Implementing Citizenship, Nationality and Integration Policies: The UK and Belgium in Comparative Perspective 9781529219906

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DJORDJE SREDANOVIC

IMPLEMENTING CITIZENSHIP, NATIONALITY AND INTEGRATION POLICIES The UK and Belgium in Comparative Perspective

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +​44 (0)117 954 5940 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2022 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5292-1988-3 hardcover ISBN 978-1-5292-1989-0 ePub ISBN 978-1-5292-1990-6 ePdf The right of Djordje Sredanovic to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: Blu Inc Image credit: Stadtratte – istockphoto.com

Contents About the Author Acknowledgements

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one Introduction Citizenship and integration: rights and inequality Cultural conformity and legal guarantees: citizenship and integration in Europe Implementation: law in action Method Contents of the book two Citizenship in the UK History and policy: discretion and cultural conformity Nationality Checking Services: citizenship on the territory Citizenship implementation in the Home Office Conclusion: cultural conformity, discretion and routinization three Nationality in Belgium History and policy: cultural conformity and the documentary approach Parquets, registers and the implementation of nationality Geographic variation Conclusion: not much discretion, but not much uniformity either four Integration in Belgium History and policy: separate models of integration CRIs and the implementation of integration in Wallonia

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16 20 24 28 28 33 39 52 55 55 63 72 77 80 80 88

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The determination of individual needs Conclusion: integration, uncertainty and flexibility five Comparative Analyses Migration policies behind the frontline The spaces of discretion Factors of variation Conclusion: how applying the law changes it six Conclusions Political implications The future of citizenship and integration Policy recommendations

97 104 107 108 113 119 124 127 127 129 133

Notes References Index

138 141 166

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About the Author Djordje Sredanovic is a F.R.S.-​FNRS postdoctoral fellow at the Group for Research on Ethnic Relations, Migration and Equality (GERME), Université Libre de Bruxelles. A sociologist specializing in the study of citizenship and migration, he has done research in Italy, Belgium and the UK on comparative citizenship policies, everyday conceptions of citizenship, the implementation of migration policies, the impact of Brexit, and the representations of migrants in the media. His work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, International Political Science Review, Citizenship Studies, and International Migration.

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Acknowledgements This book is part of a long piece of work on citizenship and migration that developed across three countries (Belgium, the UK and, before that, Italy). Many have contributed to this work, and I would like to thank at least some of them here. The main research project on which the book is based was conducted between 2015 and 2017 within a larger project of the Migration Asylum Multiculturality (MAM) research group, Under the Paradigm of the Merit and the Cultural Conformity: The New Integration and Migration Policies in Europe, which was funded by the Fédération Wallonie-​Bruxelles under an Action de recherche concertée. At the time I was working in the Group for Research on Ethnic Relations, Migration and Equality (GERME) of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), and I conducted a visiting period at the Department of Sociology of the University of Manchester (UoM). The data collected were further analysed during my period (2017–​19) as Newton International Fellow of the British Academy (grant NF171438) at UoM Sociology, and the book itself was written during my FNRS-​F.R.S. postdoctoral fellowship (grant FC22951), again at the GERME (2019–​). The research I have been conducting on Brexit and citizenship at the UoM and ULB also informs part of this book. As in all ethnographic research the thanks go first to the interviewees who gave their time to discuss their work with me –​without their help there would be no book at all, and it is a pity that in order to protect their privacy I cannot name them. I conducted the interviews at the Home Office in Liverpool, as well with UK NARIC and Learndirect, together with Émilien Fargues. It has been a pleasure to work with him, and I also thank Émilien for feedback on the manuscript, particularly on the chapter on citizenship in the UK. At the ULB I have been lucky to have excellent guidance from Andrea Rea and Dirk Jacobs. Always at the ULB I benefitted from exchanges with

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other colleagues in the MAM –​Antoine Roblain, Assaad Azzi, Emmanuelle Bribosia, Gilles Van Hamme, Isabelle Rorive, Jean-​Benoît Pilet, Laurent Licata and Sarah Ganty –​and with colleagues in the GERME, including Abdellali Hajjat, Andrew Crosby, Barbara Herman, Beatriz Camargo, Carla Mascia, Chiara Giordano, Federica Infantino, Laura Odasso and Matteo Gagliolo. In Manchester Bridget Byrne was both my sponsor and an excellent colleague, and I had the further pleasure to work alongside and exchange ideas with Alice Bloch, Alina Rzepnikowska and Sherilyn MacGregor. Beyond the two institutions I benefitted from exchanges with many other scholars, among whom I would like to thank Anne-​ Marie Fortier, Dora Kostakopoulou, Elizabeth Badenhoop, Ilke Adam, Leah Bassel, Marc Helbling and Patrick Wautelet. In addition to the ULB and the UoM, part of the data linked to the research was presented at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the University of Southampton, the Universität Bielefeld, the University of Leeds (as part of the 2019 Socio-​Legal Association Conference), the University of East Anglia (as part of the 2019 Association of Social Anthropologists Conference) and the University of Warwick. I thank the participants in the different presentations for their useful feedback. Chapter Three of the present book is based on an earlier version that appeared as ‘Barriers to the Equal Treatment of (Aspirant) Citizens: The Case of the Application of Nationality Law in Belgium’, in International Migration, 58(2): 15–​29. I thank John Wiley and Sons for the authorization to publish this revised chapter. At Bristol University Press I benefitted from the editorial work of Shannon Kneis and from the feedback of four anonymous peer reviewers. Shannon and the peer reviewers contributed to shaping and improving this book. Finally, I want to thank Cinzia Greco, who has been the most important support in my life for several years now, and my parents, whose dealings with migration and citizenship bureaucracies informed the whole research.

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ONE

Introduction

Citizenship and integration policies are located at the complex intersection of rights and nation building. Integration is increasingly a precondition to obtaining rights in several European states, and citizenship remains an important source of formal rights. However, citizenship remains linked to national belonging and integration is often coloured by references to national culture. Historical work on the formation of the concept of nation underlines three distinct processes (Hobsbawm, 1990; Anderson, 1991)1. First, the content of ‘national cultures’ has in most cases been defined, often arbitrarily, between the 18th and 19th centuries, and projected to a distant past, as well as on territories and populations that were neither homogeneous nor clearly distinct from those of confining states. Second, such ‘national cultures’ have been widely promoted across the national territory through specific policies and especially education. Third, national belonging has been sacralized through reference to a shared culture and history that is mutually constituted with the sacralization itself. Starting from these considerations it is clear how problematic it is examining whether a non-​citizen is integrated or deserving and able to become a member of the nation. Although decades of cultural and educational policies have created a corpus of reference for the ‘national culture’, its definition remains vague and elusive. At the same time, the sacralization of national membership encourages restrictive ideas of how one can become a national. Nevertheless, there are countries in which the issue of how one can become a national has been relatively simple in specific

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historical moments (at least in the letter of the law). In the case of Belgium, this was the situation between 2000 and 2012, a period characterized by a particularly inclusive nationality policy, where the fact itself of applying for nationality2 was considered proof of integration. The UK also had limited requirements for naturalization between 1948 and 2002, although the citizenship policy began to explicitly exclude (former) colonial subjects in 1962. This book explores how integration and citizenship are implemented in practice in Belgium and the UK, and how the officers and operators charged with applying the policies manage this complex mandate. On the one hand, I analyse the letter of the policies and show how restrictive ideas of national culture and national belonging appear in the policies following the integrationist ideology (Kundnani, 2007; Kostakopoulou, 2010a; MacGregor and Bailey, 2012; Mouritsen and Olsen, 2013). On the other hand, the officers and operators I interviewed mostly described their work in terms of applying the rules, with little reference to national belonging or even to the concept of integration, which has driven most of the policy reforms. In this sense, this book highlights how even highly charged policies can significantly change their meaning at the point of implementation. Most of my analyses locate Belgium and the UK in reference to other European countries. There are two motivations for this somewhat provincial approach, limited to a single continent. First, there is a strong history of research on citizenship and integration policies focused on Europe because of the availability of data on policies which has facilitated comparative analyses (in addition to European scholars, quite a few North American scholars have also focused on comparative analyses of citizenship policies in Europe). This excessive focus on the European context has been changing in the last few years, with more work also examining Africa, Asia and Latin America. The transformation a few years ago of EUDO Citizenship, a leading database and resource for the study of citizenship policies in

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Introduction

Europe, into GLOBALCIT, increasingly covering most of the world, has helped in this sense. A second reason for my focus, however, is that some of the main tendencies I explore here are principally a European story. It is within Europe that integration tests for residence and citizenship, as well as mandatory integration courses, have become particularly common, starting with the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it is within this context that the specific trajectories of Belgium and the UK can be explained. Citizenship and integration: rights and inequality The policies explored in this book pertain inherently to legal constructs. Formal citizenship is a legal status, or a bundle of rights (Marshall, 1950). As with all legal statuses, it is not solely dependent on the ways in which the law is put into practice, as I show in this book. It is also potentially limited in scope as several obstacles can impede the access to rights enshrined in law (see for example Basok, 2004), including lack of information, the need for resources of one’s own to access rights, malfunctions in the administrative system, abuse on the part of those charged to enforce the rights, or, if one needs to go to court, the inaccessibility of the judiciary system, particularly in the form of the scarcity of affordable legal representation. Even with these limitations, there is a significant body of research highlighting that citizenship does matter for the life opportunities of those (not) possessing it. Quantitative studies have shown the relevance of citizenship for access to employment (Corluy et al, 2011; OECD, 2011; Gathmann and Keller, 2018; Peters et al, 2018; Hoxhaj et al, 2020) and levels of income (Bratsberg et al, 2002; OECD, 2011; Helgertz et al, 2014; Pendakur and Bevelander, 2014; Peters et al, 2020). Such differences between citizens and non-​citizens hold even after considering potential intervening factors, such as those naturalizing having more resources or being more invested in

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the country of residence than those who do not naturalize, although with internal variation according to the origin of the new citizens (Bratsberg et al, 2002; Corluy et al, 2011; Helgertz et al, 2014; Pendakur and Bevelander, 2014; Gathmann and Keller, 2018). Qualitative studies, meanwhile, have shown that formal citizenship has specific uses (Sredanovic, 2014). Citizenship gives substantial protection from deportation and migration controls (Sredanovic, 2014; Nunn et al, 2016; Della Puppa and Sredanovic, 2017; Prabhat, 2018). Although permanent residence covers in part the same function, not all countries offer a permanent residence that does not require renewal or updating, and permanent residence does not always protect from deportation for crimes or reasons of public safety, nor those who lose the initial requirements at the moment of renewal (e.g. being employed is often a requirement for permanent residence, but whether one can renew permanent residence while unemployed changes from case to case). Furthermore, permanent residence leaves individuals subject to certain forms of migration control, if not in the territory, then at least when crossing borders. Although even citizenship does not give full protection, given the rise of new provisions for denaturalization and the increased use of already existing provisions across Europe in the last few years (Mantu, 2015; Fargues, 2017; Mantu, 2018; Fargues, 2019; Yeo, 2019; Fargues et al, 2020), denaturalization remains a relatively contained phenomenon. Even in cases in which the instrument is used most aggressively in Europe, such as within the UK in the last few years, countries denaturalize no more than a few dozen citizens in a given year. In addition to the security deriving from citizenship, the mere fact of avoiding migration controls can be sufficient to push migrants to naturalize in contexts where such controls are particularly invasive and/​or frequent (Colombo et al, 2009; Sredanovic, 2014; Della Puppa and Sredanovic, 2017). Furthermore, citizenship provides full access to welfare (Coutin, 2003; Ruget and Usmanalieva, 2010). This is relevant in a European context in which there

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Introduction

are not only substantial limits to the kind of welfare available to non-​citizens, such as the ‘no recourse to public funds’ policy in the UK (Farmer, 2017), but there are also cases in which welfare is accessible but the use of it can form the basis for being barred from naturalization (see Stadlmair, 2018a on Austria, Denmark and Germany) or even for losing legal status, as happened to a number of EU citizens in Belgium (Lafleur and Mescoli, 2018). Citizenship further gives access to reserved jobs, especially if public or limited for reasons of security (Leitner and Ehrkamp, 2006; Colombo et al, 2009; Rio, 2010; Sredanovic, 2014). Moreover, it offers full access to voting rights; although voting rights at the local level are now less rare, only a few countries offer voting rights in national elections (Pedroza, 2019; Ferris et al, 2020). The UK is one example, although limited to Commonwealth and Republic of Ireland citizens. In addition to the rights within the territory, citizenship also increases the rights of mobility. Full citizenship usually significantly increases the ability to sponsor a relative for immigration (Brettell, 2006; Leitner and Ehrkamp, 2006). Furthermore, if the passport obtained through naturalization is a strong one, it can significantly increase the ability to travel to other countries, including the ability to pursue further migration (Colombo et al, 2009; Nunn et al, 2016; Della Puppa and Sredanovic, 2017; Sredanovic, 2020a). The global inequality between countries in terms of both life opportunities and in visa-​free mobility has been the focus of a number of analyses showing the strategies to increase one’s capacity for mobility instrumentally (Ong, 1993; Schachar, 2007; Harpaz and Mateos, 2019). However, naturalization simultaneously increases the capacity to move to another country and to establish oneself in the country of naturalization (Della Puppa and Sredanovic, 2017) and, although instrumental attitudes to naturalization do exist, they are not as calculated and foreseeable as sometimes described in the literature (Sredanovic, 2020a). Statelessness not only limits access to such rights, but also limits

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further the opportunities to move to other national contexts in which the rights might be accessed (Petrozziello, 2019). Mandatory integration policies have taken different forms in Europe in the last few decades (see Pascouau, 2018; Rea et al, 2018). Integration tests are now a common precondition to access permanent residence or citizenship (van Oers et al, 2010a), and a few European countries have even introduced them for access to the territory, especially for family reunification (Goodman, 2011; Bonjour, 2014). In each case, the tests may focus on the national language(s), culture and history, as well as on the local institutions. In some cases, the tests can further verify the knowledge of, and adherence to, what are considered national values (van Oers, 2013). A second approach taken by some European countries is mandatory integration courses, which can apply to most migrants or target specific groups such as asylum seekers or migrants not in paid work. Integration courses can be backed by fines for migrants who do not comply with the obligation, or be a condition for the renewal of the residence permit or access to permanent residence and citizenship (Pascouau, 2018). Similar to the tests, integration courses can focus on the national language(s), history, culture and institutions, and in some cases discuss and promote national values. In addition to this, integration courses often have a component of orientation to employment (see Suvarierol, 2015; Gourdeau, 2018a). One central concept I explore in this book is that of ‘integrationism’ (compare Kundnani, 2007; MacGregor and Bailey, 2012; Mouritsen and Olsen, 2013). Integration, with its confining and/​or opposite concepts of assimilation, multiculturalism and diversity, is often difficult to define with precision in social science, especially because these are also concepts of policy, which are used far from coherently by governments when drafting and promoting specific policies (Sredanovic et al, 2018). Integration is, to a degree, a revision of the earlier concept of assimilation, which can be defined as the transformation of migrants and minorities into people

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Introduction

indistinguishable from the majority group via the acquisition of majority language and culture and the shedding of the minority equivalent. Assimilation has been especially promoted by settler-​colonial states, such as the US with its ‘melting pot’, and by some early countries of immigration, such as France and its equivalent, the ‘creuset français’ (Noiriel, 1988). Indeed, the French nationality law still requires ‘assimilation’ from candidates (Hajjat, 2012). Beyond these cases, assimilation has long been the norm in the acceptance of a migrant as a citizen, at least in cases in which states gave an opportunity to migrants to become citizens. Integration revises this approach by limiting it and, to a degree, defining it as being in the interest of the migrant. Integration policies in this sense usually promote the acquisition of language and local culture, an improved capacity to participate in the social, economic and political life of the residence country, participation in paid employment, and the sharing of the basic values of the majority group, without theoretically requesting that the language, culture and values of origin be abandoned. Integration is distinct from multiculturalism, which in turn is not a fully defined concept. The most convincing method for defining multiculturalism is to link it to the policy, initially developed in Canada, of promoting multiple cultures, and in particular of actively promoting (rather than simply tolerating) migrants’ cultures of origin. Along with Canada, policies of this kind have developed historically at a national level mostly in Australia, the Netherlands and Sweden (Entzinger, 2003). If we consider integration as an offer of freely and voluntarily accessible courses of majority language(s) and culture(s), or of courses to facilitate to the interactions with the local institutions or access to the labour market, it is clear that such measures are in migrants’ interest. However, the situation changes when such courses become compulsory, when failing to attend or succeed in them results in the lack of access to rights (see also Ganty, 2019) and, as I show in this chapter, when the state does not offer the courses free of charge or ceases entirely to offer them,

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and instead introduces only requirements that migrants must fulfil using their own resources. Advocates of such measures often claim that they are not only in the interests of the state or of the majority group, but also in the interests of the migrants, who would otherwise remain marginal, incapable of interacting with the majority society, disaffected or maladapted (see the analyses in van Oers et al, 2010b; Mason, 2014). An early book discussing these tendencies in Europe discussed them in terms of citizenship and assimilation (Joppke and Morawska, 2003a), although observing a softer approach than in the pre-​World War II assimilation policies. I continue certain aspects of that line of analysis, but in this book I use the concept of ‘integrationism’. By this term I refer to the ideological approach (and its pitfalls) common to many integration policies across Europe since the late 1990s. I further refer to the internal variety of integration measures, which vary in terms of restrictiveness, populations targeted, mix of resources offered to migrants and pure requirements without corresponding resources. Finally, I refer also to the differences, especially in terms of standardized tests and requirements, from the more ad hoc and discretionary policies of assimilation previously present, especially in citizenship policies. The issue of what integration requirements do to migrants has been explored in a number of research projects, particularly in the UK. In-​depth interviews have shown how candidates for naturalization in the UK, to a certain degree, internalize the ideas of deservingness promoted by the process, presenting themselves as deserving (and not needing to be tested) in opposition to other migrants considered unwilling to learn the national language or to be economically active (Monforte et al, 2019; Bassel et al, 2021). However, the most common reaction is to view the naturalization process as an ordeal through which one has to pass –​either accepting it pragmatically or contesting its aims (MacGregor and Bailey 2012; Bassel et al, 2018; 2021; Prabhat, 2018). Focusing on both the ‘Life in the UK’ test and on citizenship ceremonies in the UK and

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Introduction

beyond, Byrne shows how migrants experience these as dismissing pre-​naturalization experience, negating inequalities within the UK, and more aimed at reassuring the majority population than at integrating the new citizens in any way (Byrne, 2014; 2017). The ceremony speeches themselves tend to reproduce either the idea of a homogeneous nation or an apolitical multiculturalism without acknowledgement of the historical and current inequalities (Byrne, 2012; 2014; Khan, 2019; Fortier, 2021–​ compare Fassin and Mazouz, 2007; Mazouz, 2008; 2017 for France) while also imposing on migrants a neoliberal demand for exceptional contributions (see Badenhoop, 2017, on the UK and Germany, as well as Aptekar, 2015, on the US). Overall, the naturalization process seems to have the aim of presenting the citizenship itself as valuable by asking the applicants to subject themselves to several trials (Fortier, 2013; 2017; 2021), while at the same time obfuscating the pressure to naturalize and the obstacles to do so, presenting naturalization as a free choice available to anybody, and responsibilizing migrants to make the efforts to obtain citizenship (Fortier, 2021). Finally, quantitative research shows how the entire naturalization process in the UK, designed with the aim of increasing active citizenship, has little impact on political participation and actually reduces interest in politics, possibly because the difficulty of the procedure itself creates disidentification and cancels any proactive citizenship messages inscribed in the procedure (Bartram, 2019). Cultural conformity and legal guarantees: citizenship and integration in Europe Citizenship and integration policies have seen some common lines of development across Europe since the late 1990s. On the one hand, citizenship policies have in some ways become more inclusive. Gender discrimination has been reduced in citizenship policies as women and men can transfer citizenship equally to their children and partners, a significant

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step compared to the previous arrangement which existed in some cases until the 1980s, in which only the husband/​ father could do so, and in some cases a woman marrying a foreigner was expected to give up her citizenship of birth and take that of the husband (Knop, 2001; Vink and de Groot, 2010; Sainsbury, 2018). Similarly, most states have introduced measures against statelessness, offering routes to citizenship to children born in the state who would otherwise become stateless and limiting withdrawal of citizenship that would cause statelessness (although in both cases there is no generalized protection –​ Vonk et al, 2014; de Groot et al, 2015). Finally, dual citizenship has become increasingly tolerated: although there are still European states that do not tolerate it and others which have revoked reforms introducing toleration, there have been substantial changes compared to 1963, when the Council of Europe promoted an international treaty to avoid dual citizenship (Faist, 2007; Vink et al, 2019). At the same time, a general tendency has been the diffusion of citizenship and/​or permanent residence requirements in terms of passing tests or holding titles demonstrating knowledge of the national language(s) and of the institutions, history and/​or culture of the country, as well as an increase in the economic requirements of employment, income and/​or no recourse to welfare (Goodman, 2010; 2014; Rea et al, 2018). Along with these, a number of countries (and in some cases subnational authorities) have introduced mandatory integration programmes (Rea et al, 2018). Several explanations have been advanced for these common developments. International law has had a role in advancing some of the inclusive measures, such as gender equality and the avoidance of statelessness. Supranational institutions have also had a role; the Council of Europe has advanced positive law about the avoidance of statelessness, and the EU has exercised political pressure on candidate member states to introduce, among other things, more inclusive citizenship policies (Sredanovic and Staldmair, 2018). Furthermore, although the

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Introduction

EU has not promoted specific measures regarding integration policies, it has produced a framework that has facilitated the introduction of restrictive integration and citizenship policies via the 2003 Directive concerning the status of third-​country nationals who are long-​term residents (Groenendijk, 2004; Rea et al, 2011; Pascouau, 2018). Apart from the specific acts of EU institutions, the EU itself has been an arena for discussion and policy imitation (compare Hansen and Weil, 2001; Sacco et al, 2016). The combination of institutional structures and common, relatively shared, liberal norms has led to what Joppke in particular has defined as a ‘liberal convergence’ in migration policies (Joppke, 2007). However, internal factors of variation remain. National models and institutional inertia have meant that national policies have remained distinct between them and, at least in the Belgian case, subnational policies have also remained distinct (Jacobs and Rea, 2007; Adam et al, 2018). Furthermore, the political composition of the governments in charge has played a role. In some cases, it is clear how the introduction and the progressively restrictive reforms of integration requirements have been driven by the far right, in contexts such as Austria (Perchinig, 2010; Mourão Permoser, 2018; Stadlmair, 2018b) and Denmark (Ersbøll, 2010; 2015). Taking a comparative approach, one can see that reforms introducing citizenship tests or making them more restrictive have been predominant across the EU (the only reform in the opposite direction between 1992 and 2013 has been the Belgian nationality reform of 2000 –​Sredanovic, 2016) and have been promoted by governments of all colours. If one examines citizenship policies in general, it is clear that centre-​right governments tend to be more restrictive than centre-​left ones, and that this is not only the work of the far right, as where and when the far right is not represented in Parliament the centre right promotes similar policies (Sredanovic, 2016). The diffusion of mandatory integration across Europe can be located within a specific history (see also Rea et al,

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2018). The Netherlands has been a sort of laboratory for integrationism. In 1998 it was the first country to introduce mandatory language and social orientation courses for new immigrants not in employment (Bonjour, 2018; Swinkels, 2019), as well one of the first to move towards formal citizenship tests in the late 1990s (Entzinger, 2003). Such orientation was linked to what can be considered part of a larger backlash against multiculturalism, depicting previous policies that recognized and promoted migrants’ cultures of origin as promoting separate migrant societies and low levels of employment among migrants (Entzinger, 2003). The backlash against multiculturalism spread in the following years across western Europe; even in countries that had never had actual multicultural policies, such as Germany, multiculturalism was depicted as a problem (Vertovec and Wessendorf, 2010). Integrationist policies, however, spread outside the Netherlands, mostly after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and were characterized by different forms of hostility towards Muslims. Examples of such hostility include the administration of the German state of Baden-​Württemberg planning an integration test examining political opinions and explicitly targeting Muslim applicants (Laversuch, 2008; van Oers, 2013). French governments targeted the wearing of the veil and the suspicion of polygamy (including having a type of marriage ceremony that did not specifically exclude polygamy) as reasons to deny naturalization (Hajjat, 2010a; 2010b; 2012; Mazouz, 2017; 2019). The UK government further introduced citizenship tests justifying the policy in particular with the involvement of youths of Pakistani and Bangladeshi background in riots in northern England, presented as a sign of societal problems (McGhee, 2009; Kostakopoulou, 2010b; Bassel et al, 2018; Khan, 2019). The diffusion of integrationist policies, in addition to the backlash against multiculturalism and the proliferation of Islamophobia, can be further linked to a larger societal transformation. On the one hand, there is the larger neoliberal set of ideas that people should not only be in active

12

Introduction

employment and dissuaded from welfare through workfare policies, but should also be pushed towards active citizenship and volunteering (Kostakopoulou, 2010b; Schinkel and Van Houdt, 2010, Van Houdt et al, 2011; Bassel et al, 2021). On the other hand, there is a resurgence of cultural conformity in which the promotion of national culture and the containment of minority cultures are periodically reaffirmed (Schinkel and Van Houdt, 2010; Van Houdt et al, 2011). Since the early 2000s, not only have mandatory integration policies become common across Europe, but, in some cases, the policies have shifted either from compulsory but free-​of-​charge courses to courses that are still compulsory but the cost of which must be borne by the migrants (Bonjour, 2018). In other cases, integration and language courses have been replaced by tests alone. In the UK, for example, one way to fulfil the language and ‘Life in the UK’ requirements for permanent residence and citizenship was to complete an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) with citizenship course as an alternative to sitting tests, but this option was scrapped in 2013 (Cooke and Peutrell, 2019). Although the development of compulsory integration has been evident across Europe, it should not be considered radically different from previous practices, particularly in the field of naturalization. One of the few early ethnographic explorations of naturalization, the work of Centlivres and colleagues in Switzerland (1991), highlights the presence of even harsher notions of deservingness. The procedures they describe were highly complex, discretional and invasive, including in some cases asking to see the high school report cards and bank statements of the applicant, followed by circulating a profile of the applicant to the entire population of the municipality and putting the decision on conferring citizenship to a vote of either the municipal council or the citizenry. The integrationist wave did systematize integration requirements and constitute a backlash against multiculturalism, but it often built on pre-​existing notions of deservingness and,

