning branches of the global economy. The main obstacle to a more intense interest of potential “IT immigrants” is the limitation of the work permit. Many critics believe that the top experts prefer countries which offer more durable settlement options. The language is also a barrier, as well as the inflexible bureaucracy and – as some observers add – the not very welcoming attitudes of the local population. Critical voices also stress that the crisis in the IT branch resulted in 7% of the recruited IT specialists being unemployed. Every fifth expert lost his job in the first year at least one time. According to these critics' opinions, such narrowly tailored programmes cannot react flexibly to the changing situation in the various sectors of the labour market: while the demand for IT specialists dropped, Germany is short of skilled workers in the health sector.

Sources:
http://www.bmi.bund.de; http://www.aufenthaltstitel.de (commentary from the German Media)

      

    On July 4, 2001, the Independent Commission on Migration to Germany, nominated in September 2000 by the Interior Minister Otto Schilly and chaired by the former chair of the Bundestag, Rita Süssmuth, published the ground-breaking Report Zuwanderung Gestalten, Integration Fördern (Structuring Immigration, Fostering Integration). (The report is 325 pages long.) Its guidelines were followed by the Immigration Law, which was tabled in the parliament first in 2002 and then in 2003. The basic tenets of the Report were propagated simultaneously by certain speeches and initiatives of the Interior Minister Otto Schilly and follow the direction of the French reform of 1997-8 and British reform of 2002.

      The Report lists four reasons for the reformulation of Germany’s policies in the field. Firstly, the growth of the economy is increasingly dependent on knowledge and new ideas, which emerge out of encounters and exchanges with peoples of different origins. Secondly, the population of Germany is aging, something which has a negative impact on the labour market and innovativeness of the economy. (“The German population will probably drop from 82 million art present to less than 60 million by the year 2050, unless further immigration is allowed …”, Süssmuth, 2001: 26) Thirdly, despite a high rate of unemployment there is a large number of high- and less-qualified employment positions unfilled. The fourth and maybe the most compelling argument is this: despite the usual disclaimers and anti-immigration policies introduced since 1973, Germany has been a country of immigration de facto. Since 1954, about 31 million Germans and foreigners have immigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany. At present, 7.3 million foreigners are living in the federal Republic of Germany; that is 8.9 percent of the entire population. An active recruitment policy will simply “structure” immigration so that it corresponds to the needs of German society. The recruitment policies, however, should not harm the chances of domestic workers on the labour market.

      The shift from the ban on recruitment to the controlled labour immigration amounts to the opening of legal routes for entering the country and getting a work and residence permit. The logic of the pre-1973 recruitment schemes is reversed: whereas these presupposed the transitory nature of residence in Germany and the return of migrating workers to the sending countries, the new regulations anticipate that many (if not all) immigrants will settle permanently in Germany. The guest worker regime has been abandoned in favour of the settlement regime. “From the very beginning, immigrants are to become an integral part of the permanent resident population and should receive permanent resident status immediately with the prospect of naturalization. A points system which takes their ability to integrate into society and the labour market into consideration will be crucial. General skills will be more important than special skills and short-term demand situations on the labour market. Candidates scoring the highest number of points should be chosen from the applications which meet the minimum point requirements.” (Süssmuth, 2001)

      Naturalization is conceived of as the peak of successful integration. In this respect the new nationality law which introduced jus soli (place-of-birth principle) in 2000 is crucial. (II. 4. 2. 1.) The last hurdle on the way towards the liberal naturalization regime consists in the requirement of having to relinquish the nationality of the country of origin. This requirement is based on the rejection of dual citizenship. The commission recommends dropping this requirement and allowing multiple nationalities.

      The report weakens the special privileges accorded to expatriate Germans scattered in the countries of Eastern Europe. It suggests the introduction of an additional requirement for immediate naturalization – a sufficient command of the German language as examined by a language test taken in the evacuation area. Similarly, it specifies the criteria of membership of East European Jewish communities whose members have so far had privileged access to immigration and naturalization due to the program of strengthening Jewish communities in Germany: “the assessment of the membership to the group of people who are authorized to immigrate to Germany should be oriented towards Jewish religious law (a descendant of a Jewish mother or conversion according to the rules of the Rabbinate Court) in order to combat integration problems.” The possible applicants should be offered German courses free of charge in the countries of origin and in Germany they should be distributed “in locations where there is an existing Jewish community or at least one nearby.” (Süssmuth, 2001)

      The conception of integration relies on the assumption that this is a two-ways process involving both immigrants and the host society: “Whereas the host society must provide immigrants with the prospect of gaining permanent residence, access on equal terms to the labour market and to the educational system, immigrants to Germany are equally required to learn German. In addition, of course, they are obliged – just like all other residents – to respect and follow the Constitution and the laws.” The German state should offer free German courses for immigrants and their children. This assimilation into the majority language and political culture (knowledge of and respect for major political and legal institutions) is a necessary prerequisite for the successful incorporation of immigrants into economic and political life on equal terms with members of the majority. The majority society, on the other hand, is required to respect ethno-cultural and religious identities as far as they are compatible with the rules of the liberal-democratic constitutional system and must introduce special topics or courses into the general educational curricula which take account of them. Equal treatment of ethnic and religious minorities should be ensured. Given the massive presence of Muslims in Germany, optional Islamic religious courses should be included in the school curriculum.

      The Report became the basis of the new Immigration law (“Zuwanderungsgesetz”) approved by the German Parliament in 2002. The new Immigration Law has not come into force. The German Constitutional Court decided that it had been adopted, as far as the procedure in the Bundesrat - the Upper Chamber of the Parliament – is concerned, in a way which is not compatible with German Constitution. In January 2003, the German Government decided to submit the legislation to the Parliament again.

Box III.5
Germany: The Proposed New Immigration Law (“Zunwanderungsgesetz”)
The law is based on the new premise: Germany is a country of immigration and therefore it must develop and apply a mechanism to structure immigration. For the first time, one piece of legislation shall cover the stay of foreigners as well as employment issues, so far regulated by other laws. The reform represents a significant contribution to the need for simplification and transparency of the legislation. The wide range of permits shall be reduced to two types: the temporary residence permit and the permanent settlement permit. The number of grounds for granting the temporary residence permit and the permanent settlement permit should be also limited (i.e. education, gainful activity, family reunification and humanitarian reasons.

Three institutions shall be responsible for migration issues: the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (as an umbrella and executive organ), the Federal Institute for Population Research and an independent Commission of Experts for Immigration and Integration, which should issue annually an opinion concerning the need for immigration and the quotas.

In the field of work migration, three regimes should exist. (1) Normal procedure, where a work permit for a limited period is issued for a concrete place for which a home worker cannot be found. This system has to be made more transparent and flexible by introducing the joint procedure for issuing a work and residence permit (“one stop government”). (2) A regime which enables the immigration and permanent settlement of highly skilled experts. (3)  These two immigration routes reflecting labour market needs are complemented by a limited number of “quota” immigrants chosen from applicants making use of the point scheme. In addition, foreign graduates of German Universities will be allowed to settle in Germany. For one year after completing their studies, they will be allowed to look for a job in Germany.

A differentiated approach will be also introduced in relation to family reunification. While children up to 18 years can join “highly skilled” workers, with the other two categories family reunification will only be possible for children up to 12 years old. (This measure should improve the integration of children.)

In the humanitarian filed, the contested institute of Duldung (“toleration status”) should be replaced by the leave to remain on humanitarian grounds, where appropriate. If humanitarian reasons do not exist, expulsion of the foreigners should be carried out rigorously.

The law foresees more intense integration measures based on the idea of an “integration contract”. The State offers all newcomers the minimum integration offer (language courses, introduction into German culture, law and history). If the immigrant is lacking the requested knowledge, participation is compulsory. Non-participation may result in the loss of the residence permit while successful accomplishment may shorten the waiting period for a permanent residence permit (from 8 to 7 years).

Sources:
Entwurf eines Gesetzes zur Steuerung und Begrenzung der Zuwanderung und zur Regelung des Aufenthalts und der Integration von Unionsbürger und Ausländern. Zuwanderungsgesetzes
Entwurf einer Verordnung über Integrationskurze für Ausländer (Ausländerintegrationskursverordnung – AuslIntV)
http://www.bmi.bund.de

      
    Until the end of 2003, the parliamentary procedure has not been completed. In winter 2003, the Law was discussed by the Joint Committee of both German chambers (the Joint Committee – Vermittlungsausschuss - is a special mechanism to resolve the situation when the chambers disagree; the purpose is to negotiate and to submit a compromise proposal.) The chance that the law will be approved is not very high. While the opposition (CDU) requests that the law limit legal immigration, the “green-red” coalition government views the proposal as an already too compromised in this respect. Some commentators therefore foresee that the law will fail. Instead, a “small solution” will be accepted, namely the adoption of the law on integration. This part of the immigration draft law is the most consensual. The immigration draft law is the first piece of legislation in Germany to seek to control integration at the central level and dovetail various integration policies. The new integration measures should cover all immigrants who intend to settle in Germany permanently, both the immigrants of German descent and non-German immigrants. The proposed implementing decree on integration courses (Ausländerintegrationskursverordnung) presumes that immigrants will be offered participation in the integration courses. The content of the courses shall consist in language education (600 hours) and orientation in German law, culture and history (30 hours). The courses are completed by tests. For those immigrants who do not have sufficient knowledge of German participation is compulsory. Other foreigners (such as EU citizens, previous immigrants) may participate voluntarily. The coordinating role shall rest with the new Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. It is estimated that 98,000 persons will take part in the courses every year. The estimated costs are 126 million euro.
    
    III. 5. Convergence of National Policies
     
       Despite of initial differences, stemming from different national histories and identities, France, Great Britain and Germany have moved toward common ground in their immigration and integration policies over the last several years. They all have explicitly recognized that they are countries of immigration and formulated outlines of their policies in this field accordingly.
 
      For France, this acknowledgement was the least difficult. Thanks to the universalistic republicanism and mass immigration preceding the post-war influx, immigration was “normal” for France. In other words, even if it is not an immigrant nation, modern France has always been a country of immigration. The measures of 1997-8 subscribed to the original universalism of the French republic and acknowledged overtly the experience of immigration which had characterized the country since the middle of the 19th century.

      It was not that simple in Britain and Germany. Rather than to im-migration, Britain had been accustomed for centuries to colonists´ e-migration, and the post-war influx of non-European immigrants seemed to be merely an unintended consequence of an effort to maintain an overseas empire  (especially the Old Commonwealth) rather than a normal state of affairs. While as late as in the 70s and 80s, Britain declared itself to be “a zero-immigration country”, Germany claimed in the same period repeatedly that it is kein Einwanderungsland (not an immigration country). In this latter case, the established tradition of ethnic nationhood together with the fact of a divided Germany and millions of Germans in Eastern Europe made the Federal Republic of Germany the homeland for all ethnic Germans and thus excluded in advance the very concept of the settling and national integration of ethnically and culturally alien populations.