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in some cases, might have reduced the space for discretion or even made the requirements applied less restrictive. It is this kind of transformation I refer to when I distinguish between assimilation and integrationism. There is also significant variation in the populations targeted by the requirements. EU citizens (or rather citizens of the EEA –​European Economic Area, which also includes Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein) in the EU cannot be subject to mandatory integration courses. Indeed, their presence on the territory cannot be subject to further requirements than those set in EU law, but they may be subject to integration requirements for permanent residence and especially citizenship.3 Similarly, Turkish workers and their families are exempt from mandatory integration courses following the Ankara Agreement of 1963, which equates them on a number of points with EU citizens (Tezcan-​Idriz, 2011). Furthermore, in many cases migrants in paid employment are exempt from mandatory integration courses (but more rarely from integration requirements for permanent residence and citizenship), although in other cases a blanket requirement applies to most non-​EU migrants. There are several lines of critique that have been developed against the integrationist approach. A first one could be defined as an argument of utility. Citizenship, and legal statuses more generally, have several uses and improve the life chances of migrants. By promoting other goals, be they language proficiency, volunteering or national identity, and by requiring migrants to go through mandatory integration measures to obtain residence or citizenship, governments are fundamentally choosing to deprive at least a proportion of the migrants of such goods. As mentioned, there is intrinsic utility for migrants in improving their knowledge of the local languages, institutions and culture. However, there are doubts concerning (1) to what extent making integration compulsory increases the migrants’ uptake of the courses and (2) whether such an increase in uptake outweighs the loss of the migrants

14

Introduction

who do not manage to fulfil the integration requirements (see also Mouritsen et al, 2019). A second line of critique can be defined as an argument of democracy. Citizenship in particular is linked to the definition of the demos, that is, of the group that legitimates democratic decisions in a state. Introducing excessively restrictive requirements for naturalization, or requirements that impact candidates unequally, excludes part of the population from democratic rights (Brubaker, 1989) and/​or introduces inequalities in access to democratic rights, compromising therefore the equality of the demos that legitimizes democracy (Sredanovic and Stadlmair, 2018; Sredanovic, 2020b). A third line is an argument of culture. Limiting access to naturalization is, first, a method of promoting an ethnically homogeneous citizenry, particularly if the requirements are not ethnically neutral (Faist, 1994). More generally, integrationism and its origins in the backlash against multiculturalism essentially promote the superiority of one (or some) culture(s) over others and deny the values of diversity (for example Kostakopoulou, 2010c). A further line of critique is that, even if one justifies promoting the interests of citizens over those of non-​citizens, integrationism depreciates the cultures of minority populations who already hold citizenship by subjecting migrants with the same background to tests (de Waal, 2020). A fourth more radical line of critique is that the national majority into which migrants should integrate might not exist at all (see also Kostakopoulou, 2010a; Schinkel, 2017) or might not be clearly distinguishable from the population of other countries (Favell, 2019). The assumption of integration is that the majority shares a language, culture and values and that there is an economic mainstream which one can access –​the opposite of integration would entail migrants forming separate enclaves and/​or an underclass. However, each of these assumptions is sociologically dubious. The idea of shared values is difficult to reconcile with the political pluralism required by a democracy, or with processes of social differentiation within societies that

15

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are more likely to produce value pluralism (compare Joppke and Morawska, 2003b; Favell, 2019). Similarly, shared national cultures are simultaneously the aim and the fiction of nation-​ building policies, based on imagined communities (Hobsbawm, 1990; Anderson, 1991). The presence of a shared language depends on the degree of multilingualism –​de jure and de facto –​in a given country. However, even in contexts in which there is widespread proficiency in a given language, language testing still clashes with the sociolinguistic variation in the use of the language (compare Extra et al, 2009; Hogan-​Brun et al, 2009). Finally, economic integration might be more or less successful depending on factors outside the reach of migrants –​ full employment, economic structure, low discrimination in hiring, just to name a few. However, even in contexts favourable to economic integration, the goal of the policy could be unreasonable. A classic work on economic integration describes positive outcomes of the intergenerational migrant trajectory as joining the ranks of the middle class and the negative outcomes as assimilating to the underclass (Portes and Zhou, 1993). However, by definition the middle class requires classes below (and above) it –​if successful migrant integration is equated with becoming middle class, it is clear how this necessarily involves the failure of some (see also Favell, 2019). Given that integrationism limits and in some cases endangers the life conditions of migrants, that it goes against principles of both equality and democracy, and that it disregards cultures other than the majority one –​all of which is for the purpose of integration into a majority group that does not really exist in the terms implicit in the policies –​it is clear that the need for such policies is dubious. In the next section, I discuss the issues linked to the implementation of any policy, regardless of its utility. Implementation: law in action The study of policy implementation began, to a certain degree, as an exploration of why even good policies might not work. In a

16

Introduction

seminal and highly pessimistic volume, Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) wondered how any national policy manages to work at all, given the number of actors with diverging interests required to implement it fully. The implementation approach stands, to a degree, in opposition to the ideal type of bureaucracy proposed by Weber (1968), who saw it as guided by impersonal, regular norms as well as creating an inflexible ‘iron cage’. Implementation studies insist that the everyday work in applying and implementing a policy is autonomous. This means that the ways in which this work is done follow local logics, especially of organization of work. It further means that such work, particularly at the street level, in contact with the public, can significantly change the meaning of a policy (Lipsky, 1980). A good policy should account for the way in which it might be implemented but cannot fully determine how this will happen. This understanding goes against earlier understandings of policy evaluation, in which policies that adequately modelled their object were supposed to be successful, as well as going against understandings of changes in the policy during their implementation as mere deviations from the intended outcome (Winter, 2012). Two main points of implementation studies are important for consideration here. First, implementing organizations, especially if in direct contact with the public, tend to implement policies through local routines that have as their main objective making the work feasible for the organization in terms of the equilibrium between resources and demands from the public, regardless of the letter of the policy (see for example Lipsky, 1980; Brodkin, 1997; Darrow, 2015; Tummers et al, 2015). Second, policy implementation frequently involves, and to a certain degree requires, discretion (Pratt, 1999; 2010). The ways in which such discretion is used tend to identify deserving and undeserving categories among the public, even if such categories are not relevant for the letter of the policy (for example Lipsky, 1980; Spire, 2008; Thomann and Rapp, 2018; Mazouz, 2017; 2019).

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There are different interpretations of how bureaucrats understand their role and use their discretion. Spire (2008), starting from a study of immigration offices in France, argues that the social background of the bureaucrat can help understand the interpretation given to the law. Some of the bureaucrats he met felt a mission to control immigration to France and were willing to apply routines that were more restrictive than legally required as they understood themselves to be following the spirit of the law. Others did not share this approach and found it went against the rights of migrants but, in Spire’s experience, they tended to simply exit the bureaucracies, which in any case did not have good working conditions and therefore saw a high turnover. Dubois (2012) has a partly different approach to the issue. From his perspective, bureaucrats tend to introduce routines that are not aligned with the letter of the law. However, such routines are not necessarily deviant –​rather, the bureaucrats tend to pursue what they perceive as the spirit of the law, and to construct the official records of their activity to match the letter of the law. From this perspective, implementation can result in different levels of variation. Different branches of a given bureaucracy can be characterized by different political climates, different ways of organizing work, and different decision-​making processes, as well as diverging on decisions in similar situations (Eule, 2016). Furthermore, variation in the kind of decision made can be found between one case and the next under the same officer, in systematic differences in the decisions of different officers, or in systematic differences between different branches (Sredanovic, 2020b). One important distinction should be made within public policy and its implementation. Some policies have a specific product that might be more important than the procedure. Employment policies, for example, have as one of their main objectives the allocation of the public in paid employment. In this case, discretion might violate equal treatment between the candidates (for example by privileging candidates who begin

18

Introduction

with more resources and are easier to allocate – Greer et al, 2018) but could compensate for this violation in part by increasing the number of people employed. Similarly, while integration policies are nebulous and potentially unrealistic in their ultimate objectives, they do have the immediate objective of improving language proficiency, knowledge of the institutions, culture and/​or history of the country, and, often, the employability of the migrants. Using discretion in this context might be counterbalanced to the degree that the immediate objectives are fulfilled. However, citizenship, as with other policies based on the attribution of a legal status, is a field of policy in which the procedure is the product. Policymakers do attempt to use citizenship policy for other aims, such as improving language knowledge and employment, instilling political knowledge and civic and political values, or making new citizens identify with the nation and its institutions. However, the intrinsic mandate of the officers implementing citizenship policy is to attribute citizenship to those who meet the requirements and deny it to those who do not. In this case, applying discretion does not bring intrinsic results that counterbalance unequal treatment. Despite this, the few existing ethnographic studies of naturalization procedures show significant discretion and variation. In the US and Canada, where the procedures are relatively standardized despite the use of interviews with the candidates, Bloemraad (2006) observes how the main explanation for the higher rate of naturalization in Canada compared to the US is linked to the more proactive promotion of naturalizations, including the involvement of ethnic organizations. However, Plascencia (2012) shows also the presence of barriers to access to the procedures in the US, as well as spaces of discretion in the interviews. In France, the mandate to prefectures to evaluate the ‘assimilation’ of the candidate without defining the concept has created spaces for discretional evaluation of deservingness, which is particularly problematic for Muslim candidates (Hajjat, 2010a; 2010b; 2012; Mazouz, 2017; 2019 –​see also Costa-​Lascaux, 2002;

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Fassin and Mazouz, 2007), although some officers showed scepticism towards some restrictive notions of assimilation targeting Muslims (Hajjat, 2010a; 2012; on the other hand some of the officers observed by Mazouz, 2019 followed the norms systematically). Finally, in Switzerland the invasive procedures described by Centlivres and colleagues (1991) continued in part well into the 2000s, and the votes on individual naturalizations have been shown to discriminate statistically against candidates from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia (Helbling, 2008; Heinmueller and Hangartner, 2013), particularly in cases where the whole citizenry had a secret vote on the matter –​a practice made unlawful by the Swiss Federal Court in 2005 (Heinmueller and Hangartner, 2013). Helbling (2008) shows that the local political climate influenced not only the votes, but also the kind of requirements examined discretionally in the procedure preceding the vote itself, while Kristol and Dahinden (2020) show the presence of class, gender and ethnicity prejudice in the procedure of naturalization by marriage, in which only officers are involved. Method The data presented in this book are based on in-​depth interviews conducted with different institutions working on naturalization in the UK and Belgium and on mandatory integration courses in Belgium between 2016 and 2018. The choice to compare Belgium and the UK is linked to a number of points. First, both are ‘old immigration’ European countries, that is countries that saw significant immigration after World War II, although in the UK such migration was in the initial period mostly from the (former) colonies while Belgium recruited ‘guest workers’ from southern Europe and the Mediterranean. Second, they had similar, two-​step procedures (in the UK until 2018) for naturalization, and both have undergone integrationist reforms of the citizenship law. However, the letter of the citizenship laws is significantly

20

Introduction

different as that of the UK is an example of highly discretional naturalization, while that of Belgian is characterized by a significant attempt to limit discretion in the procedure. The focus on integration in Belgium alone is linked to the fact that mandatory integration in the UK is limited to the tests themselves, especially since 2013 and the end of the ESOL course route to integration requirements. The approach of the qualitative, semi-​structured, open-​ended interviews I conducted was focused on understanding the everyday choices and margins of uncertainty that characterize the implementation of almost any policy. With the exception of a few visits to the Nationality Team in Liverpool, I have not conducted ethnographic observations of the everyday work of the institutions. This means there are most likely some local practices not reflected in the interviews –​those that the officers are less likely to talk about, either because they are tacit practices they are not used to putting into words or else the kind of practice they might not want to discuss with outsiders. However, the approach allowed me to increase the number of contexts included in the research. By interviewing several branches involved in the different policies, rather than observing a select few, I have been able to reconstruct the inter-​institutional, and to a degree geographic, variation in policy implementation, something that is highly relevant for nationality in Belgium but also has importance for integration in Belgium and citizenship in the UK. The main institutions involved in the research are, in the UK, the Home Office (equivalent to the Ministry of the Interior) and the Nationality Checking Services (NCSs), activated by local authorities to help introduce applications. Within the Home Office, citizenship applications are processed by the Nationality Team (further subdivided into the Nationality Checking Team, which processes the applications, and the Nationality Policy Team, which defines internal guidance). In Belgium, nationality applications are introduced at local registers and processed by parquets, local offices the main

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IMPLEMENTING CITIZENSHIP, NATIONALITY & INTEGRATION POLICIES

activity of which is public prosecution. Finally, in Wallonia I conducted interviews in Centres Régionaux d’Intégration (Regional Integration Centres, CRIs), local institutions that define the mandatory integration courses. In the UK I conducted interview with seven NCSs located in northern England and Wales. I further made, together with my colleague Émilien Fargues, a number of visits to the Home Office building in Liverpool, where we interviewed 14 officers from the Nationality Checking Team, two officers from the Nationality Policy Team, and one officer from the denaturalization team. In addition, we conducted a focus group/​ collective interview with seven officers from UK NARIC (an agency that certifies non-​UK university degrees, including for the purpose of proving English language proficiency without undergoing a test) in Cheltenham and one individual interview with an officer of Learndirect (an agency involved in the organization of ‘Life in the UK’ and English language tests) in Leicester. In Belgium I conducted seven interviews with parquets (out of 14 overall parquets present in Belgium), 23 interviews with civil registers, and six interviews with associations and services assisting with nationality procedures. I further conducted seven interviews in five CRIs (out of eight CRIs present in Wallonia). The interviews with parquets, civil registers and associations covered the whole territory of Belgium, although Flanders is relatively underrepresented; the interviews with the CRIs, meanwhile, were all in Wallonia. At the time of the research on the integration policy (2017–​18), Brussels had voluntary integration policies and was introducing a mandatory one, but the new policy was not in place nor were the institutions delivering it defined, and a similar situation was present in the German-​speaking Community. The choice therefore was between Flanders, which already had a long-​standing mandatory integration policy, and Wallonia, which at the time was implementing a new integration policy; given the interest of examining a policy in the first stages of implementation, I opted to focus on Wallonia.

22

Introduction

In most cases (the NCSs, Nationality Policy Team and denaturalization team in the UK, the parquets and civil registers in Belgium), I approached each institution through a single interview, which mostly involved one officer, but in some cases included a second or third one. This was linked to the fact that the approach of my interviews was to focus in each interview on the experience of work within the institution, most of which were sufficiently small in terms of numbers of employees to obtain a good understanding of the institution as a whole. A similar approach was used for the CRIs, although in this case I was able to interview separately three different officers in a single CRI. In the case of the Nationality Checking Team in the UK, which is a significantly larger organization, the interviews with the officers were mostly individual as the division of labour was greater and the different interviews offered complementary perspectives. I described each interview as focusing on the individual experience of work; this avoided any interviewee feeling that they needed to represent their institution officially. I also avoided asking questions about their individual background and opinions; this allowed me to keep the interviews less invasive in the context of the limited time spent in each institution but obviously means that I cannot account for the possible role of the officer’s own background and philosophy in the implementation of policies, as explored by Spire (2008). The interview guide was similar in all the contexts, including elements of organization (number of people working in the institution, volume of work, formal and informal interactions with other institutions), interaction with the public (what made a case more or less complex, how they managed disagreements with the public) and points of law that, from the initial documentary analysis, resulted in possible spaces of discretion and variation. All the interviews were preceded by an explanation of the details of the research and formal verbal consent by the interviewees; most were audio-​recorded, except when the

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interviewee preferred not to be recorded, as well as all the interviews conducted in the Home Office. In the text I use codes to identify the different interviews; I give an indication of the geographical location (Flanders, Brussels, Wallonia or the German-​speaking Community) for the civil registries in Belgium but in other cases which pertain to types of institutions that are fewer in number, I only use an ordinal number. The UK and Belgium have both been characterized by the transition from relatively unitary institutional architectures to forms of devolution and/​or federalism. However, Belgium has gone much further in this direction. Despite the devolution of several policy fields to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the permanence of separate legal systems in Scotland and Northern Ireland, both citizenship and integration policies are exclusively national in the UK. In contrast, Belgium does have a single federal nationality policy but at least four different integration policies (see Chapter Four for more details). Furthermore, there are few policy domains that have not been transferred from the federal level to different institutions in Belgium. Regions –​Flanders, Wallonia and the capital Brussels Region –​are responsible for most economic and social policies. Language-​related policies, including all levels of education as well as health, are delegated to Linguistic Communities, with a German-​speaking Community covering a small number of Walloon municipalities along the border with Germany and the Brussels Region being part of both the Flemish and the francophone Communities. Contents of the book In Chapter Two I first introduce the current UK legislation on citizenship, highlighting the colonial origins of the stratified and complex citizenship and immigration legislation, as well as its recent integration-​focused developments since 2002 based on language and culture tests, and how in theory it provides extensive discretionary powers to the Home Secretary. I then

24

Introduction

examine the role played by the NCSs: I show how these services gave limited guidance to applicants, dealing with the discretion available to the Home Office and needing to decide on what aspects they could give clear information to the applicants. I also show how the different NCSs presented different interpretations of the requirements, especially concerning EEA applicants. I then outline the organization of work of the Nationality Team of the Home Office. I discuss the role of internal guidance –​hybrid documents that simultaneously provide information to the public while delimiting the discretion available to the officers. Despite the focus of law reforms on integration, I found that the Nationality Checking Team were more interested in formal requirements than in larger ideas about integration. The routinization of the procedures through the guidance and office practices significantly limited the degree of discretion in the letter of the law. Nevertheless, aspects of the law, in particular the burden of proof on the applicant, leave significant margins of discretion to individual agents, especially regarding those suspected of fraud. In Chapter Three I first discuss the Belgian Nationality Code; I show how the 2012 reform introduced linguistic, social and economic integration requirements in a country that had previously enjoyed very inclusive citizenship policies between 2000 and 2012. At the same time, the current Belgian legislation is characterized by a low level of discretion. I present the decentralized procedure for nationality acquisition between civil registers and parquets, which introduces geographic variation in the implementation of the law. Several points of law, including the role of prior infractions, how integration courses and diplomas fulfil the social and linguistic integration requirements, and how employment fulfils economic integration, were interpreted differently between register and register and between parquet and parquet. All opposition by the parquets must be reasoned and is subject to judicial review, but even the courts, which are still local, have divergent

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interpretations of the law and cannot avoid the geographical differences in its implementation. In Chapter Four I discuss integration policies in Belgium. I first show how mandatory integration courses have developed across the linguistic/​geographic divide within the country, reflecting a history of different approaches to immigration. I then present fieldwork data on the introduction of the mandatory integration course in Wallonia, based on interviews with CRIs. I show the uncertainties which result from their position between the municipalities, where the integration path begins, and the Region, which defines the content of the policy and is in charge of sanctioning non-​compliance on behalf of migrants. I further show how the CRIs exercised flexibility in defining the individual need for integration of the migrants subject to obligation, attempting to a degree to moderate the obligation itself, but also how this created conflict with the Wallonia Region. In Chapter Five I present a comparative analysis regarding the implementation and variation of citizenship and integration policies. I show how the large discretion inscribed in UK citizenship law is limited by guidance and routinization, but also how significant discretion remains, especially given the limited judicial review available in the UK. In comparison, in Belgian nationality law there is little space for discretion, which is confined to the evaluation of previous infractions and, in some cases, the use of police interviews. I contrast this with integration policies in Wallonia, where the more complex judgements required of the officers, and the uncertainty regarding aspects of the policy, call for more discretion in implementation. I subsequently discuss the factors of variation in the implementation of the law. Along with the letter of the law and the degree of judicial review, the (de)centralized procedure, the organization of work, the professional profile of the officers, and the interdependence of the institutions involved are among the main factors of variation in the implementation of laws.

26

Introduction

In Chapter Six I discuss the implications of the citizenship and integration policies and their implementation for migrants. I argue that policies that make access to rights conditional on cultural or economic requirements are problematic not only because of the erroneous assumption of cultural and economic cohesion of the majority group, but also because they create issues of implementation. I then discuss some tendencies in policy across Europe that are likely to influence the near future of citizenship and integration policies. I conclude by proposing some policy recommendations based on the research concerning how citizenship and integration policies could be transformed. I argue that simplified requirements, implemented with minimal space for discretion and with measures to ensure the uniform interpretation of the law, can offer both better access to rights for migrants and increased respect for fundamental democratic values.

27

TWO

Citizenship in the UK

History and policy: discretion and cultural conformity The recent history of citizenship policy in the UK includes two main periods of legislative activity. Relations with British colonies and former colonies and migration from the colonies themselves drove the first period between 1948 and the 1980s. The second, which began in 2002, has been driven by variations in the concept of integration. After a long period of incompletely defined UK subjecthood (Dummett and Nicol, 1990; Dummett, 2006; Prabhat, 2018), the British Nationality Act 1948 systematically codified citizenship in the UK for the first time. Promulgated in reaction to the 1946 introduction of a specific Canadian citizenship, the law was strongly linked to relations with the colonies (Hansen, 1999; Karatani, 2003). At the time, the aim was to claim continued sovereignty over the colonial population, rather than managing migration to the metropole. Thus, this law was far more inclusive than those introduced in the following decades. One aspect of British citizenship legislation sets it apart even from other former colonial powers, namely its stratification of (post) colonial status. All colonial powers have used different statuses to coopt part of the colonial population in the government of the colonies, while excluding the majority from full legal rights (see for example Jerónimo and Vink, 2011; Hajjat, 2012). However, most colonial powers have simplified their legislation during decolonization, establishing a citizen/​non-​citizen dichotomy, while the UK maintained (and still maintains, though with fewer consequences) several intermediate statuses (Sredanovic,

28

Citizenship in the UK

2017). One possible explanation for their persistence in British citizenship is that the UK has been the only colonial power to have white-​majority dominions (Canada, Australia and New Zealand). As such, the racial politics of the UK have driven its governments to maintain a stronger legal relationship with former colonial populations. A second explanation is based on path dependence. As the only major power not to follow the French-​originated model of dichotomous citizenship/​ non-​citizenship, UK institutions never entirely abandoned the more stratified approach to citizenship (Sredanovic, 2017). After the 1948 codification, British citizenship underwent reforms in 1962, 1968, 1971 and 1981, all in the direction of reducing rights –​in particular, the right to move to the UK –​of colonial and former colonial subjects. The racial/​ethnic nature of that approach was clear in the provisions by which colonial subjects with a parent or grandparent born in the UK (defined as ‘patrials’ by the 1971 reform) –​that is, British descendant and prevalently white –​maintained the right to enter the UK, unlike other, non-​British-​descendant colonial subjects (compare Karatani, 2003; Dummett, 2006; Sredanovic, 2017; Prabhat, 2018; 2019; El-​Enany, 2020). The stratification of legal statuses was used by the UK government to initially deny access to South Asian British subjects when they were expelled from East Africa in 1968 (Prabhat, 2019) and more recently contributed to the Windrush scandal, with individuals who had entered the UK as colonial subjects erroneously deprived of rights and in some cases deported because of the difficulty of proving their status (Bawdon, 2019; Gentleman, 2019; Prabhat, 2019). Again, the colonial focus of citizenship policy set the UK apart from the other ‘old migration’ countries of north-​ western Europe. While the colonial component of migration was relevant also, for example, in France and the Netherlands, the UK was the only ‘old migration’ country not to actively recruit migrants from southern Europe and the Mediterranean under the ‘guestworker’ scheme (see for example Castles, 1986 and Chapter Three of this book).