     Only in the 90s did Britain finally emerge from its post-colonialist “mourning” period and the German state completed its ethno-nationalist mission by uniting with East Germany and opening its doors to all Eastern Germans who wanted to use their newly acquired freedom of movement to resettle. The facts on the ground (that is, the massive presence of second- and third-generation immigrants and the impossibility of stopping immigration) but also economic expediency and a series of progressive ideas made sizeable parts of the political elite in both Britain and Germany re-assess their established national self-conceptions.

     Around the turn of the century, France, Great Britain and Germany have all explicitly recognized that they are countries of immigration and formulated quite similar migration- and integration-policy frameworks. Their migration policies converge on two points. On the one hand, active immigration policy schemes are designed to attract and recruit young and high-skilled labour migrants that would contribute to economic growth, fill labour shortages, compensate for aging home populations, and thereby ensure sufficient input into the welfare and pension systems. On the other hand, an extensive apparatus is deployed to restrict and limit the immigration of unwanted (low-skilled, culturally alien) groups which are portrayed as liable to disrupt the social order and drain welfare state resources. For this restrictive purpose, special measures are introduced to fight illegal immigration. At the same time, asylum-legislation is revised and refined so that it be able to capture and offset an alleged surge in “bogus asylum seekers”.

      France, Britain, and Germany also converge on the strategic guidelines for their integration policies. On the one hand, they try to build a clear procedural line connecting immigration to naturalization so that the passage from settling and residence to citizenship is as easy as possible. On the other hand, they have shifted the onus of accommodation onto the immigrants. There has been a strong tendency in recent years to temper the celebration of diversity (driven by the liberal multiculturalism of  the 1970s and 1980s) with stress on the obligation of immigrants to adapt and accept the basic values and cultural givens of the receiving society. This emphasis on national “unity” over multicultural “diversity” received new momentum in the wake of “9/11” terrorist attacks which intensified the perception of the rise and increased threat of Islamic terrorism (if not outright islamophobia).

      Integration is no longer perceived as a matter of choice for an immigrant; it is no longersomething that is desirable but cannot be enforced. Rather, it is the main precondition of acceptance. New policies are designed not only to integrate those already present in the territory, but also to filter potential migrants according to their capacity for integration and willingness to do so. In this task, all the three examined countries have drawn inspiration from traditional migration countries, but also from some new experiments carried out in the Netherlands during the 1990s. They try to formulate new immigration programmes, which exhibit strikingly similar premises:
> integration is to be managed by the central government, with the involvement of other actors countrywide,
> integration programmes should include all new immigrants (not only specific groups, such as refugees); they may also involve old immigrants on a voluntary basis,
> compulsory language education and testing should be a precondition for acquiring the status of a permanent resident (Germany, France) or nationality (U.K.),
> stress is put on civic education and adherence of the new immigrant to the fundamental values of the host society, such as the rule of law and equality; a new emphasis is also put on enhancing the practical capacity to function in the host society,
> there is a strong tendency (Germany, France) to formulate the new integration polices in the liberal rhetoric of “contract”, albeit the terms of the contract are drawn only by one side. The old rhetoric of “rights” is overridden by the rhetoric of “freedom to choose”.
> Non-compliance with the integration requirements is sanctioned.
        
    III. 6. Common EU Framework for Migration and Asylum Policy

      The Treaty of Rome (1957) – the foundation of the current EU - enshrines the idea of free movement of persons in the common European area. Ever since its establishment, the EC has adopted numerous instruments to facilitate the free movement and settlement of nationals of EC countries. For this internal migration the term “freedom of movement of workers” of “freedom of movement of persons” is used. The freedom of movement of workers is one of the four freedoms of the common EU market (alongside the free movement of goods, services and capital). The founding treaties did not give the EC any competence regarding external migration, that is the movement of third country nationals across EU borders. It was only much later, in the mid 1970s, with the changing character of immigration, that some of the EC countries started to cooperate more closely with the aim of regulating migration more effectively.
      The landmark moment in the emergence of the common EC asylum and migration policy was the adoption of the Single European Act in 1986, which decided on the creation of the unified market space without border checks on internal frontiers. The Act implied the following assumption, which was later stated explicitly in the document from Palma de Majorca in 1989: the lifting of the control on internal borders must be accompanied by stricter control of external borders and by greater coordination and mutual adjustments of the migration and asylum policies of the member states so that they may maintain their security and stability. In other words, the logical corollary of the waning of internal frontiers between the EU countries has been the erecting of less and less penetrable external borders. The process of gradual establishment of the common EU migration and asylum policy developed in three stages, the landmarks of which are the reforms of the founding treaties.
      (1) The period of the inter-governmental cooperation of some EC countries before the coming into force of the Maastricht treaty (mid 1970s – 1st November 1993)
      (2) The period of institutionalised intergovernmental co-operation within the EC framework (from Maastricht to Amsterdam)
      (3) The post-Amsterdam period, characterised by the communitarisation of the asylum and migration policies (since 1999)
    The three periods correspond, albeit indirectly, to the main waves of migration to Europe. Thus, the first origins of intergovernmental co-operation date back to the mid-1970s, when most west European countries ceased recruitment and started to implement policies limiting immigration. The introduction of institutionalised co-operation after Maastricht reflects the increase of asylum migration after 1989. The post-Amsterdam period corresponds with the fourth migration wave.

                        Table III.1
                      
            
European Migration Waves
 The Development of the EU Asylum and Migration Policies
(1) reconstruction of Europe and post - war labour migration
(1945-1975)

(1) the origins of inter-governmental cooperation
(second half of 1970s -1993)
(2) family reunification
(mid 1970s - end of 1980s)


(2) institutionalised inter-governmental cooperation (1993-1999)
(3) forced migration, asylum seekers and refugees
(late 1980s - late 1990s)
(4) the return of labour migration since the turn of the century
 (3) the communitarisation of EU asylum and migration policies
since 1999



    (1) The Period of Inter-governmental Cooperation of Some EC Countries Before the Coming into Force of the Maastricht Treaty (mid 1970s – 1                 November 1993)

      As there was no mandate for the EU, co-operation was carried out merely on the inter-governmental level. The co-operation did not encompass all EC countries, but was limited to groups of interested ones. The adopted instruments had the form of international treaties. Along with the treaties, non-binding instruments were adopted. The most important outcome of this period were the Schengen accords of 1985 and 1990, signed originally by France, Germany and the Benelux countries, concerning the abolition of checks at internal borders, and the Dublin Convention concerning the responsibility for processing asylum applications lodged in one of the member states. The Schengen agreements are binding for all EU member states, with the exception of the UK and Ireland. The Dublin Convention was concluded among then member states of the EU and came into force in 1997; currently it is binding upon all 15 member states. (Currently, both instruments are being transformed into EU legislative acts.)
      
    (2) From Maastricht to Amsterdam (1993-1999): Institutionalised Co-operation

    The events of the early 1990s, such as the war in former Yugoslavia, and the unprecedented increase in numbers of asylum-seekers, showed that a more effective coordination of migration and asylum policies was needed. The Maastricht treaty on the European Union, signed in 1992 and in force since 1st  November 1993, brought about a compromise solution. It introduced new forms and methods of cooperation in the two areas of common interest: foreign and security policy (so called second pillar) and the area of justice and home affairs (so called third pillar). Asylum policy, the rules for crossing the external borders and checks on these borders, as well as some aspects of immigration policy, were in the “justice and home affairs” pillar. The new legal instruments were “joint positions” and “common procedures”, which had to be adopted unanimously. In practice, the Council preferred to adopt various non-binding instruments, such as resolutions and recommendations. In this period, the common visa policy was also introduced. (The common visa policy was incorporated into the old, community pillar – new Art. 100c - and was implemented by regulations.) The result of this period was an incoherent set of documents. As EU enlargement became an issue, the set of documents started to be referred to as the EU asylum and migration acquis. For the candidate countries, such as the Czech Republic, all the acquis were declared binding, including the Schengen accords. As will be shown below, the transposition of the acquis was considered a top priority for the Czech Republic and consumed almost all available human and other resources. This transposition in itself took the place of a migration strategy.

    (3) The Post-Amsterdam Period (since 1999): the Communitarisation of EU Asylum and Migration Policies
   
    The landmark in the development of the common asylum policy was the Amsterdam treaty, signed in October 1997. The Amsterdam Treaty, which came into force on 1 May 1999, brought about two important changes in common asylum and migration policies: (1) it shifted the common asylum and migration policy from the third into the first pillar and (2) integrated Schengen agreements into the framework of the EU.

    (1) A new title IV. “Visas, asylum, immigration and other policies related to the free movement of persons” was integrated into the Treaty establishing the European community. In order to establish progressively the area of freedom, security and justice, the Council shall adopt (Articles 62 and 63), e.g.:
    > measures to ensure the absence of any control of persons when crossing internal borders
    > measures on the crossing of external borders
    > measures on asylum
    > measures on refugees and displaced persons
    > measures on immigration policy
    > measures defining the rights and conditions under which nationals of third countries who are legally resident in a Member State may reside in another Member State.

    The character of individual measures falling under the above provision is specified. Measures should be adopted within a period of five years after the coming into force of the treaty. The limit, however, does not apply to all measures, e. g. “the conditions of entry and residence, and the standards on procedures for the issue by MS of long term visas and residence permits, including those for family reunion”, falling under the item “measures of immigration policy goals” are not subject to the limit. In this way, the EU set out in the migration and asylum field “priorities” on the one hand and “long-term goals” on the other.

    (2) In Amsterdam, a special protocol (Protocol no. 2) “integrating the Schengen acquis into the framework of the EU” was annexed to the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community. This annex confirmed once more that the Schengen acquis has to be adopted by the new accession countries.

    The Amsterdam treaty confirmed the goal of speeding-up the creation of the common asylum and migration policy and gave the EU more adequate tools to achieve it. The creation of common migration and asylum policy is not seen as an autonomous goal, but as a part of the broader project of creating an area of security and justice. The “communitarisation” of the asylum and migration field means, in practice, that all the “old” instruments, be they non-binding resolutions or international treaties, have to be replaced by “new” EC legal instruments, that is regulations and directives.

    Five months after the entry into force of the Amsterdam treaty the European Council in Tampere (15-16 October 1999), which focused exclusively on the “creating an area of security and justice” defined the political goals and strategies of how to implement the Amsterdam treaty. The Tampere Presidency Conclusions define four elements of the common policy: (1) partnership with countries of origin, (2) a common European asylum system, (3) fair treatment of third-country nationals and (4) management of migration flows. As regards integration, included under item (3), the conclusions say that “the legal status of third country nationals should be approximated to that of Member States nationals. A person, who has resided legally in a Member State for a period of time to be determined and who holds a long-term residence permit, should be granted in that member State a set of rights which are as near as possible to those enjoyed by EU citizens.” (Tampere, point 21).