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Having already established significant obstacles for colonial subjects’ entry into the UK, and with the emergence of other migratory flows, the colonial focus of UK citizenship policy declined to a degree in the 1990s. Some of the new migratory flows received significant attention, such as refugees coming often but not only from former UK colonies. Others were not the object of political attention, such as migration from the EU, extended since 1992 beyond the historically constant migration from Ireland and more sporadic migrations from Italy and eastern Europe. The second period of reforms was initiated not so much by immigration, but rather by anxieties around UK-​born minorities, and in particular by confrontations between the far right and South Asian populations in northern English towns in 2001. The New Labour Blair Government of the time described the riots as a sign of a lack of integration, targeting particularly Muslim Asian youth. A large literature (for example McGhee, 2009; Kostakopoulou, 2010b; Bassel et al, 2018; Khan, 2019) explores the 2001 riots and how the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 redefined British citizenship in a restrictive direction, by focusing on integration requirements. With the London bombings of 7 July 2005, the New Labour governments reinforced that direction. Similar initiatives arose in several other European states during the late 1990s and the early 2000s but I am not aware of analyses highlighting a European reference for the introduction of the 2002 law.1 In line with a larger neoliberal policy of promoting civic responsibility, the 2002 law introduced a language test and a ‘Life in the UK’ test for British citizenship. The language test took the place of a seldom-​enforced requirement of being able to speak English (see van Oers, 2013: 92–​3), while the ‘Life in the UK’ test was initially focused on practical and civic competence in the UK. In addition, the 2002 law introduced citizenship ceremonies that aimed to strengthen the civicness of the naturalized and, indeed, have since then been promoting specific ideas about

30

Citizenship in the UK

British society and migrants’ role in it (Byrne, 2012; 2014; Badenhoop, 2017). The civic/​responsabilization approach of the New Labour governments was radicalized by a legislative plan that was not enacted but aimed to reduce naturalization requirements for applicants involved in volunteering, and to reject applicants whose children had committed a legal infraction (Kostakopoulou, 2010b). The Conservative-​Liberal Democrat coalition modified the civic-​competence approach of the integration test in 2013, changing the ‘Life in the UK’ test explicitly in order to make its content more focused on cultural and historical questions (Turner, 2014; Byrne, 2017). Currently, British citizenship can be acquired at birth by descendance from a British citizen or by birth in the UK to a non-​citizen holding indefinite leave to remain (ILR) (children born to non-​citizens lacking this requirement can be registered as citizens once the parent meets the requirement). Outside of acquisition at birth, all naturalizations require ILR, passing the ‘Life in the UK’ test and either passing an English language test, being from a number of countries that the Home Office recognizes as anglophone, or having obtained a university degree given in English in an English-​speaking country. There is a five-​year residency requirement which is linked to the obtaining of ILR, after which the applicant must live for another year in the UK (excepting those married to a British citizen) before being able to apply for citizenship. Such residence must be characterized by a physical presence in the UK, with a general tolerance of up to 450 days’ absence in the five years before the application and 90 days’ absence in the year before the application. For non-​citizens subject to migration control and holding a passport, the passport can fulfil the check of the physical residence, with the stamps of entry and exit testifying to a presence in the territory. Those not subject to such controls (such as EEA citizens) or lacking a passport must provide alternative evidence, such as fiscal documents (P60s) or payslips. In addition, crimes, breaches of immigration rules, but also other elements, including bankruptcy, may prevent the

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‘good character’ requirement from being fulfilled (see Kapoor and Narkowicz, 2019). The law treats in significantly different ways the attribution of citizenship based on descendance or birth in the UK (which are largely entitlements) and the acts of registration, naturalization and denaturalization (which have significant discretionary components). The norms in the law can therefore be categorized into categorical requirements and elements that are always a bar to naturalization; requirements that the Home Secretary can decide to waive; and situations in which requirements are fulfilled, but the naturalization is still formally dependent on a discretionary decision of the Home Secretary. Such a situation introduces into the procedure potentially extreme discretion, although, as I will show, internal guidance documents and routine practice reduce such discretion somewhat. Historically, and still in most countries, high levels of discretion are the norm in citizenship policy. Some exceptions do exist, however, as I discuss in the next chapter on Belgian nationality. In the law itself, good character and the intention to live prevalently in the UK (or to work abroad for the UK government, an international organization or a UK company) are the categorical requirements (the latter is clearly hard to disprove at the moment of application). On the other hand, the Home Secretary can waive having less than 450 days of absence from the UK in the qualifying period, having the full period covered by permanent residence, and having no immigration breaches, as well as the requirements of knowledge of one national language and life in the UK, but only for reasons of age or disability. Still, even if all the requirements are fulfilled (that is, if there is no need to waive any requirement), naturalization remains at the full discretion of the Home Secretary. Similarly, the letter of the law gives extensive powers to denaturalize citizens for reasons of public good, as long as the reason is fraud or the denaturalization does not result in statelessness. Even denaturalizations resulting in statelessness are allowed, as long as the person is a citizen by naturalization

32

Citizenship in the UK

(rather than by descent, birth or registration), has committed acts ‘prejudicial to the vital interests of the UK’ and is considered to be able to obtain the citizenship of another state. Nationality Checking Services: citizenship on the territory Until the end of 2018, applications for British citizenship could go through NCSs, which individual local authorities could choose to activate, and which aimed to help with citizenship applications. However, NCSs have never been an obligatory passage; applicants can always send their applications direct to the Home Office. Therefore, NCSs did not have the crucial role that municipalities do for Belgian nationality. NCSs’ main role was to assist with the material preparation of the application file, although they also took (with internal variability) a role of providing information on citizenship requirements. At the end of 2018, NCSs were closed as the service was digitized and passed to UK Visa and Citizenship Application Services, which is managed by a private company with collaboration from public libraries for in-​person help (Fortier, 2021: 78). NCSs were usually part of the local registry, sharing personnel with the registrars of births, deaths and marriages. As a ‘voluntary’ service they were de-​and sometimes re-​activated by the local authority, and they did not have a uniform geographic distribution. No NCS was ever activated in Northern Ireland,2 and Scotland and Wales did not have a high density of NCSs, while London saw a large number of NCSs as each local council could open one. While NCSs were mostly intended as low-​specialization help for applicants, participants in interviews with the Home Office Nationality Team estimated that about half the applications came in through NCSs, and from the interviews I conducted with some NCSs it emerged how these services have had a significant role in the implementation of citizenship policy. The degree to which each NCS offered advice on an application was a rather complex issue. First, the UK regulates

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immigration advice; giving immigration advice without a specific registration became unlawful with the introduction of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. NCS personnel had a basic immigration-​advice registration, but this did not cover interpreting in any way the requirements of the law. However, the NCSs could contact a telephone helpline of the Home Office Nationality Team on questions that applicants brought forward. Thus, each NCS had two choices to make: how much advice to give on the application’s possible outcome, and how much to rely on the helpline or to be willing to give information without contacting the Home Office. While a determined applicant could always send an application to the Home Office after hearing discouraging advice from the NCS, the high (and rarely refundable) fee linked to the citizenship application pushed many applicants to apply only after having some confirmation that their application had a chance. Some interviews with NCSs represented answers from the helpline as being anything but definitive, both because a response could change with the officer answering, and because the answers were often given in terms of possibility and discretion. Such responses were linked to the margins of discretion available to the Nationality Team, which were even wider in the letter of the law than they were in Home Office practice. Further, the advice activity of the NCSs was relevant, as I found some divergent interpretations of the requirements, particularly concerning applicants from the EEA. The NCSs in which I conducted interviews varied in size, ranging from one to 13 officers working and processing from a few dozen to over a thousand applications a year. In most cases NCS work was not specialized, with the local registry deliberately involving the employees registered for work on NCS also in the rest of the registry activities, rather than making NCS work exclusive. In an earlier study with NCSs conducted between 2007 and 2009, the officials interviewed showed an adherence to

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expectations that the applicants for citizenship be employed and civically active, which the New Labour government was already promoting at the time, as well as a degree of xenophobic orientation towards migrants in general (Andreouli and Stockport, 2009; Andreouli and Dashtipour, 2014). I did not find similar orientations in my interviews, perhaps as a result of a transformation in the NCS culture or geographic differences between the attitudes in London (where Andreouli and colleagues conducted interviews) and my interviews in northern England and Wales. However, perhaps because of their involvement in the citizenship ceremonies and in their discourses on integration (Byrne, 2012; 2014), some of the NCS interviewees were more oriented towards discussing citizenship in terms of requirements of integration than the Home Office Nationality Team personnel were. With the NCS service activated at the discretion of the local authority, some decisions on whether to keep the service open were explicitly economic, as discussed in the interview with NCS7: ‘We’re actually not making money on that [passport checking], but it is drawing people in, if we didn’t do passport checking a lot of people wouldn’t do the nationality checking, so we are prepared to take the hit on the passport to take the nationality in. … … we were averaging 500 pounds a week, but then we had Christmas and we had some zeros, but we’re actually averaging a thousand a week, in fees, so we’re quite happy with that.’ (NCS7) The NCSs had both a filtering role and limits on their freedom to give advice. Considering the referral of many issues to the Nationality helpline, there was a de facto continuum from cases clearly barred from naturalization (to the point that some NCSs would not even check with the helpline) to issues that

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might bar naturalization, but only if the Nationality Team in Liverpool gave a negative decision. In the first group (clear obstacles to naturalization) there were obvious issues, such as lacking the required period of residence, a permanent residence, not having passed the ‘Life in the UK’ test or not having proof of English proficiency (by test or by degree). However, in addition to these, different interviews included mentions of bankruptcy (NCS1) and infractions of the law that bar for a 10-​year period (NCS2, NCS4), which mainly comprise prison sentences of at least a year and false declarations in immigration proceedings. Two other areas were largely recognized as discretionary. Absences from the UK territory above the limit tolerated by the guidance were understood to be at the discretion of the Home Office, especially if the absences were work related. ‘If [the absence from territory] is over four months we would say “ring Liverpool and check you’re able to do this”, other than that we would say “yeah, come in, but be warned that Liverpool might ask you to provide evidence for these four months”. Because normally what we found is Liverpool check it, say “you’ve not got the right evidence, can you send it in?” ’ (NCS7) Similarly, starting with a revision of the guidance in 2015, a migratory history considered to be in breach of immigration laws has been considered proof of bad character. Normally, having been in this condition meant that the migrant was barred from naturalizing for ten years. However, the Home Office had significant space to exercise discretion on this. ‘With regards to the being in breach [of immigration rules], we always just ring the Home Office, it’s not we [who] have to make this decision, but sometimes the information the Home Office gives you isn’t clear, they say “oh, I recommend you tell them to wait till 2020

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because of this, but potentially they could apply in 2018, because this happened”, and you have to relate this to the customer, in a way that you don’t really understand why they’re saying …’. (NCS2) A third grey area was the presence of minor infractions of the law (resulting in a suspended sentence, fine or caution): such infractions were not linked automatically to the ban applying to major infractions and breaches of immigration but were still an area in which the Home Office had significant discretion. In some NCSs where I conducted interviews, the sum of these different areas of discretion was recognized as creating uncertainty in the procedure: Officer 1: The thing is, the advice that we get from the Home Office isn’t always clear. And there seems to be an awful lot of discretion, and they’ll always say “oh, it depends on your caseworker”. Officer 2: … you’ll never get “oh that’s absolutely fine”, or “that’s not fine”. It’s always discretionary, because the person you’re speaking with is not necessarily the person who’ll check that. Understandably, you’ll never get a concrete yes or no … Officer 1: But it always surprises me how discretionary it seems, cause that’s the other thing, they must all be trained to the same baseline. And I’m always surprised … “yes, if I got it, yeah, it’ll be fine, but if such-​and-​such got it, it probably wouldn’t”. And you think, for such a major, important, expensive, big thing, it shouldn’t be quite that level of discretion. (NCS2) In addition to acting as an interface managing the discretion available to the Home Office, as discussed, NCSs had a

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certain role in defining the criteria for the applications that passed through them. They had some divergences in the interpretation of the norms, particularly in relation to applicants from the EEA. As mentioned, most migrants outside the area are subject to visas and border controls and, in most cases, can show on their passport having fulfilled the residence requirements. EEA candidates, who before Brexit were not subject to visas and had no stamps on their passport when leaving and re-​entering the UK, must prove meeting their residence requirements, as well as the exercise of treaty rights, in other ways. Before the introduction of the requirement for EEA candidates to hold Permanent Residence (PR) before applying for citizenship, most of the NCSs interviewed considered EEA candidates time consuming, if not complex, as they had to present a larger volume of documentation. After the introduction of the PR requirement (on which see the next section), there were two issues: whether PR, already conditional on residence requirements and the exercise of EU treaty rights, was also proof of both for those five years; and whether EEA candidates who were not workers needed to hold private health insurance.3 NCS6 held the view that PR covered both the treaty rights and residence in the UK, and moreover observed that applicants could avoid having to wait a year after obtaining PR by sending six years of evidence to obtain a backdated PR card: “The Permanent Residence card covers them [EEA applicants] that they exercised treaty rights and that they have been resident here. … It depends on what date your permanent residence card is dated, because they can backdate it” (NCS6). However, other NCSs said that while PR proved the exercise of treaty rights, residence in the five years needed to be proved again: A: You just need to have Permanent Residence and prove that you’ve been here for five years like any other nationality does.   …

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Q: So you don’t have to check if they had medical insurance or anything like that? A: No thank goodness, we had to stop doing that, it was really tricky. (NCS4) ‘Now we obviously need the Permanent Residence card and their history. … It would be work-​based, P60s or employer’s letter, Jobseekers allowance, or anything like that … they’re supposed to be working, aren’t they?’ (NCS5) Finally, NCS2 collected the documents related to the five years covered by PR, but were confident that the Home Office had already approved such documents and they would not have represented a problem. During my research, naturalizations of EEA migrants were still relatively limited in number, first because EEA status was perceived as sufficient protection, then because most EEA nationals had to qualify for PR before applying for citizenship. This kind of naturalization increased significantly in the following years with the developments of Brexit (Sredanovic, 2020a; 2020c; Sredanovic and Della Puppa, 2020). Citizenship implementation in the Home Office4 The Nationality Team is a rather large organization, occupying most of a floor in the Home Office building in Liverpool. Having all the citizenship applications centralized in a single building stands in high contrast to the decentralization of the procedure in Belgium (see next chapter), but also in France (Hajjat, 2012) and Switzerland (Helbling, 2008). Several dozen caseworkers are organized in subteams, which, at the time of our visits, were often identifiable as islands grouped at several desks. In addition to the main Nationality Team, composed of caseworkers and managers, a separate, smaller Policy Team works specifically on the revisions to the internal guidance

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documents. Some aspects of citizenship are also outside the control of the Nationality Team. A Special Cases Unit (SCU) manages applications that involve security issues, and a team within the Status Review Unit manages the withdrawals of nationality. Caseworkers need only have completed secondary school to apply for a position, and one of the managers we interviewed said that the most common background among the caseworkers was having studied history. More senior positions are filled according to seniority and on-​work skills, rather than requiring formal qualifications. This includes the Policy Team; in fact, the only positions that require a background in law are the Home Office lawyers that advise the Nationality Team on court cases. Again, this contrasts with the Belgian situation, where the decisions are all taken by magistrates. The interviews with the caseworkers seemed to show a certain circulation between the Nationality Team and other Home Office teams in Liverpool, particularly the one dealing with the residence of EEA citizens. This includes formal ‘borrowing’ of personnel between one team and another to deal with exceptional peaks in casework. The procedures

The processing of applications occurs with a significant division of labour, with subteams dedicated specifically to basic initial processing and collecting fees. The substantial flux of money linked to the application fees meant that at times the Nationality Team used overtime and weekend work to complete the initial processing of applications, which includes taking the fees. Such overtime was often linked to peaks in applications, driven by the announcement of a fee hike a few months in advance. The managers we interviewed confirmed that the citizenship fee is significantly greater than the cost of processing an application and that the criterion for setting the fee is the Home Office’s perception of the ‘value’ of British citizenship. The same managers justified the cost by the fact

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that they did not consider naturalizing an obligation but, rather, ‘a cherry on the cake’, and by the fact that continual fee hikes had not driven down the number of applications, which they considered proof that the cost was not excessive. At the same time, the funds from citizenship applications were not available to the Nationality Team, for example should the team decide that it needed more caseworkers, but were directly under the control of the Home Office. Once the filing and fee procedures were set, the applications were coded according to their complexity, ‘A’, ‘B’ or ‘C’. The code defined the profile of a caseworker to whom the application would be assigned, as well as the time allocated: ‘A’ applications required a senior caseworker, and those working on such applications had lower production objectives, only three applications per working day. ‘A’ applications involved irregularities in the migratory history, which, at the time of the visits, required checks on the paper files and generally an extensive reconstruction of migratory history. According to a manager we interviewed, most of the applicants in this category were ‘failed’ asylum seekers (a term applied to migrants who had received a negative decision on an asylum application, although –​as I will show –​the suspicion extended to any asylum seeker who did not apply within a month of arriving in the UK). ‘B’ applications involved potential infractions of the law but no immigration irregularities, and ‘C’ applications were a residual category that included applications that could be straightforward in their processing (although the interviews revealed that such straightforwardness is the exception rather than the rule, even among ‘C’ applications). However, other categories that fitted into the ‘A’ category included applicants with claims to former colonial subject statuses, members of the armed forces (who can apply without fulfilling residence requirements), and cases in which there were potential suspicions of fraud in the tests. In addition to the stratification of ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ applications, two other elements differentiated the applications. Security

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checks examined whether the applicants had anything against them in security databases. At the time of the visit, such checks had recently been revised. Originally conducted only on specific nationalities, primarily countries at the centre of recent armed conflicts (but also Russia), they had been generalized to all nationalities. Secondly, a specific team examined applications for potential war crimes, focusing mostly on applicants from conflict areas5 who had an asylum hearing at some point. In these cases, asylum hearings were re-​examined for potential violations missing from the security databases but potentially enough to justify a denial of the citizenship application, including acting as a fundraiser, recruiter or informant. Such a procedure was rather specialized and complex; it involved comparing declarations made in the asylum hearings with knowledge of larger episodes of violence in the country of origin. Still, an interviewee from the team mentioned that, in case of references in the asylum hearing the team were not familiar with, the approach would simply be ‘Googling’. The same interviewee considered most of what is said in asylum hearings to be fabricated and referred to ‘intuition’ as a principle by which to examine individual profiles for signs of possible involvement in war crimes. This approach of generalized suspicion of the applicants and legitimation of intuition is frequently discussed in work on other migration policies, such as border control (Heyman, 2009; Pratt, 2010; Achermann, 2021), but it was otherwise absent in all the rest of the fieldwork on which this book is based. Some further categories could be referred to the war crimes unit, including applicants of other nationalities who spent extensive periods in countries considered a security risk, as well as applicants who reported the theft of their passport –​this aspect apparently constituted a security ‘red flag’ in itself. One can see how the asylum history of applicants could lead both to their applications being classified as more complex, needing extensive checks (see also Fargues, 2019) and trigger controls for possible war crimes. Such procedures show

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the extensive life of asylum hearings, which are not only complex in themselves (for example Bohmer and Shuman, 2018; Gill et al, 2018) but return in subsequent procedures to be re-​examined and potentially flag a refugee as suspect for naturalization purposes. An application that returned a hit from a security database or that the war crimes team had identified for potential security issues would be pulled by the SCU. Situated a floor above the Nationality Team, this unit was set apart by thick security doors and the need for a high-​security clearance to access it. In addition to applicants considered a security risk, the SCU also managed such highly sensitive applicants as political figures or police informants. Applications ending there were effectively outside the remit of the Nationality Team, who would not receive any information about the application until the SCU’s final decision. Once the application was checked for inclusion of the fee and not raising security red flags that justify an interest of the SCU, the examination of the application itself focused on several issues. First, the documentation presented was checked to verify the fulfilment of the residence, language and ‘Life in the UK’ requirements. Such controls included not only the content of the documentation, but also further checks on its authenticity. In addition, controls were extended to the immigration history of the applicant for breaches of immigration law that could count against good character, especially if flags emerged in the initial screening and allocation of the application. The latter checks can extend up to ten years before the application, and while delays in renewing the status before the qualifying residence period do not count against good character, irregular entry or working without a permit could be so considered. When the application included fiscal documentation (as with most EEA applicants), Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) could be contacted, in case of suspicion of falsified documentation, but HMRC applied a monthly cap to this kind of check. Some additional specific

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checks occurred on child applicants and applicants for whom a mental disability had been declared, in both cases to check for any abuse of the applicant’s identity to produce a legal status for other individuals. Uncertain cases, in which, for example, the applicant had more than the tolerated days of absence from the territory in the qualifying period and/​or needed a waiver of a requirement, could be annotated by the caseworkers and referred for a decision to a more senior caseworker. However, the direct involvement of the deputy director or even the Home Secretary, formally holding the power to make decisions about naturalization, was limited to highly sensitive cases, such as public figures or individuals already of interest to the Home Office. We interviewed a caseworker with specific experience with EEA applicants, a group for which (as was shown in the last paragraph) there were divergent interpretations of requirements between different NCSs. The interviewee did not, however, clarify whether the documentation was collected just to prove residence in the qualifying years or also to control again the exercise of treaty rights, which suggests that the policy itself might have been unclear.6 She confirmed, however, that European Health Insurance Cards (EHICs) (that is, providing coverage from the healthcare system of the EU country of origin) were accepted as proof of comprehensive health insurance. Further, the same interviewee mentioned that the threshold for rejecting a PR application was lower than that for rejecting a nationality application. Given the much lower cost of the PR application (£65), the practice of the European team was to reject any application that was missing documentation, as opposed to writing to ask for additional documentation, as the Nationality Team did. The division of labour in teams was accompanied by a formal stratification of the caseworkers: there were different internal levels, with skill and an internal application process necessary to move to a higher level. The managers we

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interviewed recognized that, especially as regards the lower levels, caseworkers did not have particularly good economic or contractual conditions, making it unlikely that the team could require formal educational requirements for the job. As mentioned, the distribution of the applications followed the skill levels necessary for more complex applications. At the same time, the distribution tried to be ‘fair’ –​mixing ‘labour intensive’ and simpler applications (for example applications that arrived through NCSs, joint applications of two or more family members). Further, as in most organizations (Lipsky, 1980; Sandfort, 2000; Brodkin, 2011), the team could have backlogs of a specific kind of application (at the time of the interview, applications including a university degree rather than an English language test had formed a significant backlog) or keep reserves of simpler applications (for example, again, NCS-​processed applications) to keep within the targets on less productive days. The Nationality Team was large enough to introduce significant measures of New Public Management (Page, 2005; Brodkin, 2011). These included specific output targets, according to the type of application processed, but also formal quality checks, including specific checklists and the systematic re-​examination by senior caseworkers of a sample of 2 per cent of all applications. Internal guidance and discretion

The key element in defining the processing of nationality applications in the Nationality Team were guidance documents. These hybrid legal documents have three purposes. They give instruction to individual caseworkers on how to process nationality applications, present the public with information on the procedure and, crucially, are an instrument to delimit within the Nationality Team the large discretion given by the letter of the law. The UK law, being a concession-​type law, gives very great discretion to the Home Secretary in deciding nationality

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applications. By establishing more detailed procedures and criteria, the guidance documents not only routinize the exercise of such discretion but, indeed, limit it significantly. This does not mean that substantial discretion is not available in deciding on nationality applications in the UK. However, the letter of the law would theoretically allow caseworkers to adopt ad hoc criteria and holistic evaluations of the merits of each candidate (something that, to a degree, still happens in France –​ Hajjat, 2012; Mazouz, 2017; 2019). Through the guidance documents, more stringent and uniform criteria replace such ad hoc evaluations. The guidance documents were produced in collaboration between senior caseworkers of the Nationality Casework Team and the Policy Team, with Home Office involvement. Revisions to the guidance documents could be produced in response to a Home Office request but could also originate within the Nationality Team itself. An example of the first development has been the tightening of controls on previous migratory history, which derived from a 2014 independent review (Vine, 2014) that criticized the work of the team for not examining in sufficient depth the migratory history of the applicants and not classifying past breaches of immigration rules as signs of bad character. An example of the Nationality Team itself driving policy change has been the extension of the requirement of PR to EEA citizens applying for British citizenship. According to the interview we conducted with one of the Nationality Team managers, before the revision of this requirement, the Home Office ‘European’ team was charged with verifying the residence requirements of EEA applicants for citizenship. Inter-​team issues emerged from the arrangement as the European team was required to conduct “for free” a procedure that normally charged a fee, while within the Nationality Team the feeling was that had their team taken charge of the verification, the quality would not have been as high as that of the more specialized European team. As a compromise between the two teams, the decision was to require EU citizens to obtain PR before applying for

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British citizenship –​which meant that the European team would continue the verification and be able to charge a fee for doing the work. While the guidance documents somewhat routinized and standardized the decisions on nationality, questions of merit persisted. For example, some of the interviews made clear that asylum seekers were considered suspect unless they had applied for asylum within a month of entering the UK. Further, one of the Nationality Team managers interviewed acknowledged that there could be external pressures on specific cases. These seemed to pertain to the outcome of the application only in the case of members of the armed forces (these applications were first sent to the ministerial staff if a rejection was planned, as denying citizenship, for example, to someone wounded saving other soldiers, was seen as highly problematic). In other cases, considerations of merit could fast-​track an application. This could be the case for applicants who came recommended by an MP or a minister, or sportspeople whom the Ministry of Sport wanted to naturalize, but also for cases with compassionate considerations (for example an applicant at the point of death) or simply applications that were held up longer than necessary. However, most discretion focused on different kinds of suspected fraud, requirements that allow for some flexibility, and on the fact that the team considered that it was up to the applicants to convince them. Suspicions of fraud first applied to the documents themselves. The caseworkers were trained to recognize fake documents and, in the interviews, seemed to devote significant attention to this possibility, a topic that on the other hand hardly emerged in the interviews conducted in Belgium. Given the burden of proof on the applicants, caseworkers seemed ready to deny an application or, at least, to require other proof and examination if one of the documents seemed to have been tampered with, unusual in relation to previous documents of the same kind the team received, or generally not trustworthy. Some NCSs would send notifications that an applicant did

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not have a level of English in line with the results of the test or the certificates presented. In some cases, the Nationality Team downplayed the notifications, particularly if the civil servants forwarding them had strong regional accents; they hypothesized that this could have made them harder for the applicants to understand. However, in other cases, the Nationality Team could conduct further checks, for instance examining the time applicants took to complete the tests and checking whether they were too quick compared with the applicants’ proficiency. The anxiety around English-​language test results can be linked to a scandal following a report by the television programme Panorama in 2014 around ‘bogus’ testing centres. Such a scandal also resulted in the expulsion of a large number of migrants, despite limited proof of individual fraud (National Audit Office, 2019; Harding et al, 2020). Presenting a degree from a prestigious university7 while not having a profile that the caseworker considered appropriate for the university was also mentioned as a reason to further examine the documentation for fraud. However, an interview with a Nationality Team manager confirmed that, theoretically, an applicant who does not know English but has formally fulfilled the requirement through a test and without fraud is someone whose application should not be rejected. ‘Mere’ non-​knowledge of English absent any kind of fraud was not considered a reason to deny citizenship. One national group that was the object of targeted suspicion by the Nationality Team were refugees from Kosovo. As a few Albanian nationals were discovered to have posed as Kosovan to apply for asylum, all Kosovan applicants who passed through an asylum process were checked with the Kosovan authorities to identify further cases. Kosovans/​Albanians are also statistically a group that has been refused naturalization more frequently for reasons of good character (Kapoor and Narkowicz, 2019) and more frequently targeted for withdrawal of citizenship (Fargues, 2019). While not systematically targeted in the same way as Kosovans, it was suggested that applications from Bangladeshis