    The Tampere summit was followed speedily by the intense work on the implementation. So far, there has been most rapid progress in the area of temporary protection, asylum and external borders. The following part of the paper focuses on developments in two areas, which lie at the heart of the immigration policies in the stricter sense, that is the reception of labour migrants (III. 6. 1.) and integration of immigrants (III. 6. 2.) In these two areas, the Member States remain responsible for a number of significant issues. This led the European Commission to propose a new and flexible method for cooperation and coordination, so called “open method of co-ordination for Community immigration policy”.

Box III.6
An Open Method of Coordination for Community Immigration Policy

The open method of coordination, specifically adopted for the immigration field, shall complement the legislative framework set by the Amsterdam treaty. The method, which should be used for an initial period of 6 years, consists in the preparation and approval of European multiannual guidelines, which will set short, medium term and long term goals and targets. The European guidelines shall cover six areas: (1) developing a comprehensive and coordinated approach to migration management at the national level, (2) improving information available on legal possibilities for admission to the EU and on the consequences of using illegal channels, (3) reinforcing the fight against illegal immigration, smuggling and trafficking, (4) establishing a coherent and transparent policy and procedures for opening the labour market to third country nationals, (5) integrating migration issues into relations with third countries, in particular the countries of origin and (6) ensuring the development of integration policies. In order to implement each set of guidelines, Member States should prepare National Action Plans which will be reviewed and adapted on an annual basis.

Source:
Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament On an Open Method of Coordination for Community immigration policy. COM (2001) 387 final. Brussels 11.7.2001.




    III. 6. 1. EU Labour Migration Policies

    The EU adopted the first non-binding documents aiming at the harmonisation of the criteria for the admission of labour related migration in the period of institutionalised cooperation. The most important are two parallel Council resolutions: Council Resolution of 20 June 1994 on limitation on admission of third country nationals to the territory of Member States for employment (O.J. C 274, 19/09/1996, p. 3-6) and Council Resolution of 30 November 1994 relating to the limitation of the admission of third-country nationals to the territory of Member States for the purpose of pursuing activities as self-employed persons (O.J. C 274, 19/09/1996, p. 7 - 9). As the titles of the resolutions reveal, both resolutions mirror the prevailing attitude of early 1990s, namely that “these policies should of necessity be restrictive”. The employment resolution underlines that “at present, no Member State is pursuing an active immigration policy”. It suggests that “admission for temporary employment may therefore be considered in terms of what is purely exceptional”. Member States may consider requests for admission only where vacancies cannot be filled by national or community manpower. As “the present restrictive measures should be continued”, the principles of the resolutions “may not be relaxed in their national legislation”. In spite of this restrictive approach, the employment resolution proposed exceptions for seasonal workers, frontier workers and key personnel of transnational companies.

    At present, the resolutions are rather documents of historical interest. As developments in the EU Members States show, the problem of labour migration is currently viewed from a different perspective. This “U-turn” can be also observed in the newly emerging EU immigration policies. Although the European Council in Tampere did not deal with labour migration in detail, it “acknowledged the need for approximation of national legislations on the conditions for admission and residence of third country nationals, based on a shared assessment of the economic and demographic developments within the Union”. To this end, it requested rapid decisions by the Council on any proposals by the Commission. These decisions should take into account not only the reception capacity of each member state, but also their historical and cultural links with the countries of origin (Tampere, 1999: point 20).

    The Proposal for a Council Directive on the conditions of entry and residence of third country nationals for the purpose of paid employment and self-employed activities (COM/2001/0368 final, O.J. C 322, 27/11/2001, p. 248-256) presents a pioneering and inventive approach, which mirrors the new attitudes that we observe on the national levels. It is based on several underlying assumptions. The regulation of immigration for the purpose of exercising activities as an employed or self-employed person is a cornerstone of immigration policy and the development of a coherent community immigration policy could not succeed without specifically addressing this issue. In an increasingly global labour market and faced with a shortage of skilled labour in certain sectors of the labour market the Community should reinforce its competitiveness by attracting and recruiting third country nationals. At present, the admission of third country nationals for paid employment and self-employed activities differs from one Member State to another. Often, the national administrative rules and procedures are highly complex and there are only a few common rules applicable to all member states. The establishment of a harmonised legal frame must therefore be put in place progressively. The aim of the resolution is to make the first step: to lay down certain common definitions, criteria and procedures which give a common legal frame to the discretion of Member States.

    The economic migrants should be admitted if the chief criteria are met. The chief criterion allowing third-country nationals to exercise activities as self-employed persons should be a test demonstrating that a post cannot be filled by the domestic labour market (“economic needs test”) and a test demonstrating the benefit for employment or the economic development of the host Member State (“beneficial effects test”.) The draft directive proposes a number of measures to simplify and make more transparent the access of a third country national to the labour market, e. g. the introduction of  “one-stop-procedure” and new single documents “a residence permit –worker” and the “residence permit –self employed person”. Permits shall be issued for a limited period of three years and for specific professional activities. After the three-year period, the permit may be renewed and shall not be subject to these restrictions. The permit shall be issued, in principle, to all applicants who meet the prescribed conditions. The Member States may, however, decide to adopt national provisions limiting the issuing of permits (ceilings, quotas) taking into account the overall capacity to receive and integrate third country nationals.

    The draft directive allows exceptions and special procedures relaxing the system, such as more favourable treatment for some categories of professionals, such as researchers and academic specialists, priests, sports professionals, artists, journalists and representatives of non-profit making organisations. The Member States may also decide to consider the “economic need test” to be passed for a specific number of jobs or specific region without the need of individual assessment. The same applies if the annual income offered to a third country national exceeds a defined threshold.

    In its entirety, the proposal is an expression of the laissez-faire turn in relation to labour migration. Yet, it does not present a simple return to the national labour recruitment policies of the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike these policies, it sees labour migration as potentially permanent immigration and gives clear preference to highly skilled workers. By applying these premises, the new policy gets closer to the immigration policies of traditional countries of immigration. On the other hand, the proposal also realistically reflects the low level of harmonisation and the lack of competence of the EU to impose on Member States rules in key areas, such as the number of admitted labour migrants. Even if adopted, the directive would allow one country to pursue stricter and another more liberal immigration policies.

      III. 6. 2. EU Integration Policies

      Currently, the founding treaties do not give the EU a direct mandate to legislate on the integration of immigrants. The legal basis for these measures is derived from the Art. 63 of the Treaty establishing the European Community. As the Tampere European Council showed in 1999, however, the Union wants to develop itself as an area of security, freedom and justice “by making full use of the possibilities offered by the Treaty of Amsterdam.” In Tampere, the Presidency claimed that “Europe must ensure fair treatment of third country nationals” and that “a more vigorous integration policy should aim at granting them rights and obligations comparable to those of EU citizens”. (Tampere, point 18). It further requested that “the legal status of third country nationals should be approximated to that of nationals of Member States.” Hence a person holding a long-term residence permit should be granted a set of uniform rights which are as near as possible to those enjoyed by EU citizens. The Council also endorsed the objective that long-term legally resident third country nationals be offered the opportunity to obtain the nationality of the Member State in which they are resident (Tampere, point 21).

      Four years later, the Thessaloniki European summit (19 and 20 June 2003), building upon the recent Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions on immigration, integration and employment (COM (2003) 336 final. Brussels. 3.6.2003), addressed the integration in a more comprehensive way. Under the heading The development of a policy at the European Union level on the integration of third country nationals legally residing in the territory of the European Union, the document outlines the premises and framework for integration policy. The Presidency calls for the elaboration of “a comprehensive and multidimensional policy on integration”. Taking into account that successful integration contributes to social cohesion and economic welfare, such a policy should cover factors as employment, economic participation, education and language training, health and social services, housing and urban issues, as well as participation in social life. An EU Integration policy should help these countries to live up to the new demographic and economic challenges which they are facing. This requires an exploration of the legal means for third country nationals to migrate to the EU, while taking into account the reception capacity of the Member States. The integration policies should be understood as a continuous, two-way process based on rights and corresponding obligations. Integration policies of the Member States should be developed “within a coherent European framework”. In order to intensify the development of such a framework, the definition of common basic principles should be envisaged.

      Thessaloniki European Council also addressed the implementation process. It referred to the recent setting up of a group of national contact points for integration and invited the Commission to present an Annual Report on Migration and Integration in Europe, which should contain an accurate and objective analysis of the migration data and the immigration and integration policies and practices. The Thessaloniki Conclusions thus present the first European strategy of integration. The shift in comparison to Tampere consists not only in the new emphasis on the comprehensive nature of integration as opposed to mere fair treatment, but also in its placement of integration into broader contexts of economic and social issues. Accordingly, the immigration and integration policies are not merely “related flanking measures” to the free movement of EU citizens, but rather an autonomous field of EU policy.

      Parallel to this elaboration of integration concept, the EU agreed on two directives pertaining directly to integration, the directive on family reunion and the directive on the status of the third country nationals who are long-term residents.

      The Council directive 2003/86/EC of 22 September 2003 on the right to family reunification (O.J. L 251 3.10.2003, p. 12-18) is based on the premise that family reunification, which is a necessary way of making family life possible, “helps to create socio-cultural stability facilitating the third country nationals in the Member State”. The directive recognises the right to family reunification for a resident third country national (“a sponsor”) who is holding a residence permit for a period of validity of one year or more and has reasonable prospects of obtaining a right of permanent residence. The directive covers only the nuclear family, but States may authorise the entry and residence of further family members. The Member State can require that the sponsor has accommodation regarded as normal for a comparable family, health insurance, and stable and regular resources which are sufficient to maintain himself and the members of the family without recourse to the social welfare system. Importantly, the Member States may require third country nationals to comply with integration measures. In principle, the sponsor's family members shall enjoy the same rights as the sponsor.

      The Proposal for a Council directive concerning the status of third country nationals who are long term residents (O.J. C 240 E, 28.8.2001, p. 79-87), which was agreed upon by the Council in November 2003, is based on the principle, shared by all Member States, namely that rights increase with the length of stay. The directive proposes that a third country national who is a long term resident, shall enjoy a set of social and economic rights similar to those of EU citizens, including the right to move to another Member State for study or employment purposes. Member states shall recognise as long-term residents all third country nationals who live legally and continuously on their territory for five years or more.

      III. 6. 3. The EU: Trends and Prospects
      
      On 18 July 2003, the European Convention submitted to the European Presidency in Rome the final Draft of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. The draft treaty was discussed at the Intergovernmental Conference opened on 4 October in Rome and closed in December in Brussels. Although the IGC was a failure, it is expected that the negotiation regarding the adoption of the Constitution will be renewed. Hence, let us have a look on what the Constitution will change in asylum and migration.

      The Constitution proposed to abolish the “three pillar structure” of the EU created in Maastricht, although some differences between issues falling fully within the competence of the EU and others like the common foreign and security policy will remain. The new mandate and rules in the field of migration are contained in Title III, Chapter IV entitled Area of freedom, security and Justice, section 2 Policies on Border Checks, Asylum and Immigration, containing Article III-166 to III-169. Under the proposal, migration and asylum should fall fully within the competence of the EU. The measures in this area shall be adopted by qualified majority, using the co-decision procedure, with the full involvement of the European Parliament and the sole right of legislative initiative of the European Commission. Newly, the European legislation will have the form of “European laws” and “European framework laws”.