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could be viewed with more attention, based on a presumed higher frequency of fraud. The third case to which the caseworkers attached suspicion were marriages of convenience. Among other things, that seemed to be the reason for the majority of cases in which applicants were invited to Liverpool for an interview, a practice that the Nationality Team seemed to use rarely. There is substantial literature on how sentimental relations between migrants are policed by the norms for marriage of convenience, promoting restrictive notions of a love life to deny legal status and, in some cases, the marriage itself, to couples who do not fit such notions (for example Wray, 2006; 2015; Charsley and Benson, 2012; Mascia and Odasso, 2015; Wemyss et al, 2018). The interviews with the Nationality Team referred to having children or being able to demonstrate hobbies in common as proof of an authentic marriage, while a lack of cohabitation was considered a critical sign. At the same time, the Nationality Team limited what could be considered a marriage of convenience to an understanding on the part of both spouses that the marriage was oriented towards obtaining a particular legal status. It is worth noting that the intention of one spouse to contract marriage in order to bypass migration restriction has been explicitly considered enough to deny access to territory or residence in the UK (Wray 2006; 2015; Charsley and Benson, 2012). For naturalization purposes, with legal residence already granted, the Nationality Team seemed to consider invalid only marriages in which both spouses had as their main aim the obtaining of a legal status. One of the managers interviewed indeed explained explicitly that they had received communications from spouses claiming that the applicant had deceived them and married them only for the status. However, such cases were dismissed by the Nationality Team as no basis for rejecting an application. The other space for discretion derived from the combination of flexible norms and the burden of proof on the applicants. The Nationality Team could exercise flexibility on the time

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spent outside the UK in the qualifying period, especially if the reason was deployment by one’s company. Several minor infractions relating to migration norms or other laws could also be dealt with discretionally, as long as the applicant had declared them (not declaring them was, however, considered sufficient proof of bad character to reject the application). Such flexibility was a way to avoid some of the norms becoming draconian, with a few extra days out of the UK or minor infractions effectively barring the applicant from naturalization. At the same time, the flexibility injected uncertainty into the process as applicants have no way to anticipate how the Home Office will deal with borderline cases. They may fear that not declaring absences from the UK or minor infractions that they cannot recall could significantly endanger their application. More generally, the burden of proof on the applicants meant that whenever a document did not clearly demonstrate the fulfilment of some requirement, caseworkers could opt to reject the application. A standardized rejection letter including the reasons accompanies the rejection. However, with the burden of the proof on the applicant, and limited availability of judicial review, the caseworkers had the latitude to err significantly on the side of caution and reject applications that merely failed to convince them about the fulfilment of a requirement. I do not have data showing whether these spaces of discretion were filled, as shown for other contexts, by subjective notions of merit (Lipsky, 1980; Mazouz, 2017; 2019) or by officers’ own conceptions of their mission (Spire, 2008). However, from the visits and the interviews conducted, the general ethos of the Nationality Team seemed to be a version of compliance with the rules, though coloured in some instances by mistrust of profiles that were not irregular in themselves, such as migrants who entered the UK irregularly, then regularized their position, and refugees who had not applied for asylum at the first opportunity. A sign of this focus on compliance with the rules was the relative indifference we encountered in relation to the concept of integration at the centre of the main legislation reforms

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since 2002. Individual caseworkers hardly ever referred to integration when discussing their work. In the interview with two managers of the Nationality Team, integration was not considered particularly relevant either. Curiously, when asked to define it, one manager pointed to the requirement in the law to remain in the UK after naturalization. As I discuss in the next chapter, integration was not a central issue in the processing of nationality applications in Belgium either, although in that case there were a few more references to conceptions of integration (Sredanovic, 2018a). Citizenship withdrawal and annulment

While the same SCU mentioned before manages the withdrawals of citizenship on the basis of national security, we were able to conduct an interview in the citizenship deprivation team that manages cases of citizenship withdrawal on the basis of fraud or serious crime. This small unit of about five agents originated in the Nationality Team but since 2012 it has become part of the Status Review Unit, which also manages the revocation of ILR. In the interview it was clarified that procedures based on fraud were often started following the emergence of details that contradicted the citizenship application, deriving from passport or immigration applications, courts, or, in some cases, testimony of spouses who denounce a marriage of convenience or bigamy. Decisions to start a withdrawal on the basis of fraud could involve the original caseworker who approved the citizenship application as if the fact considered fraud was already known at the time and disregarded, it could not become a reason for withdrawal. At the time of the interview, the citizenship deprivation team was conducting pilot schemes to remove citizenship for serious crimes not involving national security, and in particular selecting cases to bring to court to verify if the judicial system was likely to confirm the policy. At the time, such selection

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relied on a database of foreign (that is, not citizens at birth) offenders, among whom the team was looking for potential cases. While the aim of the policy was to target dual nationals who would have been left with another citizenship, this measure clearly singled out naturalized British citizens holding another citizenship and left out British citizens by birth who held another citizenship. In 2018 the Home Office announced denaturalization for serious crimes as official policy, but there is no data on how often this procedure has been followed. While international law tolerates statelessness as a consequence of fraud (Brandvoll, 2014; Mantu, 2015) and, as mentioned, UK law allows it in cases linked to national security, it is not tolerated as a consequence of serious crimes, which explains the focus on dual citizens in the latter case. Unlike the naturalization process, withdrawal of citizenship includes a systematic possibility of appeal, and the Home Office has the burden of proof. As a consequence, the citizenship deprivation team follows a practice of ‘learning from the courts’ (compare Chapter Three of this book and Mascia, 2021) to anticipate which kind of case is likely to stand up in court and therefore be worth pursuing. The withdrawal of citizenship for reasons of national security is mostly used against citizens outside UK territory (Fargues, 2017) to impede return to the UK. However, the citizenship deprivation team did promote deportation of the denaturalized among the competent branches (see also Fargues, 2019) but did not have deportation as its main aim. Indeed, even in cases in which deportation was unlikely (for example when the citizen in question had more than one British child), the denaturalization was still pursued, to strip rights linked to British citizenship. Conclusion: cultural conformity, discretion and routinization Originally created to assert the Empire’s authority over its subjects pushing for decolonization, British citizenship policy

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until the 1980s was increasingly about keeping a route back to the metropole open for the descendants of British settlers in the colonies while restricting access for the rest of the former colonial subjects. Starting in the 2000s, this policy has been reoriented to select and create ‘integrated’ citizens. This has always included a linguistic component (Fortier, 2018; Khan, 2019; 2021) but has shifted from the search for civically active ‘supercitizens’ (Kostakopoulou, 2010b; Turner, 2014 –​compare Badenhoop, 2017) under New Labour to a request for increased cultural conformity under Conservative and Liberal Democratic governments. Along with these policy reorientations, British citizenship law has always been highly discretionary, giving very few limits to the Home Secretary in deciding which applicants can obtain the concession of citizenship. In a context in which the letter of the law gives very limited guarantees to the aspirant citizens, the main result of the way in which the law is implemented is, paradoxically, to contain the discretion deriving from the letter of the law. The guidance documents, as well as the procedures of the Nationality Checking Team, primarily routinize the highly discretionary decisions inscribed in the law, transforming them in the application of more uniformly defined requirements. While implementation limits the discretion, the applicants are far from having full procedural guarantees. The burden of proof on the applicant and the limited judicial review further tip the balance against the applicant. Some aspects of the law remain uncertain, as shown, for example, by the divergent interpretation of requirements for EEA candidates. Other aspects remain at the discretion of the caseworkers, such as the management of significant absences from the UK or past breaches of immigration law, also creating uncertainty in many applications. Given the recent political history of citizenship policy reforms in the UK, it is ironic that integration ideas had a role in the interviews with NCS personnel, but much less so among the Nationality Team. The actual decisions on granting

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citizenship seem to depend more on tenets of compliance with the rules. Further, the caseworkers make some use of the discretion within the law, particularly following a culture of suspicion of fraud oriented towards rejecting applications that are not convincing enough or in which fraud is suspected (although part of this culture could be linked to specific events, such as the independent review and the media-​driven scandal on English-​language testing). Further, asylum seekers face potential obstacles when applying for citizenship, including suspicion of having been in breach of immigration rules and/​or being ‘bogus’ asylum seekers. If they are from certain countries, they can be re-​examined for war crimes. The analysis shows the autonomous role of implementation in defining the nature of the policy, in particular limiting some of the integrationist orientations of the policy and the discretion that the letter of the law allows. Still, without stronger legal procedural guarantees, uncertainty remains for citizenship candidates in the UK about conditions under which they can expect to obtain citizenship and its full rights.

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THREE

Nationality in Belgium1

History and policy: cultural conformity and the documentary approach The Belgian nationality policy recognized relatively late the role of migrations in the definition of the citizenry as, despite active recruitment policies of migrant workers starting in 1946, the first substantial reform of the nationality law happened only in 1984. This is in contrast to France, for example, in which immigration was a factor in nationality policy as early as in the 19th century, but is not as late as the German case, in which citizenship reform recognizing immigration happened only in 1999 (see, for example, Brubaker, 1992; Green, 2000; Hajjat, 2012). Substantial work migration linked to the heavy industry, and especially to the coal mines, of Wallonia developed between the late 19th century and World War II (Caestecker, 2000; Stengers, 2004). From 1946 to 1974 Belgium had a migration policy comparable to that of neighbouring France, the Netherlands, West Germany and Luxembourg. The policy involved active recruitment of workers from abroad, both through bilateral agreements with countries of emigration, and through publicity directed to potential migrants inviting them to come work in Belgium. The first agreement was signed with Italy in 1946, and one of the main objectives of the European Economic Community (the precursor of the European Union, created in 1958) was to facilitate the recruitment of Italian workers in the other five member states. Subsequently, Belgium signed agreements with Spain, Greece, Morocco, Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria and Yugoslavia (Martiniello and Rea,

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2011; Martiniello, 2013). Of those, Morocco, Turkey and Italy became some of the main nationalities among migrants in Belgium. If the Benelux countries, France and Germany were active in recruiting migrant workers, on the other hand the dominant approach was that of the ‘guest worker’, that is, the expectation was for the migrants to have a short stay in the country before completing a return migration (Castles, 1986; Akgündüz, 2012; De Bock, 2018). In addition to limited recognition of migrants’ rights, especially in terms of settlement, the entries for reasons of work were rapidly closed with the 1973 oil crisis and the associated slump in north-​western European economies. Unlike the neighbouring countries, the Belgian governments introduced the possibility of family reunification in the bilateral agreements, mostly in order to attract workers who could find better salaries in the other recruiting countries (Martiniello and Rea, 2011). With the closing down of the work migration routes, however, a large number of the migrants who were recruited in north-​ western Europe did not return to the countries of origin, and family reunification became one of the main migratory routes (Castles, 1986; Martiniello and Rea, 2011; Van Mol and de Valk, 2016). Despite this history of active migratory policies, the Belgian nationality law remained basically the same between 1932 and 1984. Even the independence of the Belgian colonies in 1961 was followed by only a minor legislative intervention allowing those born in the main colony, the Belgian Congo (today the Democratic Republic of Congo)2 and already resident in Belgium before Congolese independence, to recover their Belgian nationality in the following two years. With the 1984 reform there was a second window of two years to opt for the recovery of Belgian nationality, but as migration from Congo (on which see Demart, 2013) never reached the levels of that from Morocco and Turkey, for example, there was never the extensive legislative activity enacted in the UK to control migration from the former colonies. The

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general delay in legislating on nationality can be explained through the ‘guest worker’ approach. Migrant workers were not recognized as having the right to settle and were excluded from a number of political and social rights. As a consequence, their access to nationality was not of political interest for Belgian governments, whether in order to facilitate it or to introduce specific requirements for nationality acquisition. Before the 1984 law, the acquisition of nationality was linked to the concepts of ‘suitability’ and ‘assimilation’; both concepts were left undefined but were generally understood to include the ‘morality’ of the candidate, a patriotic attachment to Belgium and, linked to the non-​tolerance of dual nationality, the lack of links with the country of origin (de Jonghe and Doutrepont, 2012; Closset and Renauld, 2015). Each of these requirements was presumed to be held by the applicant, and the burden of proving the lack of the requirements was upon the magistrates examining the application. The 1984 law transformed ‘suitability’ and ‘assimilation’ into a requirement of ‘will to integration’. While it is clear how this transformation was an anticipation of integrationism, there was no definition in the law of either integration or the will to integrate (de Jonghe and Doutrepont, 2012). In practice, until 2000 the evaluation of the will to integrate was focused on a police interview, used at the same time to examine the candidate in terms of security issues and violations of the law, and to explore the integration itself. While there are no data on the practical working of these police interviews, they seem to be an instrument open to the biases of bureaucrats, which are well described in the implementation literature (for example Lipsky, 1980; Spire, 2008; Mazouz, 2017; 2019), and, while the interviews allowed a specialist examination of security issues, they also meant delegating integration evaluations to a profession outside the domain. Some instances of the criteria used are deducible from jurisprudence: speaking one of the national languages and looking for a job were considered requirements, while political engagement or an economic focus

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directed at the country of origin could be considered proof of lack of will to integrate (de Jonghe and Doutrepont, 2012). The situation was radically changed by the law of 2000, in which applying for nationality was in itself redefined as proof of will to integrate, without the need to bring further proof. As a result, candidates had two routes open to them: applying to the Chamber of Representatives after three years of residence, or accessing nationality as of right by fulfilling the residence requirement and not having committed crimes after seven years of residence. In the first case the decision whether to confer Belgian nationality was a discretionary and sovereign decision of the Chamber of Representatives; however, unlike the Swiss case analysed by Helbling (2008), in the Belgian case the elected assembly exercised a certain limitation of its own prerogatives by introducing internal written criteria for the decisions (Wautelet, 2014). In the seven-​year route, as long as residence and penal requirements were fulfilled, the magistrates had very little space to introduce objections. The law was one of the most inclusive in its approach to the conferment of nationality in Europe. Promoted mainly by francophone parties, it was received with a certain scepticism by the Dutch-​speaking parties, and was labelled as the snel-​ Belg-​wet (‘quickly-​Belgian-​law’; see Loobuyck and Jacobs, 2010; Xhardez, 2020a). With the successive development of mandatory integration policies in Flanders (see next chapter), there was increased pressure from most Dutch-​speaking parties, as well from the francophone right-​wing liberals, to reintroduce integration requirements for becoming a Belgian national. The result was the 2012 and current law on nationality, most of which was written by Dutch-​speaking parties with the scepticism of francophone parties, although the latter ended voting for it (Sredanovic, 2018a). The 2012 law introduced a number of additional requirements regarding linguistic, cultural and economic integration for candidates for nationality acquisition. At the same time, the new law is characterized

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by its intention to link all requirements to the possession of specific documentation, theoretically leaving little to no margin of appreciation to public officers examining nationality applications by declaration. This is something that Wautelet (2014) has defined as a ‘documentary’ system. Moreover, the public officers charged with examining applications are magistrates and therefore part of a judiciary authority. Judiciary authorities have been recognized to offer more guarantees to candidates applying for nationality than the political executive or the legislatures (Huddleston, 2013: 29–​30) and often to be more favourable to migrants’ rights than the other bodies (for example, Joppke, 2001). Finally, all decisions are reasoned and open to appeal, and judicial review has long been recognized as a major limitation to the exercise of discretion as each bureaucrat knows that their decision could be reviewed and judged for its coherence with the law and with other decisions (for example, Hawkins, 1992a). Thus, the current Belgian Nationality Code seems to be a recipe for a uniform and rigorous management of nationality applications. By way of further detail,3 the current law attributes Belgian nationality on the basis of birth to children of Belgian nationals as well as to children born in Belgium from at least one parent born in Belgium. Those born in Belgium can further apply for Belgian nationality at 18 years, provided that they have always resided in Belgium. If one of the parents has at least ten years of residence in Belgium, even without being a Belgian national, the application can be made at birth. The withdrawal of Belgian nationality is possible for those who are not nationals since birth for serious crimes leading to five years of imprisonment within the ten years after the acquisition of nationality. The issue of nationality withdrawal has not attracted the same attention in Belgium as it has in the UK and France (see Mantu, 2015; 2018; Fargues, 2017; 2019) and has been directed mostly against nationals categorized as terrorists. Indeed in 2015 a reform was introduced to make convictions for terrorism of

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five years or more a possible basis for withdrawal of nationality even ten years or more after the acquisition (Beernaert, 2015). The Chamber of Deputies had a significant role in the pre-​2012 nationality law, deciding both on the three-​year applications and on the seven-​year applications that received a negative opinion from the magistrates. This, however, created a chronic backlog at the Chamber, and currently only applications based on ‘exceptional merits’ (including qualifications such as literary prizes, high-​level sporting results or a PhD) in cases in which there is no other way to fulfil the nationality requirement can be sent to the Chamber. ‘Ordinary’ nationality applications require first of all five years of ‘uninterrupted’ and legal residence in Belgium. Most candidates further have to prove social, economic and linguistic integration, which can be proven in a number of ways. Being in paid work, education or professional training in Belgium fulfils the economic integration requirement. If the applicant can prove that they have been uninterruptedly in one of these conditions in the five years, social and linguistic integration are further fulfilled, which means that no other proof is necessary. Applicants who have an interruption in their work, studies and training in the last five years need to prove simultaneously more than one requirement. Economic integration is still required from all these applicants, in particular having worked (or have been in education or in training) for 468 days in the last five years. Linguistic integration can be proven by passing a test in one of the three national languages in one of the institutions authorized by the law; by holding a degree that is at least of high school level, taught in one of the three national languages, in Belgium or in another EU member state; by completing a professional training of at least 400 hours; or by completing an integration course. With the exception of the tests and of the degree obtained in other EU member states, each of these cases also fulfils the social integration requirement.

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The two exceptions to the general integration requirements are applicants who have reached retirement age or who certify a disability that does not allow them to work. There are also reduced requirements for applicants who have married a Belgian national, as long as they have lived with the spouse in Belgium for at least three years, or have a minor child holding Belgian nationality. In this case there is no requirement of economic integration, but the applicant has still to prove linguistic integration and social integration. The latter can be proven by an integration course, a Belgian degree of at least high school level or, possibly because of an oversight on the part of the lawmakers (see also Wautelet, 2014), 400 hours of training and at least 234 days of work, studies or training in the last five years. The fact that applications by marriage can be based on days of work only if a specific training has also been completed has been identified in some interviews with local registers as making the marriage route of limited utility. Integration requirements are complicated by the presence of four distinct integration policies covering Flanders, francophone Wallonia, the German-​speaking Community and the Brussels Region. Finally, applicants who have at least ten years of residence in Belgium can apply with the sole proof of linguistic integration, as well as submitting proof of ‘participation in the community’s life’. A candidate for nationality by declaration presents her or his application to the civil register (an office that mainly deals with the registration of births, death and marriages) of the municipality of residence. The register verifies whether the application is complete and, if it is, transfers it to the office of the Procureur du Roi (‘Royal Prosecutor’) competent for the area (at least one office of this kind exists in the 12 judicial arrondissements of Belgium). Nationality applications are examined to verify whether they fulfil the requirements and whether there is an absence of faits personnels graves

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(‘serious personal facts’, including crimes and security issues), by substitute-​procureurs, magistrates who, together with the Procureur du Roi, jurists and administrative personnel, make up what is usually defined as the parquet of the Procureur du Roi. If the parquet considers that the applicant does not fulfil the requirement, it has four months to give a reasoned and written negative opinion on the application (if no opinion is given in that period of time the application is to be considered accepted). Every negative opinion can be appealed in court, although the applicant only has 15 days to start the appeal. There are a number of differences that can be highlighted between the Belgian and the British legislation. While British citizenship maintains a unique complexity in the regulation of postcolonial statuses, the Belgian law is more complex in the way in which the general requirements for the acquisition of nationality are codified. The several different ways in which integration can be proven for Belgian nationality contrast with the relative simplicity of the British law, in which knowledge of UK language can be proven by test, degree or origin in an anglophone country, but in which almost all the applicants have to take the standardized ‘Life in the UK’ test. The procedures are comparable in the starting point –​municipal registers in Belgium, register-​based NCSs in the UK (until 2018) –​but the decision itself is decentralized in Belgium and centralized in Liverpool in the UK. The most relevant difference for the present analysis, however, is the very different level of discretion present in the two systems. The British one is an example of high-​discretion law, with all naturalizations representing a concession to the applicant and limited judicial appeal. The Belgian law, as mentioned, follows a documentary approach that should limit discretion; the magistrates have to express a negative opinion in a given timeframe or the application is theoretically automatically accepted and transcribed; and all decisions can be appealed in court.

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Parquets, registers and the implementation of nationality In the central part of this chapter, I explore how even in a case such as that of Belgium, characterized by significant guarantees for applicants for nationality, there are significant barriers to equal treatment of applicants. I show how even in the absence of openly discriminatory norms and significant discretionary power, local variation in the application of the law can introduce significant limits to equal treatment. Even this kind of inequality of treatment is problematic because the equality of citizens, including candidate citizens, is an essential democratic norm. Some of the sources of unequal application of the law, such as workload and decentralization, are well known in the implementation literature (for example Lipsky, 1980; Altreiter and Leibetseder, 2015) but they have been more rarely examined in the study of citizenship policy. I argue that the Belgian nationality policy is particularly interesting because it shows the relevance of these factors even in highly codified procedures. Nationality laws worldwide far from assure equal treatment to nationality candidates. In several countries (see for example Huddleston, 2013 on the European context) naturalization is codified as a concession to the applicant, potentially making the procedure fully discretionary. Other aspects of the procedure that implicate a lack of uniformity include cases in which there is no right to appeal and cases in which the decision is voted on by sovereign elected assemblies, which are rarely open to appeal and not held to the principle of uniformity. Citizenship laws that do not include such characteristics, and that limit discretion in the decisions, promise greater uniformity. However, scholars of citizenship legislation (see for example Huddleston, 2013; 2020; Huddleston and Falcke, 2020) have shown that the implementation of citizenship legislation can influence, as much as the law itself, who can obtain citizenship and access the rights linked to it, and that criteria removed from the texts of laws could resurface at the moment of implementation.