      Overall, the proposal of the Convention is not revolutionary. Yet, it pushes the powers of the Union further – to the limits of the politically feasible. Thus, it proposes deepening of community policies where they already exist (e.g. the proposal to introduce the uniform status of asylum, uniform status of subsidiary protection and an “integrated management system for external borders).  However, it extends a mandate on new issues only very cautiously. An example is the new mandate of the EU in the area of integration. While under Article III-168, paragraph 4, European laws and framework laws may establish measures to provide incentives and support for the actions of Member States with a view of promoting the integration of third-country nationals residing legally in their territories, such measures shall “exclude any harmonisation of the laws and regulations of the Member States”. One may wonder what kind of measures the drafters had in mind. One option is introducing a community programme to promote the capacity of the states or civil society actors to provide assistance to newcomers, but such a programme had already already established. (The programme was established as a pilot project in 2003 by introducing a special provision in the budget.) In a similar way, Article III-168, paragraph 5 stipulates, “this article shall not effect the rights of Member States to determine volumes of admissions of third country nationals to their territory in order to seek work."

Box III.7
Draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe

Art. III-166 concerns border controls. The EU shall develop policy with a view to ensure the absence of any controls of persons, whatever their nationality, when crossing internal borders, carrying out checks on persons and efficient monitoring of the crossing of external borders and gradual introduction of an integrated management system for external borders.

Art. III-167 concerns the development of common policies on asylum, subsidiary protection and temporary protection. The goal is to develop “a common European asylum system” which should comprise various elements, such as “uniform status of asylum valid throughout the Union, a “uniform format of subsidiary protection”, a common system of temporary protection, and common procedures and standards for reception conditions.

Art. III-168 deals with common immigration policy. The Union shall develop a common immigration policy aimed at ensuring, at all stages, the efficient management of migration flows, fair treatment of third country nationals and prevention of, and enhanced measures to combat, illegal immigration and trafficking in human beings. Newly, the support for integration action is explicitly referred to, but the harmonisation of integration legislation is excluded. The Member States shall preserve their right to determine volumes of admissions of third country labour migrants.

Art. III-169 introduces principles of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility.

Source:
The European Convention. (18 July 2003) Draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. (Title III, Chapter IV, Section 2) CONV 850/03, Brussels: author.

      
    Migration policy represents one of the most dynamic set of policies. The groundbreaking development that it had undergone from the 1970s to the present is no less amazing than the creation of the common currency. Yet, the development is uneven. In particular, those areas which lay at the heart of traditionally conceived immigration polices, that is the admission of labour migrants and their integration into society, are the least developed. The main reason is mainly the wish of the States to preserve their sovereignty. Nevertheless, this reason is not the only one. The migration landscape in the EU is “extremely contrasted and the imminent adhesion of the 10 candidate countries will only accentuate the difference”. (Garson- Loizillon, 2003: 9). Thus, a common immigration policy could only develop gradually, and, unlike asylum, will never reach “uniformity”. Nonetheless, there are several clearly articulated trends at the EU level, which are likely to develop further and, in turn, influence Member States’ immigration policies.

    »     Labour migrants are understood realistically as potential permanent immigrants. What follows from this is that labour migration flows cannot be determined purely by labour demands, but that policy must take into account the overall reception capacity of the receiving society.
    »     The immigration of educated and highly skilled migrants from third countries is seen as desirable and beneficial. EU policies shall be designed to attract immigrants which may increase the competitiveness of the EU economy.
    »     Some segments of the labour market tend to be fully open, this concerns in particular the globalised industries, such as IT industry, but also science and research.
    »     The other side of the new openness to migration is the emphasis that is put on integration. The integration requirements vis a vis immigrants are seen as legitimate. The willingness of the immigrant to integrate shall play a key role in the decision on admission.
    »     The current EU framework and the future visions have severe limits. It is still considered the responsibility of a member state to determine the number of the legal immigrants on its territory. (Brussels European Council. Presidency Conclusions. 16-17 October 2003: point 32). Given the creation of an area without internal frontiers, this catchphrase is a clear anachronism. (Rather, the motto should be that each Member Sate is responsible to other Member States for the number of immigrants admitted to EU territory.)
      
      Chapter IV: Czech Republic

      IV.1. Immigration Policies

      The political changes after 1989 had a radical impact on foreign migration to the Czech Republic. From 1990 until the present, the Czech Republic has changed from a country of emigration to a country of immigration. According to the official statistics, which, however, register only a segment of the real migratory flows, in the period 1990 -2000 131,400 persons immigrated to the Czech Republic, while only 43,700 emigrated. Demographers distinguish three migratory phases. The first period started immediately after November 1989 with return migration and ended in 1992 with the increase of Czech-Slovak migration that reflected the approaching end of Czechoslovakia. In the second period (1993-1997), immigration from Slovakia decreased, while immigration from other countries increased. The third period (1998-2000) is characterised by a decrease in the intensity of foreign migration (Katedra demografie a geodemografie, 2002:69-70).

      This picture is not complete as it overlooks a significant group of migrants who live in the Czech Republic with a limited work and residence permit. The statistics including these migrants reveals a more dynamic scenario. In 1993, after the split of the Czechoslovakia, approximately 50,000 foreigners lived in the Czech Republic. Of them, 30,000 had a permanent residence permit, while 20,000 had a temporary residence permit. The category of foreigners with temporary residence permits was on the increase until 1996, while in the category of those with permanent residence permits the most significant increase occurred between 1995-1998. As of 31 December 2002, 231,608 foreigners lived in the Czech Republic. Thereof, 156,359 had a temporary permit and the 75,249 had a permanent residence permit (Migration Report, 2002:32-35). The foreigners in the Czech Republic represent around 2% of the population. Of EU countries, Italy (2.2%) and Finland (1,7%) have similar sizes of foreign populations.. Most west European countries have a larger foreign population, e. g. Switzerland (19.6%), Austria (9.3%), Germany (8.9%),Belgium (8.3%), France (6.4%), United Kingdom (4.2%) and the Netherlands (4.1%). Lower percentages of immigrants live in Greece (1.5%) and in Portugal (1.2%).

      The migratory flows into the Czech Republic were shaped by many factors, such as labour migration during the socialist period (e.g. Vietnamese guest workers followed by Vietnamese small entrepreneurs), family relations and cultural and language affinity (migration from Slovakia, partly from Ukraine) or economic chances. The changing legislation that tolerated and later tried to structure and curtail migration also played a significant role. Since the mid 1990s, the state authorities have launched the process of approximating the Czech migration legislation to the EU acquis. As regards the attempts of the state to manage migration and structure immigration, we can distinguish three migration periods after 1989.
 
      (1) The first period (1990-1995) is a laissez-faire period. The liberal approach of society to migration, which was the expression of the liberated Zeitgeist “allowed almost everybody to come to the territory and to do there whatever he wanted to do” (Drbohlav, 2001:218). The newly adopted aliens law of 1992 (Zákon č. 123/1992 Sb., o pobytu cizinců na území ČSFR) was a simple legal instrument. It did not intend to restrict migration, but rather to take a proper evidence of foreigners and to legalise the use of police measures against law-breakers. In this period, legal and institutional structures were created to provide reception and assistance to particular groups, such as asylum-seekers and refugees. The State authorities also assisted in return migration of particular groups of the descendants of Czech expatriates from Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Rumania.

      (2) The second period (1995-2000) is a period of restrictions. The restrictive turn reflected domestic developments and concerns, first of all the increasing rates of unemployment which began to be perceived as a result of immigration, especially by Czech Roma who blamed Ukrainians for the jobs they had lost. On the other hand, the restrictive turn was brought about by an external factor – the accession process which forced Czechs to harmonise with the EU the acquis on migration. In spite of the shoddy legal foundations of various elements of the EU acquis of mid 1990s, candidate countries were requested to adopt them in their entirety. No wonder that the immense task of harmonising migration policies with the EU was seen by the state authorities as “a migration strategy” in itself. The restrictive trends of this period reached their peak with the adoption of the two twin acts, the Aliens Act of 1999 and the Asylum Act of 1999 that came into force on 1 January 2000.

      (3) The third period (from 2000 up to the present) is characterised by new approaches and endeavours to create more comprehensive and self-confident immigration policies. This shift has been caused by the realization that the harmonisation with the EU - in principle completed with the 1999 Aliens Act and Asylum Act – does not tackle a number of pressing issues. The current phase has been characterised by three elements:
    > development of the “catch-all” integration policies since 1999/2000,
    > efforts aiming at the introduction of active immigration policies
    > adoption of the first overall migration strategy in 2002
The following sections IV. 2., IV. 3. and IV. 4. treat these three elements respectively.
      

      IV.2. Integration Policies

      The development of integration policies in the Czech Republic has undergone three different periods. The initial period, can be characterised by the limited and targeted integration measures focused exclusively on distinct immigrant groups: recognised refugees and ethnic Czechs repatriated from particular regions (e.g. compatriots from the Volhyn in the Chernobyl area or from Kazakhstan). The second period, which started in 1999 and lasted until very recently, represented a constitutive period for “catch-all” integration policies towards immigrants. In this period, the Interior Ministry took a leading role. It managed to push the integration issue onto the government agenda (and onto the agendas of particular ministries) and to create basic institutional structures and policy frameworks. The last period started gradually with reflections on how to reform these structures and policies, which no longer provide adequate responses to new challenges. We can call this nascent period a transformation period. The turning point marking the beginning of the new period is the shifting of the competence for integration as of 1 January 2004 from the Interior Ministry to the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs.

    The correlation with the development of immigration policies is encapsulated in table below.

    Table IV.1

Czech Republic
Immigration Policies
 Integration Policies
(1) liberal period (1990-mid 1990s)
(1) initial period (1993 -1999)
policies targeting specific groups (refugees, compatriots)
(2) restrictions, adoption of the EU acquis (mid 1990s-2000)
(3) new approaches to immigration since 2000
 (2) constitutive period (2000 - 2003)
(3) transformation period, since 1 January 2004




    > The Initial Period of Integration Policies
      In 1991/1992, the state assistance programmes were launched to help integrate those who had been granted refugee status or had been included in state sponsored expatriates’ resettlement schemes. The two assistance programmes, which operated - and in the case of recognised refugees still operates - on an analogous basis, involved the provision of housing and the mediation of employment and social assistance. These assistance programmes have three peculiar features: (1) they are centrally organised, (2) the assistance is individualised, that is provided to individual families, which are in a quasi-contractual relation to the Government, and (3) they are, consequently, very costly. Despite offering important experiences with the integration of immigrants, they could hardly be extended to other groups for the following reasons. First, if such programmes involve thousands of families instead of tens or hundreds, they become unmanageable. Second, the cost would be immense. Third, and most important, such policies would need a compelling justification since they involve a level of assistance not available to the local population in need (e.g. homeless, unemployed etc.)

    > The Constitutive Period of Integration Policies (1999 – 2003)
      The major incentive for setting up a “catch all” strategy for integration was the involvement of the Czech Republic in the work of the Council of Europe. The ministerial Conference held in Warsaw in 1996, organised by the Council o Europe, was a decisive moment in this regard. The Conference proposed two measures. First, it requested the elaboration of a new pan-European conceptual framework for integration, which would reflect the new composition of the Council membership, brought about with its enlargement by the countries of central and eastern Europe. Second, it proposed the organisation of round tables in the new Member States, which could serve as a prime impetus in bringing together relevant stakeholders at the national level and offering them the Council of Europe's “know-how”, based on experiences of the old Member States.

      Taking up the impetus, the Interior Ministry organised a first national-round table in 1998, which was followed by an international Seminar on Strategies for Implementing Integration Policies held in May 1999 in Prague. In 1998-99, the Ministry took two further important steps towards the development of integration strategy. It sets up a specific central structure – an advisory body for integration policies - the Commission for the Integration of Foreigners and Community Relations (further Commission for Integration) and elaborated the Principles of the Strategy for the Integration of Foreigners (further 1999 Principles). The Principles, approved by Government in July 1999, were followed by the Strategy for the Integration of Foreigners (further 2000 Strategy), approved by the Government in 2000.

      The Working Consultation Group, established in 1998, was transformed into the Commission for Integration as an advisory body to the interior minister. It involves major stakeholders, only one, yet important, exception – the immigrants themselves. It involves the representatives of other ministries and government agencies, umbrella organisations of employers and trade unions, representatives of major non-governmental organisations, experts from universities and the Academy of Sciences, and representatives of self-governments. A small unit at the Ministry, which is a part of the Department for Asylum and Migration Policies, functions as the secretariat of the Commission. Since its creation, the Commission has been involved in the drafting of all major policy documents as well as in implementing them.
 
      The 1999 Principles is a relatively short document. Out of its preamble and 15 principles, about half are normative statements, while the rest deals with organisational issues. The Principles are accompanied by a Timetable for their implementation and an explanatory memorandum. Interestingly, the preamble does not refer to the value of integration, but to international commitments of the Czech Republic in this field. The principles are understood as an explicit declaration of the will of the government to fulfil these commitments, taking into account “current possibilities to implement the standards under the conditions existing in the Czech Republic”. They declare the responsibility of the state for creating conditions that would enable fair participation of legally and long term settled foreigners in the life of the society, as well as the willingness to eliminate discrimination, secure equal chances, and to protect their rights. The Principles also indicate that integration does not mean assimilation. The communities of immigrants are to be considered as “an integral and enriching element of the society” and partners in creating a “multicultural society”. In the elaboration of the integration strategy and its implementation, the government should co-operate with international organisations as well as domestic actors (NGOs, regions, municipalities etc.) The attached “timetable” specifies that the future strategy should be implemented in three phases: (1) the preparatory phase - 1999-2000, (2) the implementation phase - 2000 – 2001, and (3) the evaluation phase - 2002. (Documents adopted later reveal that what the authors had in mind was not implementing the often long-term goals of the strategy, but disseminating the strategy itself and making it the basis for policy proposals.)

      The 2000 Strategy sets as its primary goal the creation of an operational set of measures “against the background of the Principles”, and declares the “current integration policies of the EU” to be the main source of the Strategy. In line with the Tampere Conclusions, one of the main goals of integration is “bringing the status of legally and long-term settled foreigners as close as possible to the legal status of citizens”. The two major parts of the 2000 Strategy are, then, the analysis of the problems in various sectors and the proposal of strategic measures. The titles, however, are rather misleading. The analytical part, which describes the current situation in various spheres (e.g. residence status, naturalisation, political participation, employment, housing), also contains the identification of major problems and (occasionally) guidance for their solution. The Proposal for strategic measures covers mostly implementing mechanisms: the creation of structures and networks for implementation of the integration policies. It also defines the roles of various actors and deals with support for research, improving statistics and the financing of various projects. The institutional processes which the strategy (or rather the Government Resolution endorsing it) sets up additionally in 2001 are the plans for integration policies by the key ministries and the setting up of the advisory bodies for the integration of foreigners at the state regional district levels.

      Another issue which the 2000 Strategy aimed to address was the issue of “target groups”. The strategy proposes to solve the issue by sticking to the legal definition. The target group for integration measures should include all foreigners who live legally on the territory for more than one year. In addition, it should include other foreigners, if the inclusion is justified by the basis on which the residence permit was issued, such as family reunion. As regards cultural activities and education, Czech citizens of immigrant origin should also be included, provided they show willingness to participate in these activities. Such a broad, inclusive definition is a sign of a liberal approach, but it also reveals that the drafters wanted to avoid controversies that any definition of the immigrant would involve. Thus, the 2000 Strategy reveals a major paradox: while it clearly aims at the integration of immigrants, the very fact that some foreigners are immigrants remains a taboo like the word immigrant itself.

      This paradox invokes a parallel with the German situation before the official recognition of the fact that Germany is an immigrant country. Long-term foreign residents should be treated fairly, which also means that rights should increase with time. “Integration” as a set of policies should guarantee that these rights are respected and it should facilitate good relations between the “natives” and the “newcomers”. Yet this “fair treatment approach” remains neutral to the desirability of the full inclusion of newcomers into the society as future citizens. This analysis is supported by the marginal attention that the Strategy devotes to naturalisation. In brief, the Czech integration strategy, as developed at the turn of the century, is rather a “fair treatment strategy” than “strategy of full inclusion”. If this assessment is correct, we can assume that any positive turn toward the latter will have to be conditioned by a positive transformation in approaches to immigration. We have to leave the issue for further consideration in the following section. Now, we turn to the current stage of the development of the integration strategies.

      In the constitutive period, the implementation of integration strategies brought about some positive results. These are summed up in two government papers, the Information on the implementing of the Strategy of integration (2001) and the Effectiveness of the Strategy (2002). They involve, inter alia, the following observations:
    * key ministries prepared integration plans for the sectors within their competences. In some cases they managed to interpret the general “fair treatment principles”     into more specific standards and put forward concrete proposals for legislative and other changes,
    * increased knowledge of immigrant communities (provided by the studies commissioned by the Ministry) improved statistics and improved the knowledge of             immigrants about their rights through targeted information campaigns,
    * projects facilitating the integration of immigrants were supported by state grants,
    * newly established advisory bodies at the state district level carried out monitoring of the situation at the local level.

    > Transformation Period of Integration Policies (since January 2004)
      Besides positive results, the experience also indicated the pressing need to reform integration strategies and their implementing mechanism. First, the devolution of powers to regions and municipalities, completed as of 1 January 2003, diluted the ability of the central government to influence policies at the local level. Second, it became clear that the integration agenda has predominantly social aspects, and thus it would be better placed within the competence of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. Third, it also turned out that the model, in which the Commission, as an advisory body that meets several times in a year, was supposed to play the role of a decision-making body, turned out not to be sustainable. Thus, the shifting of the competence to the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs as from 1 January 2004 can bring a new dimension to integration policy. Remarkably, it coincides with the EU Thessaloniki strategy, which views integration not primarily as a matter of fair treatment, but rather as an element of social cohesion and economic welfare.
      
      IV.3. Active Immigration Policies

      During the 1990s, the Ministry of Interior played a leading role in immigration and integration issues. The initiative for a change in immigration policies originated, however, in the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. Inspired by Canadian immigration schemes, the international department of the ministry elaborated and pushed through the Pilot project of the Active Selection of Qualified Foreign Workers, approved finally by the Government in July 2002. The title of the project is a bit misleading. It is not designed to respond to an acute shortage of suitably qualified and skilled workers within the resident labour market, but to test the operating of a permanent immigration scheme. The aim is to attract and select immigrant families with a high integration potential. In its initial phase, which has not yet come to its end, the project has been limited to three countries, Bulgaria, Croatia and Kazakhstan. The goal is to extend the project to other countries. Although the drafters of the project did not omit its proper presentation with the public, it met mostly with reserved attitudes, both from media and from expert circles.

 
Box IV.1
Czech Republic: Pilot Project of the Active Selection of Qualified Foreign Workers

The outline of the Pilot Project of the Active Selection of Qualified Foreign Workers was approved in 2001, its full version in July 2002. The project is administered by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. The aim of the project is to test the possibility of operating a permanent immigration scheme to the Czech Republic. The model for the project is that of the Quebec point system. The applicant can achieve the maximum of 66 points. The minimum qualification criteria are set at 25 points. The evaluated criteria include employment relationship, work experience, achieved education, age (preferably 23-35), previous experience with life in the Czech Republic, language skills, and evaluation of the family. The project should enable a limited number of families to come and settle permanently in the Czech Republic. The settlement of those chosen is facilitated by the issuance of permanent residence permits after 3 years. (Normally, the foreigners have to wait 10 years.) The applicants have to secure a work permit themselves.

The project was launched de facto with some delays in the summer of 2003. The quota for the first year was settled at 600 persons and at 1400 in the second. In reality, the project started in 2003 with the aim of involving 300 persons, 150 residing already on the territory and 150 from abroad (that is mainly from the three countries of origin selected.) On 3 November 2003, the first round of selection took place. In 2003, in two rounds of selection procedures, 126 persons applied and 114 were selected (92 Bulgaria, 17 Kazakhstan and 5 from Croatia.) With the exception of two persons from Kazakhstan, the applicants applied from Czech territory.

The project is demanding, both administratively and financially. Three employees work full time at the embassies, while another six work in the centre. The launch of the project was accompanied by an intense media campaign. The reaction of the media was predominately positive, but critical. Some criticised the project because of its limited scope or because of the concrete selection of the three countries. Some considered it very bureaucratic.

In February 2004, the Ministry of Labour submitted for discussion some proposals for changes in the project, including the extension of the project to cover another three countries. The proposal also involves a new element. In addition to the “country-based” selections, the project will also enable graduates from Czech universities to participate in the project, irrespective of their country of origin.

Sources:
Government of the Czech Republic (26 September 2001): Principy a postup realizace projektu “Aktivní výběr kvalifikovaných zahraničních pracovníků” The principles and the proposed implementation of the pilot project: “Active selection of qualified foreign workers.” Endorsed by Government Resolution No. 975/2001.
Government of the Czech Republic (10 July 2002): Podrobný pilotný projekt “Aktivní výběr kvalifikovaných zahraničních pracovníků”. (The elaborated pilot project “Active selection of qualified foreign workers.) Endorsed by Government Resolution No. 720/2002.
Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (February 2004): Zpráva o realizaci pilotního projektu Aktivní výběr kvalifikovaných zahraničních pracovníků v roce 2003 a návrh dalších změn. (Draft report on the implementation of the project of Active selection of qualified foreign workers.)
http://www.imigrace.mpsv.cz
Slovo 1/2003



      
      IV. 4. Migration Strategy of 2003

      The demanding harmonisation of Czech migration legislation with the EU acquis and disputes regarding administrative competencies of various government agencies, resulted in the first migration strategy The Principles of the Government Policy in the Field of Migration of Foreigners (further: Migration Strategy) being adopted only in January 2003. This brief document, composed of the preamble and six principles, is a significant indicator of the changing attitude towards immigration. The emphasis has been shifted from the concrete to the general. The Principles should be the basis for “building a modern and focused immigration policy”. They stress the “central managerial role of the state” in migration, but also the importance of cooperating with the non-governmental sector and local authorities. The Principles set three major goals:
    > combating illegal migration
    > supporting “beneficial forms of migration”
    > contributing to the solution of humanitarian crisis in the world.