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Actors

Civil registers have an ambiguous role in the procedures. The law gives them only the duty to verify that all the documents required are present (Wautelet, 2014); indeed, in the parliamentary debate it was explicitly stated that civil registers were not to verify whether the integration conditions were met (Apers, 2014). However, the ministerial circular 2013009118, on the application of the Nationality Code, specifies, for example, that civil registers can ‘not accept’ documentation that shows a number of days of work in the last five years clearly fewer than those needed to fulfil the economic integration requirement. De facto, most of the civil registers verify that the applicant has met all the requirements (except for faits personnels graves) set by the law, and reject the applications that, in their opinion, do not meet these requirements.4 This derives from civil registers’ interpretation of their role (often also justified by not wanting the applicant to lose the 150 euro fee for an application that they think will be refused), as well as from requests from the parquets to send only applications that meet the requirements. The legitimacy of such behaviour was one of the main points of contention for the associations that help applicants: ‘… you will have some municipalities who will stop the dossier, considering the dossier to be incomplete [because it does not meet a requirement] … And this, I consider it a danger because it blocks the right to appeal. Because the dossier does not go to the parquet and so it does not go to the court either. … It’s true that one also needs to negotiate with the municipality, to say “well, this is a matter of interpretation, so it’s not up to you to judge, it’s the role of the parquet to take position on the respect of the conditions, and if one does not have the consent of the parquet, well, it’s up to the judge …” ’. (H4)5

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Refusals by civil registers can theoretically be contested before the Council of State (which deals with litigation against the administration) but, while a small number of cases have been brought to the Council since the introduction of the law, this was not considered a common occurrence by either the institutions or the associations I interviewed (such procedure would also require a written refusal from the register, which is not always produced). Among the civil registers interviewed, only one (W2) declared that no exceptions were made for candidates who insisted on the application being sent to the parquet against the advice of the register. All the others sent the applications if the candidate insisted enough, in some cases adding a written comment on why they considered the candidate not to have met the requirements. Some of the registers interviewed, especially those in the Brussels Region and those who were more experienced, were of the opinion that they had no duty to refuse applications, but still checked that the requirements were met. Given that the parquets have a limited time to bring forward an opposition to an application, I started the interviews by hypothesizing that some parquets could have been focusing on the applications more likely to be rejected and left the clock to run out on the less problematic ones. In fact, I found that most parquets did not have problems in completing the examination in the time allocated although a couple of registers mentioned soliciting a response from the parquet at the end of the four months allocated rather than directly transcribing the application as successful, and one parquet (P7) mentioned a single case in which the time ran out on an application on which the parquet would have otherwise given a negative opinion. Language, diplomas and integration courses

Linguistic competence for nationality acquisition purposes can be proven by a diploma, degree or certificate of training in one of the three national languages, by a foreign diploma,

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if obtained in the EU and in one of the three languages, by an integration course or by a linguistic test taken at a national agency. Foreign diplomas apparently did not pose problems of interpretation across the different institutions interviewed, although a single interviewee (B1) stated that such diplomas were unacceptable, while another (F7) thought that EU diplomas in any language were acceptable. Three parquets mentioned that, for applicants from confining states (France, Germany and the Netherlands; no mention was made of Luxembourg), there could be flexibility regarding the proof of linguistic competence, for example that applicants were considered competent even if they had no high school diploma (P3 and P4), or that no check at all was to be carried out (P5). These exceptions, however, are absent from the text of the law, and another parquet (P6) took the opposite approach. Even in the case of Belgian diplomas, one municipality (F2) explained that the local parquet considered the reference to ‘diplomas’ to exclude all academic titles called otherwise, meaning that professional education qualifications or dual (apprenticeship/​vocational) education qualifications were refused. In one municipality (B3) the interviewee finally observed that training courses could be accepted or refused according to the profession involved: ‘… we had some bakers who were accepted, and another profession that could have not been [accepted] under the pretext that nothing imposed the practice of the language, for example. For a manual work, one could well show, I think, a mason how to build a wall … without having to speak to him. … It’s left to their [the parquet’s] interpretation. Let’s say that we try, in function of the documents we see, to already say to the person “it’s flimsy”. In that case we would orient them towards the Selor to also do a test of French or of Dutch in addition, in order to have also this paper in the dossier, to give it more weight.’ (B3)

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Such an approach is rather exceptional, not only because of the lack of credit given to ‘manual’ work, but also because most civil registers avoid sending additional documents to the parquet, given that the law is clear about what documents are needed in order to meet a requirement. However, a few other municipalities tend to guide the applicants in building dossiers that could be convincing enough for the parquet. Integration courses are also the object of a contradictory norm. As the matter is outside federal control, the royal decree (21/​01/​2013) linked to the Nationality Code defined in its introduction (which, however, has no legal standing) that linguistic integration can be proven by integration courses at the A2 level, even though the text of the law itself simply refers to any integration course recognized by the linguistic Community. Several issues arose from this formulation. As I discuss in greater detail in the next chapter, Flanders has had a mandatory integration course since 2003, but raised the language level from A1 to A2 in 2013. Further, the course has a shorter ‘societal orientation’ component and longer language, work and society training components, and one can avoid taking the language component if other proof of linguistic competence exists. Several municipalities have refused integration courses lacking the linguistic component (H2) or older courses that were only at the A1 level, while an association (H4) mentioned that a parquet (which was not among those I interviewed) accepted the ‘orientation’ component alone. In Wallonia only a minimal orientation course existed until 2016, when a mandatory integration course, at the A1 level, was introduced. A case was made in the literature (Ganty and Apers, 2015) that the Walloon orientation course alone met the legal requirements until 2016, but the parquets refused such an approach, while the new integration course, although at the A1 level, was accepted. A civil register (W3) also mentioned that the local parquet accepted unofficial integration courses organized by NGOs before the introduction of the official Walloon integration

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course, but this arrangement ended even before 2016 because of a change of the local Procureur du Roi. Residence and work

The five years of residence requirement for applying for nationality is regulated by immigration legislation as much as by the Nationality Code. Two main issues are linked to this requirement. First, all of the five years normally have to be covered by permits of residence of three months or more. An exception exists when a temporary permit is issued for a migrant who is changing status (typically, from student-​to family-​based). Among the interviewees there was consensus that such a permit is admissible, but they also stated that some smaller municipalities are likely to refuse an application of this kind. Secondly, if there is a gap in the documents regarding the qualifying period (because of a delay in applying for the renewal of the residence document), some degree of flexibility exists, but the parquets seem to exercise discretion in this regard. The determination of economic integration is more complex: candidates must prove either they have had five years of uninterrupted employment (this also counts as proof of social and linguistic integration) or that they have had 468 days of work in the last five years (in both cases, time spent in education with the acquisition of a diploma counts as time in employment). The definition of ‘uninterrupted’ is not unproblematic, although one of the parquets (P6) gave an approximate estimate of three months for an acceptable interruption when considering this requirement. A more restrictive approach was mentioned by a municipality representative (F2) in cases of applicants who have worked without interruption but for a very limited number of hours per week, cases in which the candidates would be refused if at least 468 days of actual work were not met (that said, one parquet, P3, explicitly excluded this eventuality). Another municipality (B4) regarded candidates who worked part time

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as needing to satisfy the work requirement over a longer period of time (for example those working 50 per cent of a full-​time week would take twice as long to satisfy the number of days criterion), which meant that no candidate working part time could demonstrate five uninterrupted years of work as only the last five years can be considered. When counting the 468 days of work, the first issue relates to the fact that the law defines a ‘day of work’ in reference to a decree (Arrêté Royal of 25 November 1991), which actually includes days of unemployment in the definition. Almost no parquet or civil register among those interviewed follows this definition as it is considered to contradict other norms within the law and/​or represent an oversight by the lawmakers. However, one of the parquets (P5) did accept days of unemployment “as long as they are not too much”, while a municipality (F5) suggested that another parquet, which is not among those interviewed, follows the same approach. A final issue concerns work outside Belgium, which is particularly relevant in border areas. Under almost no circumstance is such work accepted in order to prove economic integration; indeed, only one civil register (W6) suggested that a candidate could include work undertaken abroad to satisfy the five years of uninterrupted work requirement, as long as 468 days were in Belgium. On the other hand, a parquet mentioned one of the most explicit variations among those I encountered in the research: ‘There were three different practices, in the three old divisions [of the judicial arrondissement before the 2014 reform, which reduced the number of the arrondissements], there was the questions of knowing for the people who lived in Belgium … transborder work … The division of *** granted the nationality anyway even if the person did not work in Belgium … now, for what concerns me that’s a no because the law provides that it is in Belgium that one has to work for five years … I had the question

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following the fact that, in the same firm, well, there was one [applicant] who obtained Belgian nationality, and the other no, the other person did not obtain it.’ (P4) While it is rare to have such a clear variation between two equivalent cases, and while the parquets are usually internally uniform in the application of the law, specific situations, such as the reorganization of the parquets, can add to the complexity. Faits personnels graves and police interviews

The absence of faits personnels graves was the only condition, together with the residence requirement, for the declaration procedure in the law of 2000. As the concept was left undefined, the parquets asked the legislators to define it more clearly (Apers, 2014). Indeed, the 2012 law and royal decree do list a number of crimes that are to be considered faits personnels graves. However, the list is interpreted as exemplative, rather than limitative, meaning that the crimes listed are necessarily faits personnels graves, but other infractions can also be considered so. While during the debate in Parliament even the far-​r ight Vlaams Belang requesteded only all infractions with a prison ferme (that is, non-​suspended prison) sentence (Apers, 2014; Sredanovic, 2018a) to be included, the parquets I interviewed usually applied more extensive definitions of faits personnels graves. Five of the seven parquets in some cases included even traffic violations among the faits personnels graves if they were repeated and/​or the fine was not paid (P1, P4, P7). In the case of one parquet (P2), even paying fines immediately before applying for nationality could be considered proof that laws were respected, but only in order to obtain nationality, which was grounds to deny it. In the case of one parquet (P5), traffic violations were not considered as the magistrates were aware that a denial based on this reason alone would be reversed in court; however, they continued to include infractions without prison sentences, as

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long as they expected the local judge to confirm the decision. Only one parquet (P6) limited the refusals to prison ferme sentences, although this was not straightforward: ‘… my line of conduct …, at the beginning, it was really, “this falls or does not fall within the enumeration of the arreté royal”: if there is no condemnation to prison ferme, never mind, it is no … no reason to give a negative opinion. And at a certain moment during a formation, the Parquet Général of *** said that one was not obliged, that it was exemplative, not limitative, this enumeration. … In certain cases, I have some criminal records that are lengthy, but no prison ferme sentence, and I said to myself that, in cases like that, I would … give a negative opinion. And then recently the advocate general told me, “in the end it seems that the jurisprudence is only oriented towards the prison ferme sentences”.’ (P6) In the case of P2, magistrates looked further at files that had been closed without any subsequent action, judging at least some of these to have been closed exclusively due to the lack of personnel, but to include potential faits personnels graves. Along with the interpretation of the faits personnels graves, the parquets also have very different attitudes towards police interviews. As mentioned, before the 2000 law the police interview was the main component of the nationality procedure as the interview was used to check the candidate’s faits personnel graves and her/​his level of integration. With the 2000 law, the police were limited to establishing the faits personnels graves, but Bietlot and colleagues (2002) pointed out that some police were continuing to collect information about the integration of applicants, despite the fact that this information was irrelevant to the procedure. With the 2012 reform, the integration requirements were reintroduced, but no mention of the interview was made anywhere in the legal texts. However, one parquet (P5) explained in the interview

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that police inquiries are among the ordinary powers of the magistrates (Article 24-​bis of the Nationality Code indeed still states that the police are under the authority of the parquet, but does not specify the role of the police themselves). In two of the interviews I conducted with parquets (P1 and P2), no mention was made of police interviews; two others (P4 and P5) stated that the inquiry is conducted systematically. In one parquet (P7), the interviews were only conducted with applicants who followed the route with ten years of residence and had to provide evidence of the participation in the life of the local community, and in another (P6), the magistrates left it to the discretion of each police zone about whether to conduct an interview or only rely on the available information about the candidate. In most cases, the police interview was still used to obtain further data about potential faits personnels graves and the potential “dangerousness” of the candidate. However, one of the parquets (P5) also systematically collected information on the integration of the candidate, including linguistic competence, despite the fact that the local court did not accept this kind of evidence and that no negative decision was made on its basis. In interviews with associations (H5) and civil registers (F3, F5, F7) it further emerged that at least three other parquets, not included in the research, used police interviews to collect information about the integration of the candidates, and that in at least two of these parquets some negative decisions have been made on the basis of this information. One parquet (P6), while not collecting any information about the integration of the applicants, refused an applicant who in the police interview was said to spend most of the year in the country of origin, thereby considering that the police interview was enough evidence in this case. Geographic variation As is clear from the data presented in this chapter, nationality policy in Belgium has a significant geographic variation, far

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above the local interpretation of the law in some of the NCSs. The local variation in the interpretation of the law between the NCSs focused on a specific group of applicants, EEA citizens, and their influence was arguably limited to orienting the decisions. In the case of Belgium, the civil registers had different interpretations of a much larger number of points of law and explicitly refused to transfer the applications that did not, in their opinion, fulfil the requirements of the law. In addition to this, while the implementation of the law is far more discretionary at the Home Office, the parquets in Belgium introduced significant local differences in how the law is interpreted. Given this context, it is useful to examine the sources of internal variation of nationality law implementation in Belgium before discussing variation in implementation in a comparative way in Chapter Five. First of all, a number of potential explanations do not seem to fit my data. The relatively complex institutional architecture of Belgium, with the overlap between Regions and Linguistic Communities, does not seem to influence the implementation of the nationality policy as much as it influences integration policies (see for example Adam, 2013a and next chapter). The institutions involved in nationality acquisition are either local (the civil registers) or federal (the parquets), while Regions and Communities do not seem to directly influence the nationality acquisition procedures. I examined the role of local politics, which was found to be a key explanatory factor for the variations analysed by Helbling in Switzerland (2008). Most Dutch-​speaking parties were in favour of the new law, and most francophone parties were critical of the law. Therefore, one might expect significant differences between the application of the law in Flanders and in Wallonia, but my data do not show significant differences in this sense. Even considering the party of which the municipal councillor who held the register portfolio was a member, the party of which the mayor was a member, and the parties that

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made up the local majority, I found very little relation between these indicators and the relative lenience or severity of the local register, except for the fact that, when the local majority did not include left-​wing (socialist or green) parties, the register tended to interpret the law in a slightly more restrictive way. Similarly, I did not find evidence of some of the barriers to the uniform implementation of legislation identified by some classics of implementation literature, such as the difficulty in finding agreements between the many actors interested in the implementation (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973) or the tendency of each actor to safeguard autonomy by resisting implementation instructions (Crozier and Friedberg, 1980). Nationality policy is simpler than, for example, the complex social policy studied by Pressman and Wildawsky, and in the case I explored, most inter-​bureaucracy relationships were either de jure or de facto hierarchical, limiting the need for agreement. Furthermore, with the exception of larger municipalities that had officers working exclusively on nationality, the policy was a minor component of the everyday work of most of the magistrates and municipality officers involved, which explains the limited resistance. The only form of autonomy I regularly found was the registers’ decision to officially start the procedure only once the whole dossier was ready. I also did not find evidence of a tendency among the agents to go beyond the letter of the law, something that on the other hand emerged as important in the research conducted by Hajjat (2012).6 While observation would have been a better method to explore this factor, there was little in the interviews that suggested that agents followed their personal convictions in applying the law. In particular, the small number of interviewees from the register offices who, for example, considered the requirements of the law to be too strict, also were not more lenient than the others when evaluating the applications. I cannot be entirely certain that some officers were not ready to reject an application despite recognizing it as formally valid. However, as I mentioned, most local

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registrars included in the research sent on the application if the applicant insisted enough, and the parquets were unwilling to risk their decision to be overturned if the applicant appealed the decision. Organization was a bigger factor than the law itself in this case: there are no formal penalties for magistrates erroneously opposing an application, and an appeal to the Council of State, although improbable, could be considered more problematic for the registrars. However, while some registrars expressed worry about the Council of State, they were more likely to defer to the interpretation of the local parquet and, while some of the magistrates expressed a more or less tolerant attitude towards minor infractions, in most cases they followed the orientation of the local judge to avoid having a decision quashed. The judges are themselves part of the bureaucracy and hold personal beliefs. It should be noted, however, that only a small fraction of the applications actually reach the judges –​many of the applicants who do not manage to obtain nationality are turned away (apparently in good faith) at the register stage. Two organizational aspects that did influence variation within the application of the law were the volume of applications managed (for the registers) and the workload (for the parquets). The more applications a local register received on average, the more the offices were likely to develop strong local interpretations of aspects of the law. This meant that moderate criticisms of interpretations of the local parquet, which were usually avoided, could surface either in the interview or in the interaction with the parquet itself. Obviously, given the limited power of the registers, the success of such challenges was limited. On the other hand, the higher the workload was, that is, the relation between applications received and the personnel available, the greater was the variation found in the decisions of a single parquet. Despite the strong variation in interpretation among parquets, the decisions taken within each parquet were usually uniform. However, some registers testified that the

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local parquet could be unpredictable when making decisions, either because of an exceptionally high number of applications or because of prolonged shortages in personnel. The complexity of the law itself was further recognized as a source of internal variation: while codifying in detail had the advantage of reducing the discretionary power of the bureaucracy, it also multiplied the provisions that could be the object of divergent interpretations (see Hawkins, 1992a: 35–​8; Evans and Harris, 2004). ‘And then we had this new … so-​called documentary system, where you are presented with a lot of problems because sometimes people do not have the right documents, and [the] legislator only thought of one sort of document, which certain people won’t be able to present, and … The more details you, you build into your legislation, the more problems will present themselves, because it’s really turning in an immense administrative quagmire, and … [it] doesn’t necessarily inject more equality or justice into the system.’ (P5) However, the main source of variation was the decentralized procedure itself (compare Altreider and Leibetseder, 2015). Other than the few exceptions already mentioned, most local registers conformed to the interpretation of the local parquet, while each parquet in turn tried to take decisions by anticipating and following the interpretation of the local judge presiding over nationality cases. In the absence of a procedure that could result in uniformity across the arrondissements, this system is highly susceptible to local variations. While I heard references to a few minor points that were put before the Constitutional Court, I found no other cases that went further than the appeal courts, which are still local, although covering a larger area. This means that only legislation and ministerial circulars can be used to give nationally valid criteria. While the presence of judicial review is, as mentioned, a source of uniformity in the

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application of the law, in the context studied here, the judicial review appeared at the same time to be a source of variation. Judges obviously have more general decision-​making power (and more margin to apply their own interpretations) than the magistrates of the parquets, as the latter answer directly to the Ministry of Justice. As the judges operate in local courts on cases that rarely reach the national courts, they can further actually add to the variation in interpretation between arrondissements. Moreover, at least one magistrate (P4) lamented that, while the parquets need to follow the law, the royal decree and the ministerial circular, the local judge considered the latter not to apply in court, removing one more source of codification that is valid at the national level. Conclusion: not much discretion, but not much uniformity either Even in a context such as the Belgian one, in which the nationality policy is characterized by a highly codified law, the involvement of the judiciary and access to appeal, there are significant barriers to equal treatment of applicants for nationality. Compared to UK nationality legislation, for example, the Belgian legislation, on paper, offers significantly higher guarantees to applicants. It has a low-​discretion approach, where not only are the decisions on conferring nationality not based on a discretional concession (with the exception of the procedure for exceptional merits involving the Chamber of Representatives), but its documentary approach (Wautelet, 2014) is also quite different from the extensive discretional power attributed by the UK legislation to the Home Secretary. Moreover, while the UK law is characterized by limited access to judicial review, that of Belgium not only allows judicial review for every negative decision (although giving a limited time for the applicant to appeal), but also involves magistrates in the decision making. If in Chapter Two the added value of

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the implementation approach showed how discretion is limited by practice in UK citizenship procedures, the added value of studying implementation in this chapter shows how variation exists in Belgian nationality policy despite a letter of the law that should leave little space for variation. Most of the variation in the application of the law is between offices, while within specific offices there is limited variation in application, essentially linked to cases of excessive workload. While several points in the law are open to diverging interpretations, this can only partly be attributed to the law itself. The greatest factor behind variation remains the decentralized procedure or, rather, the scarcity of instruments with which to offer interpretations that are valid and binding across the whole national territory. The Belgian law has limited openly discriminatory norms, and I have found no evidence of open violation of the law by the officers. Discretionary criteria of worth applied to the candidates emerged mostly in relation to cases in which applicants from the Netherlands, France or Germany are not required to prove their linguistic integration. Police interviews about integration might be a point at which discretionary evaluations could be made, but such interviews are not used consistently across the whole of Belgium and can be dismissed in court. The most common barriers to equality are linked to diverging local interpretations of the law. There are important signals about strong geographic differences in interpretation, meaning that applicants from neighbouring municipalities could be subject to significantly different standards. Such unequal treatment is at odds with democratic norms on the equality of citizens, and those applicants subject to more restrictive procedures risk losing access to full political and social rights and full legal protection. The geographical variation, in particular, contrasts with the centralized approach taken in UK citizenship policy, in which a single Nationality Team applies relatively uniform criteria in deciding citizenship

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applications. Beyond the comparison with the UK, the findings on Belgium are further relevant if one considers that citizenship legislation in many other countries incorporates significantly higher levels of discretion than that present in Belgium. As mentioned, such discretion has been criticized for leaving space for the unjust or unequal treatment of applicants (Huddleston, 2013). In other words, even larger variations in application could be at work in the naturalization procedures of the many countries for which we lack fieldwork data.

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History and policy: separate models of integration I have discussed in Chapter One how the mandatory integration policies that spread across Europe can be distinguished between integration requirements that must be fulfilled to renew a status or access permanent residence or citizenship, and integration policies that are mandatory regardless of applying for a legal status and are backed by fines (see also Pascouau, 2018). At the time of writing Belgium has mandatory, fines-​backed policies for at least part of the migrant population on the whole territory; further, integration courses are one way to fulfil the requirements for the acquisition of nationality. Finally, recent changes to immigration policy have linked integration courses to the renewal of residence status. In this chapter I will discuss the transformations of integration policies in Belgium, with particular attention to the development of mandatory measures and the groups of migrants targeted by such measures, and in part to the content of the courses introduced. I will further discuss the implementation of the integration courses in the Wallonia Region, again with particular reference to the decision making about the obligation to complete the course and to the migrants to which it is directed. This does not obviously cover the whole process of implementation of the integration policies, which includes decisions on how to teach the specific programmes that policymakers have made mandatory. It would be difficult to give an exhaustive examination of this process even for the Wallonia Region as the integration courses are largely taught by associations that have

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some discretion as to the content, as well as the length, of the teachings, and I am not aware of other ethnographic research on the management of integration teaching in Belgium (but see Van Hoof et al, 2020 on the teaching of Dutch as part of employment policies in Flanders). There is, however, research on how integrations courses are taught and managed day to day in a number of countries, including Norway (Hagelund and Kavli, 2009; Hagelund, 2010), the Netherlands (Suvarierol, 2015; Suvarierol and Kirk, 2015; Belabas and Gerrits, 2017), France (Gourdeau, 2016; 2018a; 2018b; 2019; Onasch, 2017) and Denmark (Lønsmann, 2020). Such research has explored several issues, including the different approaches taken in relation to cultural diversity (Hagelund, 2010); the ways in which migrants are pushed to enter employment (Hagelund and Kavli, 2009; Suverierol, 2015; Gourdeau, 2018a), even at the cost of significant deskilling (Lønsmann, 2020), and stigmatized for their cultural background (Suvarierol, 2015; Gourdeau, 2016; Onasch, 2017); and the degree to which the operators of the course can decide to dedicate extra effort or limit their work in relation to migrants (Belabas and Gerrits, 2017). Some of this research has also discussed the degree of discretion available in defining the obligation to follow the course and the penalties for those not fulfilling the obligation, although researchers both in the Netherlands (Belabas and Gerrits, 2017) and France (Gourdeau, 2018b) have shown discretion limited to minor arrangements to allow migrants to follow the obligatory components and to avoid their being penalized for absences. While in the French context studied by Gourdeau (2018b) 75 per cent of migrants had the French language course waived as they were already competent in the language, the operators she met lamented that such decisions were standardized and left them little margin of appreciation. In addition to the complexity of the actual teaching, Belgium has experienced a multilevel and conflictual development of the integration policies themselves. This is the result of

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the complexity of the Belgian institutional architecture, the presence of a diverging approach both along geographic/​ linguistic lines and along political lines, the combination of international influences linked to neighbouring countries as well to the European Union, and the role of changes in migrations themselves in influencing the policies. I have mentioned how the federal organization of Belgium includes three Linguistic Communities and three Regions, without a territorial correspondence between the two types of institution. In the field of integration, there are currently four different policies, defined by at least five different federal institutions. A Flemish policy, promoted by the Flemish Community, applies to the Flanders Region as well to the Brussels Region; a Walloon policy introduced by the Wallonia Region applies to Wallonia with the exception of the German-​ speaking municipalities, in which the policy is decided by the German-​speaking Community. In addition to the Flemish integration policy, a distinct francophone policy, introduced by the French Community Commission, also applies to the Brussels Region; finally, the coordination of the Flemish and of the francophone policies in Brussels is subject to a Joint Community Commission (Adam, 2013a; Xhardez, 2016; Nassaux, 2020). Integration policies in Belgium are not only decentralized, but have seen for years (and to a degree still see) significantly divergent approaches. There are several explanations for this divergence, along with the federalized nature of much of Belgian policy (on which see Van Avermaet and Gysen, 2009; Foblets and Yanasmayan, 2010; Loobuyck and Jacobs, 2010; Adam, 2013a; Adam and Martiniello, 2013; Pulinx and Van Avermaet, 2015; Adam et al, 2018; Xhardez, 2020b). First, the history of migration has been unequal across the country. Until the 1970s most migration was directed to Wallonia –​as a centre of mining and heavy industry –​and to Brussels –​as the capital (Martiniello and Rea, 2011; Martiniello, 2013). Flanders, with the partial exception of the province of

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Limburg, saw much less immigration. The tendency reversed with the decline of the coal and metal industry, particularly in the 1970s, and the parallel economic improvement of Flanders (compare Thomas, 1990; Vandermotten, 2011), which has since attracted more migrants. As a result, Wallonia has entered the period of integrationism with more established minorities (especially locally born descendants of migrants) and lower immigration levels, while the opposite happened in Flanders. Second, Flanders is set apart by a history of marginalization of the Dutch language in Belgium, in reaction to which a nationalist Flemish movement developed, with a rise in strength starting in the 1960s (see for example Vos, 1998). While the language and cultural policies have been rebalanced as a result, there is still a nation-​building approach in the Flemish Community/​Region government, which pursues the promotion of the Dutch language and of Flemish culture (Loobuyck and Jacobs, 2010; Adam, 2013a; 2013b; Adam and Martiniello, 2013; Adam and Jacobs, 2014; Pulinx and Van Avermaet, 2015). A particularly contentious situation characterizes the Flemish municipalities around the Brussels Region, which are officially Dutch speaking but increasingly have a population (a significant part of which is constituted by migrants) that is more likely to speak French (compare Cetrà, 2019). Third, politics are significantly different between Flemish and francophone parties. Anti-​immigration and xenophobic positions have found an entrepreneur in the parties that emerged from the right wing of the Flemish nationalist movement, the N-​VA (Nieuw-​Vlaamse Alliantie, New Flemish Alliance) and the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest). The left wing of the Flemish movement first collaborated with the Socialist Party and was then absorbed by the Green Party. The N-​VA, in particular, has been the party of relative majority in Flanders since 2010. Francophone xenophobic parties have fared much worse and remained marginal. Fourth, as a relatively small country divided along linguistic lines, Belgium has often paid significant attention to the policies

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and the politics of the confining countries –​in particular to the Netherlands among the Dutch speakers and France among the francophones (Adam, 2013a). The Netherlands has been a laboratory for integrationism, and while France has had its own version of the integrationist wave since the introduction of an integration contract in 2003 (Pascouau, 2010; Hachimi Alaoui, 2014), it has not been as prominent as in the Netherlands and, more importantly, it has influenced policies in francophone Belgium far less than the Dutch integration policies have influenced Flanders. The role of the supranational dimension, and the EU, has been more indirect, but the institutional frame that the EU offered for integration policies, as well as the availability of funds for integration courses in the form of the Integration Fund, have contributed to promoting the introduction of integration courses (Adam and Martiniello, 2013). In this context, Flanders was the only federal institution in Belgium to have a mandatory integration policy between 2003 and 2016. The development of such a policy in Flanders followed the transition of the Netherlands from multiculturalism to integrationism, as along with the mandatory integration policy the Flemish governments gradually reduced their previous policy of funding of minority associations (Adam, 2013a). The change was first driven by the right-​wing liberals of the VLD (Vlaamse Liberalen en Democraten, Flemish Liberals and Democrats) but saw the assent of most Dutch-​speaking parties. The argument for making integration courses mandatory followed the Muslim-​stigmatizing discourse common to many integrationist policies, as Muslim women were singled out in the debate as the group that could be brought to follow the course only under obligation (Adam, 2013a). The integration policy, initially targeting only first arrivants, was extended in 2006 to cover all migrants with the exception of EU citizens and Turkish workers, as well as Belgian citizens born abroad with at least one foreign parent and without schooling in Belgium, and welfare recipients (Adam, 2013a; Xhardez, 2020c).