      As the Action plan to combat illegal migration adopted in summer 2003 suggests, the principles have started to operate as an overarching basis for policy creation in the migration field: the plan involves a set of preventive measures and calls for the facilitation of issuing work permits. It also wants to combat illegal migration by addressing the situation in the countries of origin.
      The process of harmonisation of immigration and integration policy with west European countries was speeded up by integration with the EU. In 2000, the Czech Republic achieved the level of harmonisation necessary to enter the EU. Since achieving this turning point, a new space has opened up for the articulation of more creative, self-conscious immigration and integration strategies. Nowadays, Czech society is facing the same problems as the west European countries. In many aspects of immigration and integration policies, it is on a similar level of development (e.g. the new and differentiated approach toward labour migration, the creation of programmes for permanent immigration, the addressing of integration through central bodies).
      
      V. Conclusions and Recommendations

      In the post-war years, France, United Kingdom and Germany represented three distinct prototypes of immigration and integration regimes, each shaped by their particular national histories, traditions and self-perceptions. Since the late 1990s, however, there has been an unprecedented convergence of their policies to the new model of a European immigration country. In this model, and contrary to some old countries of immigration, such as the U.S., the state plays a key role not only in structuring immigration, but also in integrating newcomers. The European societies do not want to transform into “melting pots” or “mosaics” of various cultures. Therefore, the immigrants have to adapt to national languages and political values of host countries and maintain only these traits of their ethnic cultures that are compatible with these values. Compared to the traditional models, this new model lies somewhere in-between the traditional French regime of assimilation and the British multicultural model.

      Only to a very limited extent can this convergence be explained by the influence of the emerging common EU migration and asylum policies. As has been discussed above, the creation of common policies concerning the adoption of new immigrants and their integration is only at the very initial phase. (Moreover, the UK is not participating fully in this building of a common framework.) Even if some partial aspects of the common policies, such as visa policies, are of relevance, as a whole the unifying political process has not really been the decisive factor in the reconstructions of immigration and integration strategies and their architects have not viewed emerging EU policies as the major source of concern and stimulus. On the other hand, as the summit of Thessaloniki in the summer of 2003 indicated, the EU has the political will to create a more robust framework of immigration and integration policies in the future. The immigration should contribute as effectively as possible to the new demographic and economic challenges of a unified Europe. Notwithstanding the adoption of the EU Constitution (and its new migration Articles), the EU will play a more influential role in the future than it has been given hitherto.

      The current convergence of immigration and integration policies of major European countries must therefore be explained by other circumstances such as the new geopolitical situation in Europe after 1989, the processes of globalisation, an increasing awareness of demographic decay and a renewed will to impose liberal values on immigrants after the period of excessive multiculturalism. In the case of Germany, the new political situation after 1990 helped this country to accomplish its ethnic mission and open the gates for other than ethnic brethren as well. Globalisation and global competition showed that the liberalisation of some segments of the labour market is a matter of the highest urgency. To be able to compete in a global market, Germany like the other western European countries began consciously to lure global elites. Similar economic and societal problems that all the European societies began to face, in particular the aging of population, made them open to similar responses. In contrast to the prevailing view in the first half of the 1990s, immigration from third countries is no longer viewed as aggravating problems of unemployment and poverty, but rather as a potential remedy for population aging and the pension system deficit.
 
      The volte-face vis-a-vis labour immigration is complemented by converging attitudes concerning integration policies. Integration is understood as a two way process. The state has to facilitate integration by offering the newcomer “integration tools”, that is language and orientation courses (France, U.K., Germany) as well as other tools (e.g. the handbook – U.K.). By accepting the offer of an integration package, the immigrants enter into a “contract” with the host society, under the terms of which he makes efforts not only to obtain a command of the language, but also to adopt the basic values of the host society. If he is not able or willing to accommodate, he cannot count on definite reception and inclusion.

      The new emphasis that all European countries put on integration is partly the result of acknowledging the failure of the integration of the second and third generation of immigrants. Today, the failure not only threatens social cohesion, but sometimes also endangers a peaceful coexistence. (It is no secret that the attacks in France on Jewish objects and symbols can be attributed almost exclusively to the teenagers of immigrant background). The assimilationist accent was also invoked as an attempt to neutralise the popularity of far right politicians and to defuse their anti-immigration rhetoric. The “9/11” and the sensitivity to the problems of coexistence of different cultures and religions have also played a role in departing from the excessive multiculturalism of the 1980s.
      
    
      Recommendations for the Czech Republic
      
      In the last 15 years, Czech immigration and integration policy has gone through a dynamic and accelerated development. Now, it is confronted with the same problems as west European countries. From the experiences and failures of post-war developments in France, U.K. and Germany, we can draw inspiration and lessons at least in three aspects, ranked on the scale from the most general to the concrete.
    » (A) as regards historical and cultural circumstances for the reformulation of the conceptual basis for new strategies and policies
    » (B) as regards adequate and effective methods of policy making in the field of immigration and integration
    » (C) as regards concrete measures and programmes

(A) Cultural Conditions and the Conceptual Premises of the New Immigration and Integration Policies

      (1) Similarly to German society, the Czech society understands a nation first and foremost as an ethnic and genealogical community. The ethnic concept of nationals as descendants of the mythical “forefather Czech” is the major barrier to the construction of a national identity based on citizenship rather than on ethnic origins. In Germany, the turnaround of 1989 resulted in re-unification, which relieved the Western state from its ethnic mission. For the Czechs, on the contrary, the break up of Czechoslovakia hampered the transformation of the ethnic nation into a political nation. To a certain extent, paradoxically, European integration has not helped either, since it has built a stage for the exhibition of fears for the “national existence” and “identity” of ethnic Czechs. The restructuring and transforming of national self-understanding cannot be done by a decree; it is not a matter of a piece of legislation. It can only be influenced indirectly and in the long run, for instance, by school curricula which emphasise the multiethnic character of the history of the Czech lands up to World War II. This multi-ethnic legacy of the past should help Czechs to open up to a multi-cultural and civic nationhood. On the other hand, immigration and integration strategy should send a clear message to immigrants that one need not be born Czech, but can also become Czech out of his/her own will, free decision and efforts.
      
      (2) One of the striking differences between the understanding of immigration and integration issues in France, the UK and Germany on the one hand and in the Czech Republic on the other is how immigration and naturalisation is viewed. In the former countries these processes form an integrated whole, while in the latter case, they are treated separately. The Czech understanding of integration is still that of “integrating foreigners” into the host society, not that of “incorporating immigrants” into the nation. The Integration Strategy 2000 pays lip service to naturalisation by declaring it an accomplishment of integration. However, naturalisation rules have never been included into the reform of the legislation concerning aliens. That must change. The linking of immigration and naturalisation issues and rules is the premise of a consistent integration policy. Only by connecting immigration and naturalisation issues can we create an end-to-end and credible integration mechanism.

(B) Methods of the Policymaking in the Field of Immigration and Integration

      (3) In France, the U.K. and Germany, the taking of strategic, far-reaching decisions in the immigration field is a political issue par excellence. The alternative solutions are proposed and discussed in political parties, movements, civil society, the media, and, finally, in the parliamentary debates. In spite of some positive signals recently, in the Czech Republic immigration and integration issues are still, to a large extend, an administrative matter, and the actual debates take place outside normal political discourse and procedure. Thanks to that, there is no acute danger of an unreasonable and populist solution being adopted. On the other hand, this nourishes a sense of irresponsibility among political forces and the public regarding immigration and its consequences. In order to find consensual, sustainable long-term solutions, this attitude has to change.

      (4) In France, the U.K. and Germany, the substantial proposals for solution of immigration issues are elaborated with the close involvement of experts. It is not a simple one-way process from expertise to political program, though. Rather, politicians study experts’ proposals and recommendations carefully and assess which ones are both acceptable and feasible and, therefore, can become a part of their political program. Thus, each of the major reforms was preceded by a comprehensive expert analysis and political discussion. In the Czech Republic, the responsible authorities have also tried to involve experts in finding solutions. Their involvement in the Commission for Integration is a case in point. The results are, however, not very convincing so far. An independent political analysis of migration and integration issues is missing. One step forward could be to establish a research institute or centre for migration, modelled after similar research institutes affiliated to ministries. (Note that the German reform proposes the establishing of a similar institute.)

(C)  Concrete Measures and Programmes

      (5) In France, U.K. and Germany, the new pressure on migrants to integrate is balanced by an offer (actual or proposed) of language courses and other integration tools. Even if actual experience with how such measures could enhance integration is limited, the Czech authorities should consider it seriously. The language problem of the immigrants is not smaller but rather greater than that of the immigrants in the studied West European countries. In contrast to English, French, or German, Czech is not a world language. This may make some migrants more reluctant to spend time studying it. Therefore, if we agree that the language assimilation is a pre-condition of full societal integration, greater assistance should be offered to immigrants in this regard. Two issues should be considered. First, what is the proper language requirement and at what stage of the integration pathway it should be requested and tested. Second, how the financial burden is to be shared between the host society and the new arrivals.

      (6) In comparison to west European countries, as well as the proposed EU draft directives, there is a considerable lack of any flexible measures of more relaxed, preferential treatment for the categories of migrants such as researchers, scientists, university teachers, top managers, investors. (The first positive signal in this direction is the newly proposed inclusion of all foreign university graduates into the Active selection of qualified foreign workers project.) Since the absence of flexible schemes for these categories may have a bad impact on the competitiveness of the Czech economy, there is a pressing need to introduce such schemes, as proposed by the draft directive on the conditions of entry and residence of third country nationals for the purpose of paid employment and self-employed economic activities.

      (7) As soon as possible, the Czech Republic should introduce a more flexible system enabling and attracting permanent immigrants (“new settlers”). The pilot project of the Active selection of qualified foreign workers should be quickly extended and reformulated to become universal, that is, without limitations to certain countries. (After all, preferential treatment for immigrants from certain countries having historically no close links to the Czech Republic, is not only unusual in the European context, but, more importantly, unsustainable on the ground of fair treatment. The authors are right to say that the recipient country may choose new immigrants, but this argument fails if foreigners who have already entered the country are treated according to their nationality.)  In shaping and introducing the permanent immigration scheme, the Czech Republic may contribute to solving humanitarian crises in the world by taking  into account also the situation of the “to be immigrants” in their home country and their origin, such as is Jewish origin (see Germany) or their belonging to a minority in need. Following in the footsteps of West European countries, the Czech Republic should also make use of the potential of foreign university students and should allow them to stay in the country after they have completed their education. The pathway to permanent immigrant status should be made shorter for all, by cutting the “waiting period” for a permanent residence permit to maximum of five years for all.

      (8) An integral part of all reform should be an aspect of transparency and manageability of the system, in particular from the point of view of the immigrants. It is most urgent to analyse and introduce the “one stop government system” proposed by the draft EU legislation (like e.g. Germany).

***




    Appendix: Explanatory Theories. An Overview

      1. Neo-classical Economics
      » Immigration as a consequence of an unbalance between demand and supply on labour markets.
     
        Regions or countries with a great deal of cheap labour have less demand for it than regions and countries with more costly labour of limited volume. Wage differentials incite workers to travel to the regions where their labour will be paid better (push factor). Their labour will nevertheless still be cheaper than the labour of domestic workers which is why they are also actively recruited by employers (pull factor). In the long run, such migrations should establish a balance both in supply and in salaries. The last explanatory variable of this model is a rationally calculating individual who migrates because he wants to maximize his benefit, that is, his (salaried) income. He compares his future income in the place of his original residence with the possible income in places with higher salaries. (Todaro, 1969) His destination is co-determined by different sets of economic conditions (besides income also unemployment rates) and of migration policies (e.g. skill-based or family-reunification based policies) in receiving countries. (Borjas, 1988: 95).

    It pays to see the other theories as critical responses to what has been perceived as the flaws of this neo-classical “push and pull  model”: what seems logical in retrospect, that is, people migrating from poor countries to the rich ones, is more ambiguous under closer comparative scrutiny: in many poor countries people do not migrate in large numbers to rich countries whilst, on the other hand, outmigration is an important phenomenon in many not-so-poor countries which have experienced a phase of intense economic development. (Panreiter, 2000: 45) Additional (or altogether different) explanatory variables are needed besides (or instead of) the abstract model of individual rational choice.
      
    2. The New Economics of Migration
    » Migration as a consequence of efforts at risk avoidance and income sources diversification and of relative, rather than absolute impoverishment.
     
    Oded Stark of Harvard, the major representative of this approach, studied migrations from countryside to cities in the third world. In contrast to the neo-classical model, he shifted the focus from the (supposedly rational) individual to the family as the basic unit of decision-taking. He also drew attention away from labour to insurance and capital markets. Rather than wage differential, the main incentives for migration are said to be insecurity, relative impoverishment, and efforts at risk avoidance or income sources diversification. Migration is seen as serving as a means of transforming a household so that it fits the requirements of the capitalist economy in an environment which lacks working insurance and credit markets.

      A rural family faces two major barriers to its entering the capitalist economy: it lacks the capital needed for modernization (e.g. purchase of machinery) and also sufficient guarantees against the possibility of failure. “It is here the rural-to-urban migration by the most suitable family member – a mature son or daughter (especially if educated) – comes into the picture. In bypassing the credit and insurance markets (with their bias against small farmers) migration facilitates the transformation; it succeeds in doing this via its dual role in the accumulation of investment capital (...), usually generating significant urban-to-rural flows of remittances, and through diversification of income resources, controlling the level of risk.” (Stark, 1991: 11) Remittances are not only an additional income but rather a new source of capital which allows the modernization of a household while keeping the risk relatively low. From this perspective, it is not labour markets but capital (or credit) markets that are crucial. Besides this capital investment function, migration to the cities represents also a sort of “portfolio diversification” whereby the risks are being scattered in the absence of an insurance market. (Stark, 1991: 48) There is a mutually advantageous “trade of risks” - the migrant member of the family is insured against the possible failure of his (her) job seeking in town (he or she can always come back and find safe haven in his/her original home), the remaining members of family are insured against natural or economic misfortune by having an independent source of income in town. (Stark, 1991: 43, 219)

      Another major point of the new economics of migration is the explanatory shift from the rational choice stress on absolute benefits (maximizing calculation) towards the consideration of relative benefits and relative poverty as the main incentive for migration – an individual is seen as being motivated to migrate when he sees others having advantages that he does not have but could have if he migrated (especially when he knows that those others got them via migration). (Stark, 1991: 102) What motivates is attainable benefit seen with reference to the others. The act of comparison and examples of success are crucial: this explains why the rate of migrations from countryside to city is not highest in the poorest regions or villages, but rather in those with very unequal income distribution.

      Two major implications for government policies follow from the new economics of migration. (1) Government can influence migration rates not only through labour markets, but also by shaping insurance and capital markets, (2) the changes in the distribution of income may influence migration independently of or at loggerheads with the changes of mean income: "In fact, government policies that produce a higher mean income in migrant-sending areas may increase migration if relatively poor households do not share in the income gain. Conversely, policies may reduce migration if relatively rich households do not share in the income gain." (Massey et al., 1997: 261)   
      
      3. Dual Labour Market Theory
    » Migration as a consequence of a hierarchical segmentation of domestic job market and of recruitment policies.

      This theory, worked out by Michael J. Piore, explains migration by referring to its demand side. It also shifts the crux of explanation from the micro- to the macro-level – from the rational choices of an individual or a household to the structural and cultural condition of industrial societies. Labour markets in industrialized countries are divided into two segments – the second one offering unstable, badly paid jobs with a low social status and without any opportunity for upward mobility (so-called “dead-end-jobs”). These jobs are avoided by the indigenous labour force so that there is a demand for an additional labour supply even though there might be a high unemployment rate in the first segment. Immigrants are the most suitable group to fill this vacant space. This is so not only because of the wage differential between their country of origin and the host country but also because they are recruited for a temporary period, maintaining their social centre of gravity in their countries and caring little either about the social status of their work or about the chance for upward mobility in the host country. They do not link their self-esteem and identity to their social standing in the host country but rather in their country of origin, where their status moves upward because of their earnings abroad. Jobs in host countries are thus severed from social identity which remains rooted in the social structure of the sending countries (or migrating cultures themselves). In contrast to the neo-classical suppositions, from this perspective migration phenomena are best explained not by wage differentials across countries and regions but rather by the social segmentation of the domestic market in jobs and recruitment policies: “(i)t is the employers, not the workers, and the jobs, not the incomes, that are strategic”. (Piore, 1979: 19) Low-level wages are held down by cultural and institutional mechanisms and may not rise in response to a decrease in supply, they may fall, however, in response to an increase in the supply of immigrant workers since „the social and institutional checks that keep low-level wages from rising do not prevent them from falling“ (Massey et al., 1997: 262)

      “Ethnicization” (or even “racialization”) of the lower segment of labour market splits the working class into superior insiders and inferior outsiders, indigenous and privileged and alien and disadvantaged. It establishes a welfare and social threshold below which native workers will never fall since it is assigned to a social group with a permanently inferior social status. This segmentation may work well until immigrant communities settle for good in the host country and begin to use the framework of liberal-democratic universalist principles to raise the claims of equal opportunities and life chances in the host society. Then the split between the space of identity and social status and the space of money earning is broken and the social and ethnic tension follows. (Parnreiter, 2000: 29 – 30)
      
      4. World-Systems Theory
       »  Migration as part of capitalist accumulation that thrives on imbalances between the advanced centre and backward periphery.
    
        According to this theory, the migration of labour is an inherent part of the process of the capitalist accumulation which needs the incessant incorporation of new areas and the uprooting of traditional rural classes so that they become a new and cheap labour force. The flow of goods and capital into the non-capitalist periphery is followed by the flow of labour migrants in the opposite direction. The penetration of capitalism into the peripheries creates uprooted, mobile populations and, at the same time, forges strong material, cultural and political links to the core countries resulting in population movements. (Wallerstein, 1974)

      The emergence of the inter-state system with closely checked borders transformed migration: mere geographical displacement was compounded by the change in juridical and political status which allowed increased exploitation. Borders and national identities split the working class into insiders and outsiders. Borders become selective filters that weakened the bargaining position of immigrants and allowed their increased exploitation. Both separation and connection – the wall and the holes – were indispensable to heightening profits. According to Saskia Sassen, “national boundaries do not act as barriers so much as mechanisms reproducing the system through the international division of labour (...) The strengthening of the nation-state creates the conditions for immigrant labour as a distinct category of a nation's labour supply … characterized by (1) the institutional differentiation of the processes of labour-force reproduction and maintenance; and (2) a particular form of powerlessness, associated with formal or attributed foreign status, that meets the requirements of types of work organization based on direct rather than structural control over the workforce.” (Sassen, 1988: 36)

    The processes of globalization in the last quarter of the 20th century underlined the basic assumption of this approach that labour migration is a subsystem of the world-market: migration is enhanced and intensified by an increase in the mobility of capital and goods, by the acceleration of transport and information transfer, and by the electronic media and means of communication which are able to connect instantaneously even the most distant places on the planet. Globalization incorporates all remaining rural areas on the Earth into one world-market and into its division of labour. It accelerates the processes which have accompanied capitalist expansion from the very beginning. Agrarian households are deprived of the traditional subsistence economy and pulled into the realm of salaried work - they move to the cities and/or to other countries offering jobs. (Massey, 1990: 67)

      Moreover, the post-fordist transformation of capitalism linked to the process of globalization in the core countries increased the offer of precarious and badly paid jobs in the services appropriate to the unqualified and undemanding labour arriving from the periphery. Capital may move to the periphery and labour to the core – nowadays as in previous stages of its development, either way capitalism thrives on the imbalances between two regions.
      
      5. Migration Networks Theory
    » Migration as sustaining and enhancing itself through the networks of information, assistance and obligations between migrants in the host             society and their friends and relatives in the sending area.

    Whereas the previously outlined theories try to catch the causes or origins of migration, the theory of migration networks focuses upon the ways migration reproduces or sustains itself. The networks established by and through migration feed back and increase migration: „Migrant networks are sets of interpersonal ties that connect migrants, former migrants, and non-migrants in origin and destination areas through ties of kinship, friendship and shared community origin. They increase the likelihood of international movement because they lower the costs and risks of movement and increase the expected net returns to migration. Network connections constitute a form of social capital that people can draw upon to gain access to foreign employment. Once the number of migrants reaches a critical threshold, the expansion of networks reduces the costs and risks of movement, which causes the probability of migration to rise, which causes additional movement, which further expands the networks, and so on.“ (Massey et al., 1997: 264) Networks make available information about the situation in the receiving country to the people still residing in the country of origin and give them also social, economic and residential infrastructure on which they can rely after they have moved to the receiving country  - orientation in the new environment, assistance in residence and job seeking, help in emergencies). Family and ethnic or regional ties make up the densest parts of the networks. This explains not only the residential concentration of one ethnic (local, regional, religious etc.) immigrant community (in city quarters or regions) but also its economic and social concentration in a particular type of job and level of social standing – in one economic and social niche.