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Mandatory integration policies outside Flanders were resisted for a long period given the scepticism of most francophone parties. Four elements changed the direction. First, most Dutch-​speaking parties promoted the diffusion of mandatory integration, pushing in particular for a link between nationality and integration courses, as described in Chapter Three. Second, the francophone liberals, the MR (Mouvement Réformateur, Reformist Movement) aligned themselves with the idea of mandatory integration and promoted it in Wallonia (Xhardez, 2020c). Third, with the nationality reform of 2012 there was a demand from some applicants for nationality to be able to complete an integration course, which was, however, lacking on most of the Belgian territory (Adam et al, 2018). Fourth, with the arrivals of refugees with the great movements of 2015 (see Mescoli et al, 2019) there was a perception that a stronger offer of integration courses was needed (Xhardez, 2020c). Some of the francophone parties first agreed in principle on the possibility of an integration course in 2009, which facilitated the Dutch-​speaking pressures for nationality reform. The Wallonia Region first introduced a mandatory orientation section keeping the language, ‘citizenship’ and socio-​professional components voluntary in 2014, and then made the whole course mandatory in 2016. Mandatory courses were introduced also in Brussels and in the German-​speaking Community. While in both cases the legislative decision was taken in 2017, the mandatory nature of the course was enacted in the German-​speaking Community in 2018. In Brussels this happened only in 2021, mainly because of the lack of any offer of training which would have allowed it to have been made mandatory, but also because of the complexity of Brussels’ institutional architecture (Nassaux, 2020). The development of the integration and nationality policies shows the mutual influence of the two. It was the acceptance in principle of mandatory integration on the part of the francophone parties (notably the francophone liberals) that legitimated the Dutch-​speaking parties in promoting

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integration requirements for Belgian nationality. However, it was the reform of the law, which left applicants outside Flanders with one way less to apply for nationality, that pushed the other federal entities (some of which had political majorities that had shown scepticism about the nationality reform) to introduce mandatory integration policies for their territory (Adam et al, 2018). The organization of the policies

The structure of each of the four (Flemish, Brussels francophone, German-​speaking and Walloon) integration courses is similar, with an initial orientation and social assessment of integration needs, a course of language, one on the local institutions and an orientation to socio-​professional insertion. However, the institutional organization and the populations targeted are different. The Flemish course is managed by an institution of private law created by the Flemish government, Agentschap Integratie en Inburgering (AAI –​ Integration and Citizenisation Agency); the francophone Brussels is contracted to BAPAs (Bureau d’accueil des primo-​arrivants –​ Office for the welcoming of first arrivants), promoted by individual municipalities and associations; the German-​ speaking Community has a single institution, Info-​Integration, managed by the Red Cross (which also has a major role in the welcoming and housing of refugees); and finally, the Walloon policy is managed by CRIs (Centres Regionaux d’Intégration –​Regional Integration Centres), associations promoted in collaboration between municipalities and associations of a given area of Wallonia. In most cases the actual offer of actual courses are further contracted to other public or non-​governmental organizations. In addition, most policies exempt the over-​65s, minors, people with a disability that would impede following the mandatory course, EEA and Swiss citizens and their relatives, and Turkish citizens (on the basis of the 1963 Ankara Agreement). However, the German-​speaking,

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Walloon and Brussels policies are only directed to migrants who have arrived in Belgium in the last three years, while in Flanders the policy extends to all the migrants who are not otherwise exempt. Further, in the German-​speaking Community and Wallonia workers are exempt –​initially such exemption was linked to the possession of a work permit, but in Wallonia the norm was changed in 2018 to indicate employment of at least 50 per cent of normal working hours and with a contract of at least three months. The Flemish and Brussels policies do not exempt workers but on the other hand exempt those who have a high school diploma obtained in Belgium (as well as, in Flanders, a diploma obtained in the Netherlands). Finally, the Flemish policy has a larger target population as it targets also minors who do not have the competence in Dutch to follow schooling in that language, as well as Belgian nationals born abroad, with at least one parent who was also born abroad. The integration courses are free of charge but the Flemish government voted in 2020 for the introduction of a 180 euro fee starting in 2022. In addition to this, the current Flemish policy requires the targeted migrants either to obtain the required results or to attend the full course, but if the required results are not obtained there is no integration certificate issued to use for applying for nationality. Moreover, starting in 2022 there are plans for a stronger requirement to pass a ‘citizenship’ test at the end of the course. In other words, while there has been convergence on the Flemish position across Belgium (Xhardez, 2020c), the subnational models (Adam et al, 2018) continue to be relevant because of the more restrictive positions progressively adopted in Flanders. In addition to the already discussed links between integration and federal nationality policy, a link has been established by the law of 18 December 2016, which required non-​EEA citizens to sign a declaration engaging to make efforts to integrate when obtaining a first residence permit for reasons of work. The completion of an integration course is one of the ways to show such effort, which is formally required to have the

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permit renewed four years later. The implementation of such declaration has been delayed and, as in no case have four years have passed since a signing, there is no clarity on how the requirement will be considered. The Walloon integration course has been the object of an evaluation (Gossiaux et al, 2019) commissioned by the Region. The evaluation has highlighted one of the main points of this book –​that mandatory integration courses cannot bring the participants to integration, regardless of the definition used, if the wider society is closed to new members, for example in terms of discrimination in hiring and selection of tenants. The evaluation has further highlighted how the uneven availability of courses and barriers to attending (for example transport, care responsibilities) make it difficult to fulfil the obligation, with some cases in which migrants who were subject to such obligation had to turn down offers of employment in order to complete the course. Finally, it has been noted that, while the course is useful for many categories, it does not cover adequately the specific needs of some migrants, in particular if illiterate, and at the same time it does not reflect the needs of those with a long presence in Belgium, for example if they have spent some years undocumented or if they are attending to qualify for a nationality application. The latter consideration also shows the problematic nature of the links between integration and nationality. CRIs and the implementation of integration in Wallonia Differently from most of the other institutions discussed in this book, the CRIs are not fully integrated within state institutions. While there are some differences in the specific organization of each CRI, in general CRIs are partnerships between local authorities and associations (including trade unions, associations of migrants and other kinds of associations), with both type of partners represented in all the governance instances (general assembly, board of directors, central office) of the institution.

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One result of this institutional profile was that CRIs showed more autonomy in relation to the public authority setting the policy than the usual autonomy between public authorities. In particular the CRIs coordinated their interaction and their response to the actions of the Wallonia Region. CRIs showed a professional culture that had an ambivalent relation with the mandatory course. In different interviews the professional point of reference was social work, and in the official evaluation of the course (Gossiaux et al, 2019) there are also mentions of the orientation of some of the CRI employees towards an interculturalist (compare Elias and Mansouri, 2020) approach, arguing for cultural adaptation among both the migrants and the society at large. However, most of my interviewees showed belief in the fundamental values of integration inscribed in the policy (and criticized to a degree in this book). If on the one hand the interviews showed resistance to the idea of punishing or constraining migrants (which to some extent brought the CRIs into friction with the Wallonia Region), they came from a previous experience of limited resources for linguistic resources for language courses and social orientation of migrants. ‘I am not for the obligation. But on the other hand, let’s take advantage of this obligation to give access to people who in a given moment did not have access to all these courses, to have them easily; I think that ten years ago finding a course of French, it was a pain.’ (CRI3, interviewee1) The introduction of the mandatory course, with the relative increase in the economic resources directed to this aim, was therefore welcomed by CRIs, and in some interviews there was further disappointment that certain groups of migrants were exempted from the integration requirements. The situation before the introduction of the mandatory course in Wallonia was that of a demand for courses that went beyond

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the offer existing on the territory, and most interviewees underlined how the demand remained high. In other words, the interviews conducted at the CRIs seemed to show a willingness to accept constraining those migrants unwilling or, more often, lacking the time to follow integration courses, in exchange for the resources to offer integration courses to those demanding them.1 At the time of the interviews the integration course in Wallonia had four components: an initial orientation course, 120 hours of French language, 20 hours of ‘citizenship’ (focusing on the Belgian institutions) and four hours of ‘socio-​ professional’ insertion. The French and ‘citizenship’ courses were delivered either by public institutions or by associations receiving funds from the Region (although from the interviews the latter seemed preponderant), while the socio-​professional insertion course was offered in the CRIs themselves and was considered as an introduction to the mainstream policy of employment training present in Wallonia; in the same years the Region introduced funding to adapt the existing employment training offer to the migrant group. It should be underlined that in each case the obligation of the course is to attend the required number of hours for each component (with the possibility that some of these components are waived), but without any kind of obligation of achieving specific results or passing examinations. With the already mentioned exception of Flanders, the integration courses in Belgium are also valid as proof of linguistic and social integration for applying for nationality, while in other countries that require a course or test as a precondition for citizenship (including the UK with the language and ‘Life in the UK’ tests), there are also requirements of results. As mentioned, the French and citizenship courses function through referral to associations and other public institutions. The way in which the courses are organized by each institution can result in slightly different content and focuses, as well as their having different lengths. As emerged from the interview

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with CRI1, this also avoided cases in which migrants risked not qualifying for their requirements because of absences from the course. As most courses offered had more hours than those required by the integration policy, even with incomplete attendance the requirement was fulfilled. One of the first issues in the implementation of the Walloon integration course is which migrants are subject to the obligation of completing the course, as any decision on penalties depends on who is considered to be targeted by the policy. In some interviews the target population of the policy was considered well defined: having spent at least three months but less than three years (at the moment of the introduction of the policy) in Belgium, being at least 18 years of age, not being an EU citizen or part of a comparable group (such as Turkish workers and their families, who following the 1963 Ankara Agreement cannot be subject to conditions of residence not applied to EU citizens –​see Tezcan-​Idriz, 2011) and not having a work-​based permit. The criteria themselves were considered restrictive by some interviewees, who considered the integration course a resource and would have preferred those who had arrived before the introduction of the policy and/​or EU citizens to be included in the target group: ‘Is the public targeted by the obligation pertinent and sufficient? I think clearly no, it’s clear that the definition of first-​arrivant … it’s too restrictive. It’s too restrictive because it excludes on one hand EU nationals who need as much as the others the content that is proposed through the integration course, on the other hand it excludes the populations who are present on the territory for more than three years and who can also have an interest to follow the course.’ (CRI2) The exemption of the Turkish workers and their families (as long as the relatives also hold Turkish citizenship, as the interview with CRI4 clarified) was also not approved of in

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some interviews. In this case the acknowledgement of Turkish migration as one of the major components of migrations to Belgium, initially promoted through an active recruitment policy (see Reniers, 1999), intersected with claims about the creation of a separate enclave: ‘There are also some things that are difficult to understand, why have they exempted the Turks –​there is an agreement of cooperation, they are part of the common history of the country, but have not exempted the Moroccans, when there is a part of shared migratory history.’ (CRI2) ‘When the two [worker and relative] are Turks, they are exempt. And there is an agreement on this level, for the integration course, which is a pity. Because it is a community that lives a bit closed in on itself, in any case in our region.’ (CRI4) While some provisions were clearer but did not find the agreement of all the CRIs, there were other provisions that left doubts open or brought paradoxes. The three-​months criterion meant that Erasmus students, if lacking EU citizenship, were initially targeted by the mandatory integration course. The paradox was solved by clarifying that university students were not to be included in the target group, but this still left high school students who had turned 18: ‘In the first version [of the integration course] it was mandatory for people with already a residence permit of more than three months, but students that came in Erasmus had more than 18 years, had a residence permit of more than three months, and had to follow the integration course, when 4–​5–​6 months later they were going back to their country. … The Wallonia has corrected this, it has left students of higher education, so

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it means that today you have a youth that comes here to do his rhéto, the last year of secondary … so he has more than 18 years, he’s not a higher education student … he will be subject to the obligation of the course.’ (CRI2) Having three years of presence in Belgium, even if part of the period was without legal status, provided exemption from mandatory integration,2 but this was difficult to implement: ‘There could be a paradox, that is, let’s say the person has been for two years in an irregular condition, and then has introduced her application only at that moment, one should almost exempt her with the proof that she was there before … in fact it’s not easy that the person dares to say it, and even if she says it, she needs to be able to show it.’ (CRI2) Finally, non-​citizens returning to Belgium after moving outside the Schengen area (and losing legal residence) were considered ‘first arrivants’ and therefore targeted by the policy: ‘Administratively he is a first-​arrivant. I had a case yesterday, the gentleman who arrived here in 2011, who applied for an asylum procedure that was started, he went elsewhere … he arrived here at [the CRI]. Obviously I will have a completely different procedure with someone who knows the system, who knows how it works … but the obligation is the same.’ (CRI3, interviewee1) While the criteria for identifying the migrants under obligation were relatively straightforward for the CRIs, implementing them depended on an initial selection by the municipalities, which, especially in the first period of introduction of the policy, did create some problems. The integration procedure is started at the municipality at the moment of obtaining the first permit; the municipalities, however, happened to send to the

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CRIs migrants who were not under the obligation, not send others who were under the obligation, or more generally not to complete the initial procedure as required. Some municipalities had taken a generalized approach that was in contrast with the general policies, such as sending all the new residents who did not speak French, regardless of whether they were the target of the policy. In addition to this, municipalities, especially if smaller, could be less then systematic in the procedure, needing follow-​up from the CRI to complete it, and often having significant delays, which created problems for the deadlines for completing the course. When a municipality sent a migrant who was not under obligation the CRIs had the opportunity to correct the situation (after which the migrant could decide whether to start a non-​mandatory course). If someone targeted by the obligation did not receive the communication, the situation could be slightly more complex, as the migrant could reach the CRI spontaneously or following the indication of a welfare agency or another institution, but the mandatory procedure started officially with the communication on the part of the municipality. ‘This functioning, that relies on municipalities for the identification of the public has been indicated as … difficult in the implementation [mise en œuvre] of the course, and this continues to be difficult. Why? First because the definition of the target public is very complex to master, there is a series of exemptions that can often make hesitate on whether a person is required or not.’ (CRI2) Correcting a case in which the municipality categorized incorrectly the position of the migrant in relation to the obligation was considered straightforward in most CRIs as the initial assessment of the individual need for integration could be used also to correct the initial error. In one CRI migrants

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under obligation who were not categorized as such by the municipality but nevertheless made contact with the CRI were simply treated as voluntary: ‘What can happen is that among [migrants who have not been registered as obliged] there is one that by chance is someone who was obliged, who arrives at the CRI saying ‘I’m interested in following the course’ … and that during the assessment we realise that he was obliged. He’s coming to following voluntarily, why should one add them a layer of obligation? So much the better!’ (CRI1) However, in one CRI there was a worry about having in place the documentation that officially started the period within which the obligation had to be fulfilled. ‘… a person who presents himself spontaneously but it appears that in fact he was obliged –​this can happen more often that one thinks, because more one has close relations with the associations, more they pass us a public … In that case evidently we activate the mandatory component, but the main question that one will have is what should we do with the receipt that normally should be signed when the municipality informs the person that she is in the obligation. Because the signature of that attestation … starts the 18-​months period.’ (CRI2) In another CRI the reason for having such documentation in place was that the funding of the CRIs was based on the number of migrants who started a mandatory course. ‘We say to the person that she is under the obligation and will be called by the municipality to sign the official document. … In fact we give numbers to Wallonia and we receive our grant in function of the number of

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obliged people we have seen. So we have all the interest that people follow their obligation.’ (CRI5) Other CRIs, despite being on the same model of funding, were less interested in formalizing this passage. Further, while one could hypothesize that this approach might give some incentive to categorize more migrants as under obligation, nothing in the interviews suggested a practice of this kind. A final issue derived from the possibility that a migrant was not working at the moment of obtaining the residence, but started working soon after. While being employed normally provided exemption from mandatory integration, the migrant in question had already received an obligation to complete the integration course.3 In one CRI this was considered a reason to make sure that the person completes the course, although it was recognized that working made it difficult: ‘It can be that when he gets to the municipality he doesn’t have his work permit, and therefore is subject to the obligation. But that at the moment he has three months to come see the regional centre for integration … it can be that he has obtained his [work] permit. And so there one falls in a difficulty because … people have a job, and therefore do not have anymore the time, the hours to follow the assessment.’ (CRI1) Other CRIs, however, were more flexible and used the initial assessment of individual needs or other instruments to exempt the migrant from completing the course. A further issue derived from the fact that those receiving welfare could be required by the CPASs (centres publiques d’action sociale/​public centres of social action), the local welfare agencies, to complete the integration course as part of the measures to improve their employability and maintain their benefits. This became problematic as attendance on the course was mandatory from the point of view of the CPAS, but not

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from the point of view of the CRI. Further, the aims of the two kinds of institutions did not always match. CPASs were more likely to promote rapid access to the labour market even with deskilling and short-​term contracts, similarly to what has been described for integration courses in other national contexts (Hagelund and Kavli, 2009; Suverierol, 2015, Gourdeau, 2018a; Lønsmann, 2020), while the CRIs were more interested in completing the integration course before promoting employment. From the interview with CRI5, however, such conflicts seemed to have been mostly solved in meetings between the different CRIs and CPASs by the end of 2017. In sum, while there were some areas of doubt on the composition of the public targeted by the mandatory policy, and issues with the implementation of the policy at the level of the municipalities, the CRIs managed these aspects without significant uncertainty. It is clear, however, that the mandatory nature of the integration course was limited in the cases in which the municipality did not communicate the obligation, as many of these migrants did not make contact with the CRI through other channels. The determination of individual needs Once a migrant was categorized as under obligation to complete the integration course, CRIs were called to assess the individual need for integration. The initial ‘social assessment’ (bilan social) had a role in orienting the rest of the integration course and, in most CRIs, in deciding whether to waive components of the integration course. Such assessment followed a common list of questions that was developed in collaboration between the different CRIs and taken by the Wallonia Region as part of the policy: ‘There is a framework of social appraisal, with a number of questions to ask, that allows to ask questions about

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the full situation of the person. For what pertains to her family, her health, her skills, her studies, the diplomas obtained, the housing. … Now, it is not a police interrogation, it remains a human conversation.’ (CRI1) The standardization of the assessment has the further aim of allowing migrants to start the integration procedure in a territory under the remit of a CRI and to continue it, in case of a change of residence, in another CRI. There were two distinct orientations in the degree of discretion that the CRIs were considered to have in conducting this assessment. Most CRIs used the social assessment as a discretional instrument to define the requirements for the individual migrant, correcting the errors of the municipalities in defining a migrant as obliged or not to follow the course, and waiving the components of the course that were either not needed by the migrant, or difficult to fulfil because of work, studies or care. One interview I conducted at CRI3 was particularly explicit in terms of lack of detailed instructions in the policy that could limit discretional decisions: “There are no criteria, no criteria. I do not look for laws or rules where there are none. … The day that the Region Wallonia tells me ‘why?’ –​‘and why not?’ ” (CRI3, interviewee1). The ‘citizenship’ component of the integration was the least discretional of the three: unless the migrant had already completed a course of this kind (something that did happen for some refugees while undergoing the asylum procedure before getting a residence permit and therefore being subject to integration requirements), there was no way to waive the component. The ‘socio-​professional insertion’ component, being limited to only four hours, was not perceived as particularly important and was usually waived for those with experience of work in Belgium or signs of having basic skills, such as already knowing how to complete a CV. The French course, being the major component of mandatory integration, was the object of more attention. In some cases, being able

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to conduct a conversation with the CRI in French without needing to resort to an interpreter was considered enough to waive the language component: “The decree is very broad, it does not give particular criteria. For what concerns the language, I when I have in front of me someone with whom I can discuss, I do not need an interpreter, there is no need for a course of French” (CRI3, Interviewee 1). In other cases, the decision was taken upon a more detailed evaluation of pre-​positioning of the candidate in relation to language proficiency: “In the current version of the decree it is only said that learning French is mandatory only if the social assessment considers it necessary. If … we see a person and see he gets by perfectly in French, we will not ask him to pass a placement test” (CRI5). In the same interview it was noted that for those under obligation to complete an integration course there was little available in Wallonia in terms of ways to prove their proficiency in French outside the social assessment, as the only official testing institution, the FOREM, did not offer tests for this purpose: “The only proof that exists currently is the test … and the only possibility that people pass a test in Wallonia is at the FOREM, but the FOREM takes only people who are applying for nationality” (CRI5). One exception to the possibility of waiving the language component on the basis of the evaluation conducted at the CRI was linked to those who were completing a course in order to apply for Belgian nationality. In the interview with the CRI5 there was mention that in the past waiving the language component meant that the resulting integration certificate was not accepted by the local parquet as proof of linguistic integration. In this case the solution was to ask the migrant to pass a language test in place of following the language course. In rare cases the individual assessment could be used to avoid constraining migrants who refused to follow components of the course. In the interview with CRI4 there was a reference to a migrant on the basis of marriage who insisted she had no

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interest in learning French or in working. As the policy refers to decisions to make according to the needs of the migrant, such components were waived as not in the interest of the migrant. The only exception to the confidence in making decisions of this kind emerged in the interview with CRI2, in which, on the other hand, there was great attention to collecting documentary proof of the possibility to exempt a migrant, from the perspective of a migrant, anticipating potential need to justify the decisions with the Region. ‘What is extremely complicated is the objectivation of the exemption. … If the person is francophone … does this person need a course of French? Because she might well speak French but do not know how to write it. … In that case, to objectivate the exemption from learning French, one either needs the proof that one is in a process of learning, or have an attestation, as the FOREM has done … that proves that the person has a level A2. … One has also to evaluate if the person needs or not a component of orientation towards the socio-​professional integration. To objectivate the need also in that case one will see what she has already activated … from the moment when there is an inscription at the FOREM, one can consider that the support of the FOREM … is enough.’ (CRI2) In the same interview there was a recognition that there were significant spaces for discretion in the decisions on whether to waive integration components, although with a certain discomfort on the part of the interviewee: ‘In that case there is place for a form of arbitrary … of the social worker that receives the person. … We’re still not at the end of that reflection. … Can one argue that on the basis of the elements communicated by the person, [one

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can] say “in fact there is no attestation, but one observes that on the basis of a pre-​placement that one has done he has sufficient competence”, or does one absolutely ask for a written proof, to say “well if one comes five year from now to ask us … ‘why didn’t you send that person to a course?’ ” ’ (CRI2) The differences in the approach between CRIs might be linked to a combination of the geographical area under the CRI and to the volume of work. The CRIs that were located in larger towns and had their working capacity almost filled by the users who were under obligation, with waiting lists for some courses or even for the social assessment, were also those more confident in taking autonomous decisions on the fulfilment of requirements on the part of the migrants. On the other hand, the CRIs that were located in more rural areas and served a smaller population in relation to their working capacity were more worried about complying with the regional policy and being able to justify their choices with the Region. While the mandatory nature of the integration course is backed by fines, during the period in which I conducted the interviews there was no specific actor holding the power to issue such fines. Partly, this was not an urgent issue: a failure to comply with the integration requirements was established at 18 months after the communication of the obligation to complete the integration course, which meant that for the first year and a half of the existence of the policy there was limited possibility of migrants being targeted by fines. The only possible case was for those who did not make contact with a CRI within three months from the communication of the obligation. Further, the policy specified that penalties could be waived if there was a lack of resources to fulfil the course requirement on the territory, which meant that during the period of set-​up of the course it was less likely that fines could be applied. However, there were some further delays

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in setting up the punitive dimension of the policy, which was finally defined only in 2019. CRIs were charged with preparing dossiers of non-​ attendance for the migrants subject to the policy who did not comply, but with no entity to apply the fines the approach taken was not to produce dossiers that would have had no destination. “What are we going do to? We do nothing. We’re still not there, we’re not saying to the Region Wallonia ‘oh, there are some that haven’t come here’. As long as they do not come to ask us the question we’re not saying anything, that is not our aim” (CRI3, interviewee1). In one case the initial approach to produce dossiers for migrants who had not presented themselves within the initial three months was interrupted following the example of the other CRIs “We had sent [dossiers of non-​attendance] at the very beginning, we followed, and then when we learnt that the other centres were not doing it … if the others don’t do it, it doesn’t need to be done. We are not going to put people in difficulty” (CRI4). While up to 2017 there were no sanctions for non-​ compliance in sight, the menace of sanctions was still used in some cases to convince the more resistant migrants to start the integration course, and in particular to sign the relative convention (see also Gourdeau, 2018b for similar practices with mandatory integration in France): ‘I get to manage it without the sanctioning agent just by evoking the sanction. … In the interview I go in gradation … the more I insist and more the person says no, and more and more firmly. … I say that there are administrative sanctions in the end, that go from 100 euros to 1,500 euros if they do not respect their obligation.’ (CRI3, interviewee3) When I conducted further interviews in 2018, some migrants were starting to reach the 18-​months limit and potentially to

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risk fines for not having completed the course. The approach of the CRIs was rather to apply for extensions for these migrants rather than to push for punishment. However, the Wallonia Region in the meantime had changed approach, considering that the resources available were sufficient and insisting on starting the fines as soon as the ‘sanctioning agent’ was defined. This situation created a certain attrition with the CRIs: ‘We have sent a number of applications for an extension saying “this could be accepted, these are elements that could be accepted”, but the extensions have almost all been rejected, because the Wallonia has refused the elements, while according to us the elements were completely valid. The Wallonia is not at all in the reality of things.’ (CRI5) The change in orientation within the Region could be explained by changes in the political composition of the local government. Wallonia has seen the Parti Socialiste (Socialist Party, PS) as the main party for much of the history of local government, with most Ministers-​Presidents (the highest political authority) being members of this party. However, between July 2017 and September 2019 the local government moved to the right, as the junior partner of the PS, the Christian-​democrat Centre Démocrate Humaniste (Humanist Democratic Centre, cdH) broke with the PS and formed a government with the right-​wing liberals of the Mouvement Réformateur, which, as I have shown, were the promoters of mandatory integration in the francophone context. Given the divergence between the Wallonia Region and the CRIs, the CRIs opted to interrupt the requests for extensions, hoping to put some pressure on the Region until the introduction of the sanction procedure. ‘Currently, given the reaction of the Wallonia in relation to the applications for extension … there is a decision