      To be logged into a social network highly reduces the cost of migration – beginning with traveling arrangements or illegal border-crossing guides and ending up with searching for an apartment and job, not to speak of the kind of circular migration developed for instance between Mexico and US and Poland and Germany. Not only are opportunity costs reduced by the network but also psychological costs fall sharply since a migrant maintains his involvement in his cultural group which alleviates the feeling of alienation in a foreign country.
 
      The process of globalization enhances the opportunities for circular migration and permanent communication between local community and emigrants. Migratory networks establish a new and permanent transnational social space in which a new kind of identity is constructed. This kind of identity shatters the traditional concept of migration as an irreversible, one-off process and of identity as linked to a fixed and permanent place of residence (either in the country of origin, or in the country of immigration). Migration becomes instead a permanent state in which emigrants do not lose their original contacts and identity but keep and cultivate them while settling in the new country. They do not change their place and identity once and for all but rather they stay in a new space “between”. Hence the new notion of „transmigrants“: “Transmigrants are immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation-state (...) They are not sojourners because they settle and become incorporated in the economy and political institutions, localities, and patterns of daily life in the country in which they reside. However, at the very same time, they are engaged elsewhere in the sense that they maintain connections, build institutions, conduct transactions, and influence local and national events in the countries from which they emigrated.” (Glick Schiller et al., 1997: 121)

    Migration networks theory implies a pessimistic assessment of the capacity of government policies to control migration movements. On the one hand, many networks form independently of a government’s intentions and actions. On the other hand, certain policies which cannot be abandoned for human rights reasons, such as family reunification and asylum and/or refuge granting, serve to enhance migratory networking.
     
      6. Cumulative Causation Theory
        »Migration as a consequence of changed circumstances brought about by migration itself such as migration networks, change in the job market           structure and/or institutions of receiving society

      Social networks are a prototype of a broader category of mechanisms which may be called  cumulative causation mechanisms. In these a process causes a change in the environment which sustains or enhances the process itself. While the formation of migration networks pertains to the supply side of migration, many other changes pertain to the demand side, such as changes in the social status of certain jobs, in the organization of production or in the distribution of land, income and human capital. Many such feedback effects of cumulative causation lie outside the reach of government: for instance a devaluation of certain jobs as „immigrant“ makes it difficult to recruit native workers even in times of domestic unemployment. (Massey et al., 1997: 266)    
      
      7. Institutionalist Theory
    »  Migration as a result of the emergence and consolidation of institutions linked to migration

      This theory uses the general model of cumulative causation to describe the working of institutions associated with immigration. Most of these institutions emerged as a result of an imbalance between the large number of people seeking entry into capital-rich countries and the official barriers set up by these countries. Demand for services to would-be immigrants brought about a black market where the following services are on sale - smuggling across borders, black contracting between immigrants and employers, counterfeiting documents and visas, arranged marriages. Besides these private agencies there also emerged NGOs trying to protect immigrants both from exploitation and victimization by these illegal profit-makers and from the repressive apparatuses of states (counseling, legal advice, shelter, legalization, human rights protection). (Massey et al, 1997: 265) Similar to networking, this institutionalization makes immigration quite independent of the original causes and reasons. Even more than networks, institutionalization goes against the regulatory efforts of governments. For one thing, increased police efforts only increase the profits of illegal smugglers and mediators, for another, human rights groups use their transnational leverage to trigger an alarm bell and apply pressure whenever stricter regulatory measures are proposed by government.
      
      8. Client Politics Theory
    » Immigration as an effect of the client relationship between the employers’ lobbies and higher officials.

There is a paradox between the overall tendency of the nation-state to sustain its boundaries, supposedly leading to restrictive immigration policies, and the fact that for long periods (especially after W.W.II) the politics of immigration in western states was rather liberal. The may be partly explained if we use the concept of client politics (developed by James Q. Wilson) as Gary Freeman does: “The typical mode of immigration politics ... is client politics, a form of bilateral influence in which small and well-organized groups intensely interested in a policy develop close working relationships with officials responsible for it. Their interactions take place largely out of the public view and with little outside interference.” (Freeman, 1995: 886) Christian Joppke, following Wilson and Freeman, summarizes the argument as follows: “The costs of immigration, such as unemployment or overpopulation, are widely diffused, while its benefits, such as cheap labour or family reunification, are highly concentrated. This poses a classic collective-action dilemma, in which the organized beneficiaries of concentrated benefits will prevail over the unorganized bearers of diffused costs. Accordingly, the expansive interests of organized employers and ethnic groups will outcancel the restrictionist leanings of the non-mobilized and underinformed public.“ (Joppke, 1999: 17) Client politics is backed up further by the „strong antipopulist norm“ (Freeman, 1995: 885) of the culture of political élites as it was shaped in the 1950s and 1960s by coping with experiences of nazism, colonial racism and racial segregation. This „antipopulist norm“ is institutionalized in the constitutional framework: whereas the political process is vulnerable to the populist pressure of majority opinion, the legal process is anchored in universalistic principles.

***

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Documents:

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Government of the Czech Republic 7 July 1999): Zásady koncepce integrace cizinců na území České republiky. Principles of the strategy for the integration of foreigners on the territory of the Czech Republic. (Endorsed by Government Resolution No. 689/1999).
Government of the Czech Republic (11 December 2000): Informace o realizaci zásad koncepce integrace cizinců na území České republiky a návrh Koncepce integrace cizinců na území České republiky. Information on the implementation of the Principles of the strategy for the integration of foreigners on the territory of the Czech Republic and the Proposal of the Strategy for the integration of foreigners on the territory of the Czech Republic. (Endorsed by Government resolution No. 1266/2000).
Government of the Czech Republic (19 December 2001): Informace o zkušenostech se zváděním Koncepce integrace cizinců na území České republiky. Information on experiences concerning the implementation of the Strategy for the integration of foreigners on the territory of the Czech Republic. (Endorsed by Government resolution No. 1360/2001).
Government of the Czech Republic (11 February 2004): Účinnost Koncepce integrace cizinců v roce 2003 a její další rozvoj v souvislosti se vstupem České republiky do Evropské unie. The effectiveness of the Strategy for the integration of foreigners on the territory of the Czech Republic and its further development after the accession of the Czech Republic to the European Union. (Endorsed by Government resolution No. 126/2004).
Government of the Czech Republic (13 January 2003): Účinnost Koncepce integrace cizinců na území České republiky do roku 2002 a další rozvoj této koncepce po vstupu České republiky do Evropské unie. The effectiveness of the Strategy for the integration of foreigners on the territory of the Czech Republic and its further development after the accession of the Czech Republic to the European Union. (Endorsed by Government resolution No. 55/2003).
Government of the Czech Republic (26 September 2001): Principy a postup realizace projektu “Aktivní výběr kvalifikovaných zahraničních pracovníků” The principles and the proposed implementation of the pilot project: “Active selection of qualified foreign workers.” Endorsed by Government Resolution No. 975/2001.
Government of the Czech Republic (10 July 2002): Podrobný pilotný projekt “Aktivní výběr kvalifikovaných zahraničních pracovníků”. (The elaborated pilot project “Active selection of qualified foreign workers.) Endorsed by Government Resolution No. 720/2002.
Integration Commission of the Minister of the Interior (2003): Analýza situace a postavení cizinců dlouhodobě žijících na území ČR. Analysis of the situation and the status of the long term resident foreigners in the Czech republic. Prague: author. 29.5.2003
Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (February 2004): Zpráva o realizaci pilotního projektu Aktivní výběr kvalifikovaných zahraničních pracovníků v roce 2003 a návrh dalších změn. (Draft report on the implementation of the project of Active selection of qualified foreign workers.)

France

Ministere des Affairs Sociales, du Travail et de la Solidarité (8 décembre 2003): Notre politique d'integration. Paris: author. http://www.travail.gouv.fr

Germany

Bundesministerium des Innern. Entwurf des Zuwanderungsgesetzes: Übersicht wichtiger Änderungen gegenüber dem geltenden Recht. http://www.bmi.bund.de
Bundesministerium des Innern. Übersicht der Neuregelungen des Zuwanderungsgesetzes. http://www.bmi.bund.de
Independent Commission on Migration to Germany. (4 July 2001): Structuring Immigration- Fostering Integration. Berlin: author.

United Kingdom

Home Office. Immigration and Nationality Directorate.(2003):  Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP). Revised Programme effective from 31 October 2003. London: author.
Home Office. Social Policy Unit. (September 2003): The New and the Old. The Report of the „Life in the United Kingdom“ Advisory Group. London: Home Office Communication Directorate.
Home Office. The Research, Development and Statistics Directorate (2001): Migration: An Economic and Social Analysis. London: author.
Secretary of State for the Home Department. (February 2002): Secure Borders, Safe Haven. Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain. London: The Stationery Office.

Legislation in Force:

(France) J.O. No. 274 du 27 novembre 2003 page 20136, Loi No. 2003-1119 du 26 novembre relative a la maîtrise de l'immigration, au séjour des étrangers en France et la nationalité.
(Germany). Gesetz zur Reform des Staatsangehörigkeitsrechts vom 15. Juli 1999.
(Germany) Verordnung über die Arbeitsgenehmigung für hochqualifizierte ausländische Fachkräfte der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie von 11 Juli 2000, BGBl I 2000, s. 1146, zuletzt geändert durch Verordnung vom 16.07.2003, BGBl. 2003 I s. 1471.
(U.K.) Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002.

Bills:

(Germany) Entwurf eines Gesetzes zur Steuerung und Begrenzung der Zuwanderung und zur Regelung des Aufenthalts und der Integration von Unionsbürger und Ausländern. (Zuwanderungsgesetz).
(Germany) Entwurf einer Verordnung über Integrationskurze für Ausländer (Ausländerintegrationskursverordnung – AuslIntV)

Newspaper Articles (Selection):

Klaus, V. (18.1.2003): Co s přistěhovalci? (What shall we do with immigrants?) Lidové noviny. Příloha Orientace, p. 14
Štěpánková, K., Pekař, R. Ž, Kutilová, M. a další. (10. prosince 2003): Za prací do Česka. (To work in Czech Republic.) (Příloha Lidových novin a společnosti Člověk v tísni o ekonomické migraci.) Lidové noviny, p. I-IV
Klečková, M. (18.-20.7.2003): Pomohou nám cizinci omládnout? (Will foreigners help us to get younger?) Hospodářské noviny, p. 18
Karas, J. (3.-5. 10.2003): Imigranti důchody nespasí. (Immigrants will not save the pension system.) Hospodářské noviny. s. 8

Miscellanea:

Department of Demography. The Faculty of Natural Sciences. Charles University. (2003). Populační vývoj České republiky 1990 – 2002. (Population development in the Czech Republic 1990 – 2000). Prague: author.
Migration Project. (2003). A Comparative study on Migration. Prague: author.
Tung, Nguyen (2001). Vietnamci v Praze. (Vietnamese in Prague.) Praha: SVO – ČR č.1

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