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between the CRIs to not send the applications for extension anymore. Until Wallonia notices that there are no more applications for extension –​“ah, why?” –​and this might make the Wallonia reflect.’ (CRI5) Some practices adjusting the norms in favour of the migrants subject to obligation have also been found in research on integration courses in France (Gourdeau, 2018b) and the Netherlands (Belabas and Gerrits, 2017). However, the actions of the CRIs go beyond these minor adjustments. The possibility of street-​level bureaucrats modifying the policy in favour of the public has been theorized (Evans, 2013; Tummers et al, 2015) but there is not much literature highlighting such practices in the migration field disregarding the general policy and the requests of the higher-​level institutions, one of the few examples being the practice of Belgian CPASs to allow access to emergency healthcare to undocumented migrants (Andreetta, 2019). The partly non-​governmental profile of the CRIs, and probably the orientation of the local government of the time, seem to be the main factors explaining this kind of deviation from the policies. Conclusion: integration, uncertainty and flexibility I have shown how the diffusion of mandatory integration in Belgium has been particularly complex. The different approaches to the matter between right-​and left-​wing parties, the indirect influence of the EU, and the policy learning from other countries is arguably common to other cases in Europe. However, in Belgium the situation was complicated by the complexity of the federal institutional architecture and the fact that Dutch-​and French-​speaking parties and institutions have distinct preferred points of reference –​the Netherlands and France –​to learn from. Moreover, the linguistic divide and the presence of a strong nationalist movement in Flanders have brought distinct general integration approaches (Adam,

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2013a). While federal policy –​nationality in particular –​and the alignment of the francophone right wing to the Flemish policy have brought a convergence towards the Flemish model (Xhardez, 2020c), the strengthening of the mandatory nature of the policy in Flanders has kept the policies distinct. Studying nationality and mandatory integration together also shows how integrationism operates on different levels. With the 2012 nationality reform motivated, among other factors, by the existence of mandatory integration in Flanders, and the introduction of mandatory integration in the rest of Belgium motivated by the nationality reform, the reasons to introduce integration requirements seem to a degree to be circular. Further, it is relevant that most of the ‘voluntary’ attendees of the integration courses in Wallonia seems to be motivated by the nationality requirement. Focusing on a recently introduced policy has allowed some of the issues that accompany the introduction of many policies to be underlined. Some of the contradictions highlighted in the interviews with the CRIs –​requiring visiting students to undergo mandatory integration, making it difficult for migrants to interrupt the integration course if they find a job, and the fact that undocumented migrants could have been exempt from the requirement but had difficulties in obtaining exemption –​have been ironed out by subsequent changes to the policy. However, the interviews have highlighted also incomprehension and sometimes conflict between the CRIs, the municipalities, the Region and, to a degree, the CPASs. This confirms to some extent the early observation of Pressman and Wildawsky (1973) that the number of actors involved increases the chances that a policy’s outcomes will be altered in relation to the original design. Beyond the issues linked to the early days of a policy, the fact that CRIs were able, and were in most cases willing, to use discretion to exempt at least some of the migrants from different requirements moderated to a degree the compulsory nature of mandatory integration. This could also be used to

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avoid imposing the requirements on migrants who already had work, care or study responsibilities. However, this was possible not only because of the letter of the law, but also because of the specific profile of the CRIs, who answer at least in part to local associations and seem to have a professional culture influenced by social work. Further, given that the CRIs located in smaller towns and serving a smaller population were more wary of following the letter of the policy and anticipating possible controls from the Region, it could be hypothesized that one reason for being more lax with the requirements was avoiding being overwhelmed by the potential workload. As a result, CRIs were willing to reinterpret the law in a more lax way than the one promoted by the institution that created the policy –​in this case the Wallonia Region. While this is not the main focus of this chapter in particular, it is also clear that, while freeing some migrants from the obligation, the discretional procedure did not lead to a uniform application of the policy: migrants living in less densely populated areas were apparently subject to stricter requirements. Further, the decisions on whether or not a specific migrant needed to be subject to the obligation to follow a specific component of the course could very well depend on the individual operator of a CRI, as well as on specific biases in evaluating each migrant.

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FIVE

Comparative Analyses

There is a highly established body of literature comparing migration policies, including citizenship (for example Brubaker, 1992; Hansen and Weil, 2001; Bauböck et al, 2006; Faist, 2007; Janoski, 2010; van Oers, 2013) and integration (for example Jacobs and Rea, 2007; Goodman, 2010; 2014; van Oers et al, 2010a; Garcés-​Mascareñas and Penninx, 2016; Pascouau, 2018). Comparative analyses of the implementation of migration policies are rarer, the few exceptions including the studies of migration control across seven European countries by Eule and colleagues (2019), deportation policies in Germany and the US (Ellerman, 2009), and the visa procedures of different national consulates in Morocco (Infantino, 2016; 2018). As mentioned in Chapter One, comparing citizenship and nationality policies across Belgium and the UK allows factors that are limited to a national context to be distinguished from factors that could apply to a larger number of countries. Comparing citizenship and integration policies further shows how integrationist tendencies have changed naturalization requirements as well as leading to the introduction of obligatory courses. Whereas several European countries, including the UK, have integration requirements for permanent residence and/​or citizenship, but no mandatory integration courses, the countries with mandatory integration frequently link it significantly to the naturalization requirements. In the following sections, I first present integration and citizenship policies in contrast to the ‘frontline’ migration policies (visa, border control, residence); subsequently,

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I discuss in more detail what the comparative approach shows about discretion and variation in the implementation of the policies. I conclude by discussing the different influences of integrationism across the cases considered. Migration policies behind the frontline There are a number of implementation studies that have used ethnographic methods to explore what can be considered the ‘frontline’ of migration policies (Eule et al, 2019), including visas (Infantino and Rea, 2012; Alpes and Spire, 2014; Infantino, 2017; 2019), border controls (for example Heyman, 1995; 2009; Pratt, 2010; Crosby and Rea, 2016) and residence (for example Triandafyllidou, 2003; Spire, 2008; Eule, 2016). A common thread across these studies’ findings is the tendency of officers to deviate significantly from the letter of the law, usually to make migration control practices more restrictive than the (already usually restrictive) official policy. Further, the letter of the policy, which is often highly complex, is substituted (Eule, 2016; Eule et al, 2019) or integrated (Infantino and Rea, 2012) by an understanding of the policy that is defined and circulated within the institution(s) implementing the policy, often without a direct relation to the letter of the law. More generally, controls tend to be routinized and informalized to manage workloads (Pratt, 2010; Eule, 2016), giving rise, however, to unequal treatment following conceptions of deservingness and suspicion (Heyman, 1995; 2009). Furthermore, the migration control institutions, as well as the individual agents, often apply the laws in explicitly restrictive ways, for example denying entry in excessively large numbers and leaving it to subsequent controls to examine whether the stop was needed or not (Rea and Crosby, 2016). Even more deliberately, these institutions introduce specific strategies to deny entry or residence to applicants who qualify fully in terms of formal requirements but are perceived by the officers to have motivations that go against the spirit of

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the policy (Spire, 2008; Infantino and Rea, 2012; Alpes and Spire, 2014). Motivations for such approaches include, again, the management of institutions’ workloads, but also official numerical objectives –​for example the target of a certain number of migrants expelled in a given year –​that create incentives to bend the law (Spire, 2008). Furthermore, officers often understand the migration policies to have the objective of limiting immigration (or at least a specific kind of immigration) or else reducing the access of migrants to welfare (Spire, 2008; Infantino and Rea, 2012), and individual migrants are suspected of either committing fraud (Spire, 2008; Alpes and Spire, 2014) or having motivations that are unacceptable from the officers’ perspectives (Alpes and Spire, 2014). In each case, the agents of migration control consider it acceptable to distort the law to pursue principles that they approve of politically or that they consider to be in the spirit of the law. The fact that the security logic has become dominant within migration policy in Europe (taking the place, in many cases, of the workforce logic during the 1980s –​compare Huysmans, 2000) contributes to such an orientation within migration policies. One of the dominant findings in implementation studies is the way in which bureaucracies informally ration limited resources (including their own working time, for example Lipsky, 1980; Clark-​Daniels and Daniels, 1995; Triandafyllidou, 2003). Therefore, the restrictiveness of migration control is problematic but not particularly surprising. However, there are further theorizations within implementation studies that could suggest the presence of phenomena that may influence bureaucrats to act in favour of their clients, including the tendency to use one’s own resources (in opposition to rationing) to solve specific cases (Evans, 2013; Tummers et al, 2015) and the orientation of specific professional cultures to promote, rather than limit, the rights of the public (for example Andreetta, 2019). As mentioned in Chapter Four there are a few examples of the ways in which specific migration policies can be implemented by redefining the norms to help migrants

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rather than hinder them, including the already discussed adjustments that occur in mandatory integration courses in the Netherlands (Belabas and Geerrits, 2017) and France (Gourdeau, 2018b). In the data presented in this book, there is some evidence of the willingness to diverge from the letter of the law to help migrants applying for citizenship, although these are more frequent in the interviews with operators working on mandatory integration courses in Wallonia. In the field of citizenship, the deviations from the norm are essentially limited, in Belgium, to not requiring documentary proof of language competence for some applicants from the Netherlands, France and Germany and, in the UK, to the caution applied when dealing with socially or politically sensitive candidates, such as members of the armed forces or applicants in respect of which there are pressures from other branches of the government. At the same time, there is limited evidence of officers being proactive in restricting access of migrants to citizenship and residence. This could obviously be a methodological issue –​ having used in-​depth interviews, I may have simply missed tacit and/​or hidden practices that other studies, based on more long-​term ethnographic observations, are better positioned to discover. However, there are two other explanations for the different approaches taken in citizenship and integration policies. First, these domains of migration policy are not part of the ‘frontline’ previously discussed. Citizenship does offer protection against migration control and deportation, and mandatory integration has some links with the renewal of legal status, but generally speaking the migrants involved in these policies have already been admitted to the territory and to residence. Consequently, the pressures to aggressively control migration that exist in ‘frontline’ policy domains are less relevant here. Second, the professional profiles involved are less strongly linked to security. The Nationality Team implementing citizenship policy in the UK sits within the Home Office and is, therefore, institutionally close to the more security-​oriented

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policy domains, but all the applications that present security issues are the exclusive domain of the SCU. The parquets in Belgium, which include public prosecutors, are also contiguous to the police but are part of the Ministry of Justice. The remaining institutions explored here have a different profile, being linked either to the recording of births, deaths and marriages (civil registers in Belgium, NCSs in the UK) or else lying at the intersection of municipalities and NGOs (CRIs in Belgium). Both NCSs and registers in Belgium showed a continuity with their main work –​registering population changes –​by focusing mainly on respect of the norms,1 as did also the parquets and the Nationality Team of the Home Office. As described in the three previous chapters, most of the institutions considered had as their main objective to verify whether an applicant met all the requirements, even if there was not always agreement on what the requirements were. The important point here is that little in terms of further policy objectives was discussed in the interviews I collected. There were, however, a few deviations from this general approach. The Nationality Team’s practice was informed both by a strong suspicion of fraud (hardly mentioned in the interviews with the parquets) and by a suspicion of refugees who did not have the expected asylum experience of applying immediately upon arrival on UK territory and obtaining asylum without other doubts raised at the hearing. The parquets in Belgium showed a specific approach in their management of faits personnels graves, which are both particularly in their field of competence as public prosecutors and, as discussed in Chapter Three, one of the aspects that the Belgian law has failed to codify. In some cases, the arguments used by the magistrates, on recidivism in minor infractions or regarding the paying of fines well before applying for nationality, appeared to represent a transfer of the penal concepts of rehabilitation and will to rehabilitation to the domain of nationality (see also Sredanovic, 2018a). Considering the great extent to which citizenship and integration reforms in the UK, Belgium and elsewhere have been dominated by

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integrationism, it is surprising how little integration as a policy objective was discussed in the different interviews. I mentioned in Chapter Two how the concept of integration felt almost out of place at the Nationality Team of the Home Office; in the civil registers and parquets the concept was only occasionally discussed (see also Sredanovic, 2018a). In the case of the Nationality Team, it could be that the local organizational culture –​more interested in identifying fraud than examining integration –​was still in line with the pre-​2004 approach, in which integration was not part of the equation. The partial exception were the NCSs, in which there were more references to concepts of integration. In this case, the involvement of the registers in citizenship ceremonies (Byrne, 2012; 2014) appears to have had a greater role than the introduction of tests in promoting the concept of integration among the institutions involved in naturalization. The only institutions that emerge from the interviews as significantly distinct from the others are the CRIs in Wallonia. The CRIs are the only institutions that are not entirely part of the public sector as they are controlled on an equal basis by the municipalities and NGOs. Furthermore, whereas the registers, NCSs and Nationality Team mostly followed an administrative professional logic, and the parquets a legal one, social work seemed to be a significant professional point of reference for the CRIs. The CRIs not only discussed integration more specifically (which was entirely to be expected from integration centres), but also showed significant flexibility in enacting mandatory integration courses. As discussed in Chapter One, this is partly linked to the different nature of citizenship and integration policies: the latter have specific objectives that are more relevant than the strict following of the norms, a fact that on its own invites a certain flexibility. However, the ways in which CRIs exercised discretion to exempt migrants from parts of the mandatory integration course contrasts further with the rigour of other institutions explored in this book in applying the law, as well as with the suspicion exercised by

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the Nationality Team and the zeal of certain local registers in Belgium. The spaces of discretion Discretion is a major issue in policy studies. Some legal approaches to the concept have described it as merely the space left undefined by the law (Dworkin, 1977). However, more social and implementation-​oriented theorizations have underlined how law and discretion are mutually constitutive (Hawkins, 1992b; Pratt, 1999; Eule et al, 2019) as the implementation of law is itself conditional on exercising discretion (Pratt, 1999), and everyday implementation is often characterized by tinkering with the law (Eule et al, 2019). Lipsky’s theorization of street-​level bureaucrats (1980) indeed considers discretion as constitutive of street-​level work, and autonomy from control on the part of superiors as one of the main goals of the everyday organization of work –​a view proposed in even more radicalized forms in other theories of organization (Crozier and Friedberg, 1980). Lipsky’s initial theorization of discretion has been questioned, discussing the tendency towards the increased regulation of professions that previously had access to discretion (Howe, 1992) and the role of New Public Management in increasing control over bureaucrats through standardized controls and quantitative objectives (Brodkin, 2011). However, the increase of managerial control does not necessarily cancel discretion, both because managers frequently do not have a full vision of the work of street-​level bureaucrats, and because the multiplication of regulations invites interpretation, as well as cases in which regulations contradict each other –​leaving bureaucrats to choose which to apply (Evans and Harris, 2004). Furthermore, although New Public Management has influenced bureaucracy, it has not eliminated the practices and autonomy specific to street-​ level bureaucracy but rather redirected part of these practices to working to the metric (Brodkin, 2011). In addition, in

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certain professions there can be a shared professional culture between the street level and the managers that leads to shared objectives, rather than street-​level bureaucrats aiming to maximize autonomy (Evans, 2011). Although discretion might be a common aim of street-​ level bureaucrats and be necessary to the implementation of a policy, in some cases, discretion might be less necessary. When there are no substantive further policy aims, as in the case of citizenship, the procedure is the product, and spaces of discretion that might be essential for other policies become less important. Moreover, in the field of migration, discretion is more likely to be based on biases regarding the deservingness of individual migrants, or, even worse, a way to limit their rights beyond the policy mandate. Comparing the high-​discretion UK citizenship policy and the low-​discretion Belgian nationality policy shows both how discretion is managed and how it shapes the procedures. One way in which discretion was reintroduced into the nationality procedure in Belgium was through the use of police interviews. In the cases in which police interviews were conducted and had an impact on the final decision, there was space for a return to pre-​2000 subjective evaluations of the applicants, their language proficiency or any other details on which police were collecting data2 and the parquets were willing to consider. Some aspects of this process are more or less explicitly foreseen by the law as evaluating the security issues the applicants might represent (a problematic process in itself –​see for example Bosworth and Guild, 2008). In other cases, however, this introduced procedures of evaluation that were explicitly deplored and ruled out in the discussion of the law in Parliament (Sredanovic, 2018a). In Chapter Two I have shown the extent to which the organization of the Nationality Team at the UK Home Office was directed at delimiting and routinizing the extreme discretion allowed by the letter of the law, defining general criteria through guidance and establishing standardized

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approaches to casework through the internal organization of the Nationality Team. Given the already mentioned tendency of implementation studies to consider the creation of discretion as an objective of bureaucracies (Crozier and Friedberg, 1980; Lipsky, 1980), it is significant that in the case of nationality in the UK, implementation actually had the role of limiting the extensive discretion assigned by the law. There is little in the implementation literature to explain such a development. There is research that shows how what should be complex evaluations are reduced to routinized applications of simplified rules, but these are mostly linked to the aim of reducing the workload linked to each case (compare Lipsky, 1980; Tummers et al, 2015). However, most implementation theory has been written in opposition to Weber’s (1968) theory of bureaucracy as the impartial, uniform and rigorous exercise of power. This has helped show how bureaucracy is messy, discretional and more oriented to limiting workload and creating spaces of autonomy, but implementation theory offers less to explain why a specific bureaucracy should limit the discretion assigned by the law. Hajjat (2012) also showed how the complex and deliberately undefined concept of assimilation was, to a degree, routinized in the implementation of French nationality policy, for example avoiding following the indications of the Ministry on wearing the veil as a possible sign of non-​assimilation. One possible explanation is that citizenship has remained, to a degree, outside the process of rationalization of policy described by Weber (1968) as it has remained defined by a sacralized aura and considered a space of state sovereignty not amenable to rationalization. Indeed, citizenship attribution has remained in some cases the domain of political assemblies, as for example in Switzerland (Helbling, 2008), Denmark (Ersbøll, 2013) or, to a degree, Belgium, as discussed in this book. In other cases, the attribution of citizenship has been formally given as a power to a high-​ranking official (see also Huddleston, 2013), whether the President, as in Italy (Tintori, 2013), or the Minister of the Interior, as in Greece (Christopoulous, 2009) and, indeed,

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the UK. Submitting the naturalization application to political assemblies is feasible in such highly decentred contexts as that of Switzerland (Helbling, 2008) or in relatively smaller countries; further the Chamber of Representatives in Belgium drafted internal regulations when it was deciding on a significant part of the overall applications. However, it is not feasible to require the decision of a minister on each naturalization application, even in smaller countries. It is in this context –​of extreme discretion linked to the sacralization of naturalization decisions and a simultaneous need to manage a volume of applications in line with contemporary bureaucracy –​that we can understand the initiative within the Home Office to implement the law by actually limiting discretion. Despite such limits, the caseworkers of the Nationality Team did make extensive use of the discretion available for specific cases. These involved different areas of suspicion of fraud (documents about which there were doubts over authenticity, applicants with documentation that did not match the perceived language skills, or suspect marriages of convenience) as well as applications in which there were doubts regarding the fulfilment of the requirements. In these cases, the possibility to exercise discretion was used to reject applications without always needing to prove a lack of requirements. More generally, the areas in which the Nationality Team decided to keep discretion –​absences from the territory and minor infractions of immigration rules and to laws –​were not systematized, as shown in particular by the difficulty experienced by some NCSs involved in the research in anticipating how applications would have been treated in Liverpool. Consequently, there was more uncertainty regarding nationality applications in the UK than in Belgium. In Chapter Three I mentioned how some registers had difficulties in anticipating the decisions of a few parquets, but NCSs were more general and categorical that points of the law were discretionary and that they had no way of foreseeing how a citizenship application would have been evaluated on these points.

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Two key elements linked to discretion in the implementation of the policies are the requirements of official, reasoned responses and the availability of judicial review. The limited degree to which judicial review is available for nationality decisions in the UK significantly increases the possibility of exercising discretion. In contrast, the possibility of appeal made the parquets in Belgium much more attentive to maintaining coherence between decisions in individual applications, as well as to aligning themselves with the interpretation of the local judge. The need for an explicit and justified motivation for denying nationality applications constitutes a limit to discretion both in the Belgium and the UK.3 However, there is a difference between Belgium, where parquets must formally oppose the application within four months or else it is approved automatically, and the UK, where a complex application could theoretically be processed for years without consequences for the Home Office. That said, the practice of discouraging verbally, rather than giving a formal written refusal, is one of the reasons why registers in Belgium have an influence on the nationality procedures far beyond that attributed explicitly by the law –​such a practice contrasts with the guarantee of judicial review formally available to the candidates. Comparing the discretion exercised by CRIs in Wallonia further highlights the role of discretion in the policies considered. Some of the CRIs interviewed used the initial assessment to decide whether the migrant needed language, citizenship and work orientation courses, as well as to annul the erroneous obligations to complete the course introduced by the municipalities and exempt from the course migrants who had begun working after receiving a request to attend the course. I highlighted the different approaches among CRIs regarding the degree to which they had a clear mandate from the Wallonia Region to do so. As the aim of mandatory integration policy is to improve the knowledge of language, institutions and employability, exercising discretion in this manner makes sense. In the case

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of nationality policies, the discretion was used to correct paradoxical consequences of the law –​in Belgium, these consequences included requiring migrants to prove through documents the knowledge of their native language –​or to accommodate specific situations, such as applicants in the UK who risked not meeting the requirement for citizenship because their job required extensive periods outside the UK. However, although citizenship policies can have the indirect aim of improving the ‘integration’ of new citizens, their principal aim is to confer citizenship on those meeting the requirements and not to confer it on those lacking them. Applying these norms equally is of particular importance because unequal treatment means producing a demos that does not give equal opportunities to some sectors of the national population (Sredanovic and Stadlmair, 2018). In this sense, UK and Belgian citizenship policies were less problematic than the French one as analysed by Hajjat (2012), where officers were called to evaluate the assimilation of the applicants by a policy that explicitly refused to define ‘assimilation’ clearly. They were also far less capricious than the decisions based on political votes in Switzerland, as analysed by Helbling (2008). Nevertheless, the discretion present in the UK and Belgian policies, particularly the extensive one persisting in the UK, does not seem compatible with the aims of citizenship policy and introduces significant uncertainty for the applicants. In addition to ‘positive’ discretion –​that is, an explicit mandate to exercise discretion –​ the ways in which the letter of the law defines the requirements further defines the spaces of discretion. In the case of Belgian nationality, I explained in Chapter Three how the detailed codification of the requirements left little space for discretion in the implementation of nationality law. One major exception is the case of faits personnels graves, where the lack of an entirely clear definition left parquets latitude to decide what constitutes a sufficient infraction to justify opposition to the acquisition

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of nationality (these decisions went beyond what even the far right had proposed in Parliament –​Sredanovic, 2018a). In the case of CRIs in Wallonia, there was a greater lack of clarity in the definition of the policy, especially in the first period of application, regarding situations such as migrants who began working after having signed the integration agreement, students, migrants erroneously categorized by the municipalities, and migrants required to attend an integration course by the welfare agencies. As a result, the CRIs not only had space to exercise discretion but, in some cases, it was necessary to fill the gaps of policymaking. Factors of variation Variation in the implementation of a policy can be found at the level of decisions, the decision-​making process, the organization of work and the political climate (Eule, 2016), as well as between each decision, individual officers, or different offices (Sredanovic, 2020b). As with discretion, there are cases in which variation in policy implementation is necessary. For example, the policy might require adaptation to different geographic contexts or to account for the specific condition of members of the public; more simply, a uniform application of the policy might require a level of control that could cause casework to grind to a halt. CRIs in Wallonia adapted the integration policies to certain individual cases, and in Chapter Two I mentioned how the Nationality Team in the UK expedited the processing of certain applications, including for compassionate reasons. However, there is little to justify territorial differences in the application of the policies considered. This applies to integration within francophone Wallonia, where it is difficult to identify legitimate differences at the sub-​regional level, and even more so to citizenship in the UK and Belgium, as this is an intrinsically national policy. Moreover, the issues of the equal treatment of candidate citizens I discussed in problematizing discretion in citizenship

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policy apply more so to the internal variation in implementing citizenship policies. There are some potential factors that do not seem to explain variation in the three case studies considered. The political orientations of the local government were one of the factors of variation identified by Helbling (2008) in the implementation of citizenship policy in Switzerland. In my research, in addition to not explaining the divergent interpretations between parquets and between local registers in the implementation of Belgian nationality policy, local political orientation did not appear to play a role in the different ways in which citizenship policy was interpreted by the NCSs, nor in the ways in which integration policies in Wallonia were interpreted by different CRIs. Similarly, I did not identify the personal profile of individual officers or operators as an explanatory factor for the variation in any of the three cases considered, as suggested by Hajjat (2012) and Mazouz (2017; 2019) for nationality policy and Spire (2008) for residence policy in France. However, this could simply be a method issue, as I did not include questions on individual backgrounds in my interviews. One key element in the variation of the implementation of policies is the presence of a centralized or decentralized approach. In a recent forum (Manby and Bauböck, 2021), a decentralization of the naturalization procedures, including the transfer of power of naturalization to local authorities, has been advanced by Manby (2021) as a way to open routes to citizenship in countries with very low current rates of naturalization, and in particular in countries of the Global South with limited civil registration coverage of the population. However, most contributions to the forum expressed reservations regarding decentralization, linking it to divergent practice, discretion, possible discrimination, and violation of political equality (Manby and Bauböck, 2021). I explained the extent to which the decentralized organization of nationality policy in Belgium introduces significant variation despite a letter of the law aiming for low discretion. In comparison, citizenship procedures in the

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UK were rather uniform on points of law, despite the much higher discretion allowed by the law itself. Furthermore, it was not only the decentralized nature of the procedures that introduced variation in Belgian nationality, but also the lack of instruments to ensure a uniform implementation of the law. Not only are registers and parquets local, but even the judicial review in Belgium, although significant, remains at a local level, with only some constitutional issues arriving at higher courts. Another divergence can be identified in the policy instruments available in the two countries. Internal guidance documents allowed the UK Home Office to update, frequently and rather effectively, the interpretation of the law. The Belgian authorities did have the option of issuing circulars but some judges seemed to be of the opinion that these circulars did not bind their decision, meaning that only higher-​level legal instruments, such as decrees, seemed to be available for coordinating law interpretation in Belgium. In comparison, the network of NCSs in the UK did develop some divergent interpretation of the law, particularly for EEA candidates, but was generally uniform on most points. This was not only a result of the centralization of the decisions in the Nationality Casework Team in Liverpool, but was also linked to the relative low-​cost investment of the nationality helpline. The four caseworkers covering that helpline were frequently unable to give definite answers given the discretion left by the letter of the law, but still managed to offer some common interpretation of the letter of the law across the national territory. The particularly strict norms on immigration advice in the UK made it difficult for NCSs to engage in the kind of interpretation of the law conducted by registers in Belgium, to the point of not allowing NCSs to give advice even when applicants asked for it. Even a comparison of nationality and integration in Belgium shows the role of coordinating instruments. Integration policy across federal entities in Belgium is highly divergent as there are distinct philosophies of integration (Adam, 2013a). However, within Wallonia, the different CRIs managed to take similar

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positions, both because of the common referent in the Wallonia Region and because of their informal coordination. Decentralization is normally advocated in order to have an implementation more attentive to local needs and interests, as well as higher efficiency (for example Balaguer-​Coll et al, 2010; Faguet et al, 2015). It is difficult to compare the efficiency of nationality policy in the UK and in Belgium, given the high diversity in law, procedure and organization, as well as the two countries’ different sizes. From the perspective of interests and needs, nationality in Belgium, as an eminently federal policy, does not appear to justify the pursuit of local interests, apart from offering services in the different national languages. It is true, however, that there are competences that are much harder to centralize in Belgium. All language-​related policies, including integration, as well as the different aspects of education are delegated to the Linguistic Communities, whereas many social and economic policies are delegated to the Regions. There is no similar level of policy devolution to the constituent nations of the UK, and even the separate Scots and Northern Irish legal systems seem to have little influence over citizenship (with the obvious exceptions of how the Good Friday Agreement influences the application of Republic of Ireland citizenship to Northern Ireland –​Driscoll, 2019). Managing the different kinds of institutions and policies existing across Belgium in a hypothetical central nationality authority would be challenging, although it could be observed that this already happens on a small scale in each parquet when dealing with applicants who have moved within Belgium. Judicial review emerges as having a paradoxical role in influencing variation in policy implementation. In line with the literature (Hawkins, 1992a; Huddleston, 2013; Huddleston and Falcke, 2020), the presence of judicial review reduces variation between cases and between caseworkers: nationality decisions among the parquets in Belgium usually appear more foreseeable, also because the magistrates involved

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know that their decisions can be appealed and generally attempt to anticipate the orientation of the local judge to avoid their decisions being quashed. In contrast, the limited judicial review in the UK helps make citizenship decisions less foreseeable given the already mentioned larger space for discretion that this leaves to the Nationality Team officers. However, judicial review to a degree reinforces geographic variation in nationality policy in Belgium, as the courts are still local and can offer divergent interpretations of the law. Belgium is a civil law country, and judicial precedent is not binding as in common law countries such as the UK. Still, a consistent jurisprudence is difficult to disregard, and, in practice, the Belgian legal system does give relevance to the jurisprudence beyond its binding dimension, as also emerged in some of the interviews with the parquets. Despite the circulation of some jurisprudence –​for example regarding the way of interpreting the norm on faits personnels graves –​ court activity appears to have played a limited role in making nationality policy uniform across Belgium. One way in which the letter of the law itself can introduce variation in policy implementation is the law’s complexity. Although a clear definition of the provisions of a policy reduces the space for discretion, the more provisions are present in a law, the more details there are that could be subject to interpretation. This can be seen in some exceptions introduced both in the UK nationality law and the Wallonia integration policy. It is further particularly clear in the case of Belgian nationality policy, where the high complexity of the law4 multiplied the points of law requiring interpretation and were recognized by some as not contributing to equality. This might appear to be a Catch-​22, as not defining a policy in detail leaves space for discretion and doing so multiplies the provisions to interpret discretionally. At the same time, this is not a zero-​sum situation as complexity and completeness are two different dimensions of law making. A law can be less complex without a loss of completeness simply by reducing

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the number of cases foreseen or the ways to fulfil a single requirement –​something that did not appear to be the aim of the last major nationality reform in Belgium. Finally, workload shows significant links with the variation within policy implementation. On the one hand, there is an intuitive finding that institutions with a workload above their capacity, specifically some parquets in Belgium, tend also to have more difficulties guaranteeing foreseeable and uniform casework. Less intuitively, the absolute volume of cases processed is linked to stronger local interpretations of the law. Local registers with a high volume of nationality applications in Belgium were the only ones to champion their own interpretations of the policy in the exchanges with the parquets. Similarly, NCSs dealing with a larger volume of citizenship applications in the UK were less likely to consult the Home Office helpline regarding every doubt, and CRIs in Wallonia serving a larger population were more confident in exempting migrants from parts of the integration course. Eule (2016) also analysed how bureaucracies (in his case, those linked to residence procedures in Germany) tend to substitute local routine knowledge to the letter of the law. I would add that such local knowledge develops only with a higher volume of cases treated, and that it does not necessarily substitute itself for the law, but rather can simply add a specific interpretation of it. Indeed, where the officers dealt with a well-​defined and less discretional policy, such as the Belgian nationality law, the disconnect between the law and its local interpretation was not so strong. Conclusion: how applying the law changes it The comparison of citizenship policies in the UK and Belgium, and integration policy in Wallonia, highlights how discretion and variation depend both on the letter of the law (codification, explicit mandate of discretionary evaluation, judicial review) and on factors of implementation, from the

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degree of centralization to deviation from the norms and issues linked to workload. The comparison also enables an examination of the role that integrationist approaches played in the implementation of the different policies. Each policy was driven by different variants of integrationist ideology, including the ‘active citizenship’ promoted by New Labour; its culturalist variant promoted by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats; and the diffusion of integrationism, first promoted in Flanders as a factor of nation building, across Belgium. However, the only group of interviewees that showed a strong adhesion to integration as a systematic aim were those who worked at the CRIs in Wallonia. In addition to being directly involved in the delivery of the integration course, most had prior experience of the voluntary integration course in Wallonia, characterized by scarcity of places in relation to demand. Although some interviewees were critical of the more restrictive approaches of the Wallonia Region, the availability of more resources was much appreciated and, indeed, a number of interviewees expressed the preference to also include in the obligation the migrants exempted from it, including EU and Turkish citizens. In the other institutions, there were occasional references to integration, but far fewer than the legislative process would have suggested. NCSs in the UK showed, in a few cases, more interest in the issue of integration, apparently because of their involvement in citizenship ceremonies, in which the integration dimension is more present, although performatively (Byrne, 2012; 2014). The comparative analysis shows how the main logic of a policy may not be shared by those implementing it. Partly this could be explained by the fact that there is no explicit mandate for the institutions interviewed in relation to citizenship to evaluate integration. In contrast to France, where this mandate does exist (Hajjat, 2012; Mazouz, 2017; 2019), integration is limited to the possession of specific documents (Belgium) or to the combination of tests and ceremonies (the UK). A further explanation might be that only institutions

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that already have an organizational culture receptive to a specific policy value are likely to take that value to heart –​if the organization has different core values, it can continue to prioritize those (compare Spire, 2008, who extends this reflection to individual bureaucrats).

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Political implications A large number of the changes to citizenship and integration policies in Europe since the late 1990s have been built around an integrationist ideology. Whereas there are several arguments against making integration mandatory or a precondition of access to rights, offering language courses, orientation about the institutions, culture and history of the country, or job training are all welcome activities. For some interviewees from the CRIs in Wallonia in particular, the mandatory nature of the integration courses was acceptable in exchange for enough investment in integration to allow a larger number of migrants access to courses. Forcing some unwilling to follow a course in order to allow other, more willing migrants access seems an acceptable approach for many. However, there are no intrinsic guarantee that the courses will remain free of charge. A more in-​d epth analysis of the policies and their implementation allows one to discuss in more detail the practical role of integrationism in the everyday working of the policies. Research with migrants who have experienced the citizenship policies of the UK has shown how such policies are experienced mostly as hoops to jump through and as restrictive notions of UK history and society (MacGregor and Bailey, 2012; Byrne, 2014; 2017; Bassel et al, 2018; Prabhat, 2018; Bassel et al, 2021; Fortier, 2021). However, my interviews on citizenship policy, both in the UK and in Belgium, showed a limited use of integration as a concept in the everyday work of the officials. From this point of view, citizenship policies

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do not even seem to be about mono-​or multi-​culturalism. Rather, integration requirements seem to be relatively arbitrary trials non-​citizens have to go through in order to prove to be deserving of equal rights. A further point is that integrationism has been strongly linked in north-​western Europe to the push to increase rates of participation in paid work by migrants and their descendants. The choice to tackle the issue through migration and cultural policies –​rather than through stronger anti-​discrimination policies, less deregulated labour laws, and public intervention in the economy –​is in line with broader neoliberal tendencies (Schinkel and Van Houdt, 2010; Van Houdt et al, 2011; Suvarierol, 2015). It is paradoxical how, despite this elective affinity between integrationism and the deregulation of the labour market, specific requirements both in the UK and especially in Belgium seem to require open-​ended contracts (for example, five years of uninterrupted employment fulfilling also social and linguistic integration requirements). A further issue is the degree to which citizenship and integration policies ensure equal and uniform treatment of the migrants involved, and to what degree the implementation moment itself adds discrimination to what might already be inherent in the letter of the law. Hajjat (2012) and Mazouz (2017; 2019) have shown a mix of restrictive ideas of deservingness and, in Hajjat’s case, some hesitation to apply some of the more Muslim-​hostile norms of nationality policy in France. For the Swiss context there is significant evidence of discrimination created in the implementation of policies, from the invasive procedure described for the 1980s (Centlivres et al, 1991), to the statistical discrimination against candidates from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia in the votes on individual applications (Helbling, 2008; Hainmuller and Hangartner, 2013), to discriminatory notions of gender, class and ethnicity involved in facilitated procedures for marriage-​based naturalization (Kristol and Dahinden, 2020). More isolated examples show the possible uses of discretional

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naturalization to openly discriminate against certain classes of applicants, as when a Greek minister gave instructions not to naturalize candidates from the Balkans (Christopoulos, 2009). In the data I have collected there are limited signs of overt discrimination comparable to that found in Switzerland for example. The interviews conducted with the Home Office in the UK, however, do suggest an organization of the work that casts suspicion on former asylum seekers, as well as on Kosovans and, to some degree, Bangladeshis. A separate issue is to what degree there is variation in the implementation of the laws, regardless of variation disfavouring a specific group in particular. The implementation of nationality law in Belgium created a significant geographic variation (or variation between offices). This variation is paradoxical given that the letter of the law was intended significantly to limit discretion. Some variation between offices, in particular NCSs, emerged also for citizenship policy in the UK, but this seemed more linked to uncertainty about the requirements for EEA citizens –​a situation that, however, becomes more problematic when considering the growing uncertainties for this group post Brexit (Sredanovic, 2020a; 2020c). What was more present both in citizenship policy in the UK and in integration policy in Wallonia was uncertainty relative to the outcomes (that is, variation between cases and between officers). In the case of integration in Wallonia, this was mostly in terms of adjustments done in the CRIs to exempt some of the migrants targeted by the obligation to complete a course. In citizenship policy in the UK, this was largely the effect of the discretion inscribed in the letter of the law; internal guidance and practice limited this discretion to a degree but did not avoid the procedure being highly uncertain not only for the applicants themselves, but also for the NCSs. The future of citizenship and integration Citizenship policies in Europe have had some inclusive general developments, including elimination of elements of formal

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gender inequality, provisions for the avoidance of statelessness, and an increased tolerance for dual citizenship (Vink and de Groot, 2010). At the same time, since the 1990s, citizenship has become politicized, with reforms of citizenship laws becoming more frequent and policy preferences becoming associated with left-​and right-​wing positions (see for example Sredanovic, 2016). Joppke (2003) described the political transformations in terms of left-​wing de-​ethnicization (easier access to citizenship, reduction of specific measures based on ancestry and ethnicity) and right-​wing re-​ethnicization (integration requirements, diasporic policies for descendants of citizens abroad). However, there are other tendencies that make citizenship laws increasingly particularistic (Sredanovic and Stadlmair, 2018), including investment-​based citizenship schemes (see for example Džankić, 2018; 2019), increased norms for (and use of) denaturalization (for example, Fargues et al, 2020), and criteria based on exceptional merits and demerits. This is mostly an issue of path dependence: it has been rare since the 1990s for citizenship laws to be significantly simplified once a particularistic norm has been introduced (Sredanovic, 2018b). Integration-​based requirements are one example: in Europe in 2016, only six countries (Cyprus, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Serbia and Sweden) had no formal integration requirements in the letter of the law according to the GLOBALCIT database; such requirements have since been introduced in Norway (in 2017) and in Italy (in 2018). Looking at a longer time period, it is rare that this type of requirement is removed or even relaxed (Sredanovic, 2016). A de-​culturization of citizenship, with length of residence returning on its own to be the basis of becoming a citizen, without a need also to show cultural conformity, seems unlikely at the moment in Europe if one looks at the letter of the laws. Still, the implementation of the policies can be somehow less culturalist. Some countries, including the UK, have abandoned more active mandatory integration courses in favour of tests or requiring documentary proof, and both in the UK and in Belgium the officers involved

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in nationality applications have shown limited engagement with the notion of integration. Similarly, the increase of particularistic norms in the letter of the law does not exclude that relatively standardized procedures such as those existing in Belgium and the UK could be less particularistic than the more ad hoc evaluations conducted in Belgium before 2000, as well as in other countries such as Switzerland. One specific and significant development in the UK has been the Brexit process, which has removed EU law protections from EU migrants (as well as their third-​country relatives) residing in the UK. This development has created significant anxiety within the group (see for example Guma and Jones, 2019; Lulle et al, 2019; Rzepnikowska, 2019; Sredanovic, 2020a; 2020b). EU citizens had a low naturalization rate, but the loss of rights linked to Brexit has increased naturalizations (Sredanovic and Della Puppa, 2020; Sredanovic, 2020a) in a context in which the Home Office has, however, increased the controls on the group, applying ten-​year retrospective controls to the previous exercise of EU treaty rights, which were less targeted in the pre-​Brexit context. Given that EEA applicants emerged as a group in respect of which there were more uncertainties about the implementation of the law, it might be possible that the EEA migrants present in the UK before Brexit will become another ‘legacy’ group to which specific norms apply, adding to the already complex citizenship legislation deriving from UK colonialism. In this general context, the ways in which citizenship policies are implemented become important, and frequent reforms and increased complexity are a recipe for increased discretion and the creation of local practices that diverge from the letter of the law (for a similar point about residence, see Eule, 2016). Integration policies have been somehow more uncertain in their development. As with citizenship policies, it is rare to see a mandatory integration policy, whether backed by fines or as a condition for legal status, entirely scrapped. However, mandatory integration policies are relatively expensive, and

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governments in Europe have in some cases reduced the role played by integration courses. The UK is an example of this, as the ESOL with citizenship courses introduced in 2002 as one of the options for fulfilling the language and ‘Life in the UK’ requirements ceased to qualify for the requirements in 2013, leaving only tests and university degrees as available routes (compare Cooke and Peutrell, 2019). The Netherlands has been an even more explicit example as in this case the transformation since the 1990s has been from voluntary and free integration courses, to free but compulsory, and to compulsory courses one must pay for (Bonjour, 2018). In such a context, the Flemish case appears consistent in having offered extensive and free integration courses for several years –​an approach that can be linked with the specific context of nation building and promotion of the Dutch language on the part of Flemish authorities (Adam, 2013a). However, as mentioned in Chapter Four, fees for the integration course have been announced also in Flanders. The switch, official or de facto, to private providers has been linked to a strong decline in quality in the Netherlands (Suvarierol and Kirk, 2015) and to suspicions of fraud in English language testing in the UK, with the latter linked to some migrants being denied status or even deported (Harding et al, 2020). Therefore, although I discussed in Chapter Four the ways in which integration requirements were sometimes relaxed in Wallonia, there is space for a significant worsening of these policies. Therefore, the overall development of integrationism in Europe since the late 1990s opens questions about the societies into which migrants are supposed to integrate. While offering language courses and orientation to migrants is certainly beneficial, making such offer compulsory for ‘integration’ purposes ignores diversity within the majority groups, offers little in terms of clear empirical results, and opens several problems in the implementation of policies. Increasingly, the concept of integration is itself shown to be problematic and subject to criticism, both within the social sciences and in society at large.

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Policy recommendations The comparative analysis also allows some indications to be advanced on the kind of policy and implementation that can improve equality in migration policies. Reducing discretion in the implementation of citizenship policies would be a way to improve guarantees for the applicants and to offer equal treatment, thus reducing space for the bias that tends to emerge in bureaucratic routines. Less discretion would avoid refugees and specific national groups such as Kosovans and Bangladeshis being examined with more suspicion in the UK. Discretion is not a bad thing in itself and may be essential in the implementation of some policies. However, naturalization procedures can be a relatively simple procedure, and specific issues of democratic equality justify a more rigid implementation in the case of citizenship. The ethnographic data presented in this volume and in earlier literature suggest that there is little to gain from generalized discretion in the evaluations of candidates for citizenship. Further, the bureaucracies called to evaluate applicants tend to reject part of the power of evaluation: Hajjat (2012) showed the perplexity of officers in France in relation to some issues of assimilation, and the Nationality Team in the UK limited the discretionary power deriving from the letter of the law. Further, some interviewees both in parquets and in the registers in Belgium deplored the fact that nationality policy is not applied more uniformly and non-​discretionally in Belgium. As some interviews show, discretion is sometimes used also to avoid paradoxical situations, such as demanding that applicants prove knowledge of their native language through a high school diploma. However, many of these cases could be avoided with a simpler formulation of requirements for naturalization. Discretion in integration policies played a different role, as in Wallonia where it was used to account for individual needs, both in the sense of migrants not needing to be subject to obligation, and in the sense of migrants who would have had

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difficulty in attending a required course. When the policy is more complex –​and the product is not simply the process –​ there is more reason to leave space for discretion. Still, many of the paradoxes the operators of integration in Wallonia had to manage derived from the mandatory nature of the integration course. While the obligation of the policy forced federal entities beyond Flanders to increase funding for integration, the same obligation pushed migrants who might have not needed the course to attend, potentially reducing the places available to those both willing and needing. The issue remains whether there are migrants who need an integration course but can access it only through the obligation. Avoiding the stereotype that identifies Muslim women as such a group (see the criticism of this stereotype in Kirk and Suvarierol, 2014; Eijberts and Ghorashi, 2017), there remains the question of how large such a group might be, and whether an obligation that could result in limitations on legal rights is really the best way to empower such a group. Effective judicial review, as already underlined in previous literature (for example Huddleston, 2020; Huddleston and Falke, 2020), has a positive effect on the implementation of policies. Parquets in Belgium were more attentive to the consequences of their decisions, knowing that each decision could be appealed and quashed in court, while the Nationality Team of the Home Office retained more leeway to reject applications that were merely suspected of irregularity, also because of the limited access to judicial review. Obviously, judicial review has a cost and adds to the workload of the courts. Moreover, judicial reviews have their own discretion (compare Moorhead and Cowan, 2007), as shown also in some interviews with parquets in Belgium mentioning court decisions not based on documents. Still, the courts offer a public and controlled environment that offers guarantees to the applicants. Simplified requirements –​regardless of whether requirements are lowered –​would improve policies. The multiplication of possible ways to fulfil the different integration requirements in

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Belgium created problems in implementing uniformly a policy that was explicitly designed to leave little space for subjective evaluation. A possible explanation for this complexity might be a will to recognize different conditions that allow the image of the ‘good citizen’ to be achieved. However, the specific configurations included in the law were met with perplexity by some of the officers interviewed, while still excluding certain kinds of candidates. Applicants with five years of uninterrupted employment, for example, were assumed to know one of the national languages. There is an intuitive assumption that workplaces can facilitate learning the local language, but several interviewees expressed doubts about the automatic link, and at the same time the norm constituted a punishment for those on fixed-​term contracts. Simplified requirements can allow coverage of more profiles, avoiding both the need for complex and diverging interpretation on the part of the officers and the risk of excluding certain social profiles from nationality. Similarly, avoiding undefined concepts in a policy greatly facilitates its implementation. Hajjat (2012) described the issues deriving from the unwillingness of the French legislator to define the concept of assimilation at the centre of the nationality policy. In the three cases considered in this book, undefined concepts were either more marginal (in nationality and integration policies in Belgium) or further defined through internal guidance (in UK citizenship policy). However, the criterion of good character represented an excessively flexible concept that could be utilized in several ways to reject a citizenship application in the UK (see also Kapoor and Narkowicz, 2019). Similarly, the similar concept of faits personnels graves is paradoxically left underdefined in Belgian nationality policy, despite a general approach to limit discretion and requests from the parquets themselves to have a clear definition of the concept (Sredanovic, 2018a). Again, there can be valid reasons to avoid codifying a concept, especially when expert judgement is required and leaving experts some leeway can allow them to make better use of their skills. In the case

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of integration policy in Belgium, this was explicitly defined through the use of the ‘social assessment’ of each migrant targeted by the policy. However, in the case of citizenship, there seemed to be little need to leave space for expert judgement, either in Belgium, where the applications were processed by highly qualified magistrates, or in the UK, where skills were mostly learned on the job. Finally, decentralized procedures created significant geographic variation in nationality policy in Belgium, as well as more modest variation at the level of the NCSs in the UK and in the implementation of integration policy in Wallonia. In all three cases, decentralization is in part due to the need to offer a point of access close to the public. As such, the fact that each municipality is required to process nationality applications in Belgium is welcome, also considering the historically unequal distribution of NCSs on UK territory. However, it should be noted that the need for registers to be more involved in Belgian nationality policy, and in particular to be a mandatory step in the application process, is due to the complexity of Belgian legislation and to the decision to charge the highly qualified parquets with processing applications. In the UK, relatively simpler legislation and the use of less-​qualified caseworkers (with the addition, however, of service rationing through the exceptionally high fees) meant that applicants could always send their application directly to the Home Office. Beyond the initial point of access, however, there are limited reasons to decentralize the entirety of the process in Belgium. The country is multilingual and with distinct policies –​including but not limited to integration policies –​across the federated entities, which means that a centralized procedure would require caseworkers with knowledge of the three national languages as well as of the different local policies. However, this situation already exists, such as, for example, when applicants have moved from Flanders to Wallonia, as well as in Brussels, where the parquet needs to cover applications both in French and in Dutch. In other words, centralization

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of the processing of applications would require significant adjustment, but such adjustments already exist on a smaller scale. At the same time, a full centralization is not the only possible solution. I observed in Chapter Five how a modest investment in terms of a few caseworkers managing a helpline allowed for an acceptable geographic uniformity in the implementation of British citizenship among the NCSs, and how regular meetings between the CRIs helped to make the implementation of integration in Wallonia less variable. Similar measures, along with an institutional organization allowing for collaboration between different institutions, would allow harmonization of nationality policy in Belgium and reduce unofficial policymaking on the part of local registers. The issue for Belgium, however, is that decisions on nationality are mostly the domain of magistrates, ‘borrowed’ from their primary activity of public prosecution to deal with nationality as a further work domain. In other words, an implementation of the aims of uniform and non-​discretional nationality policy would probably require allocating more resources to the parquets –​this would allow greater coordination among the parquets and between the parquets and other institutions. Further, this would allow limiting the role of local registers to the actual mandate of the law, rather than asking them to play a role in verifying the fulfilment of the requirements.

137

Notes one Introduction 1

2

3

I am following here the ‘modernist’ school of historical study of nations and nationalism, which emphasizes how the concept of nation is historically recent and originated between the 18th and 19th centuries. For a fuller account that also considers rival approaches see Özkırımlı, 2017. While ‘citizenship’ is the most common term in literature to refer to the legal link between an individual and the state, and ‘naturalization’ the most common term for the acquisition of citizenship, in Belgium the legal status is called ‘nationality’ (‘citizenship’ referring mostly to political rights) while the main procedure to acquire nationality is called ‘declaration’ (‘naturalization’ is a discretionary procedure that involves the Parliament and since 2012 has been limited to applications based on exceptional merits). In the UK ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationality’ are used interchangeably, and the procedure of acquisition is mostly called ‘naturalization’. In this book I use mostly ‘citizenship’ and ‘naturalization’, but I use ‘nationality’ and ‘nationality acquisition’ when referring to Belgium specifically. EU citizens are also often excluded from voluntary integration policies, assuming no problems of integration for the group; however, with the process of EU enlargement there can be lagging periods, in which citizens of the new member states continue to be targeted by voluntary integration policies –​Barbulescu, 2019.

two  Citizenship in the UK 1

2

3

In an interview with the managers of the Nationality Team of the Home Office we were told that the rest of Europe is not necessarily a significant point of reference for UK citizenship policy, which is more likely to look at the US, or to Canada and Australia. Citizenship ceremonies, often organized by the same personnel involved in NCSs, do not see the involvement of local authorities either in Northern Ireland (Byrne, 2014). This could probably be explained by the potential tensions that could derive from organizing ceremonies that include an oath to the Crown in certain parts of Northern Ireland. Intra-​EEA migrants for reasons other than work are required to hold health insurance in order not to be a cost to the local healthcare system; in the UK, the Home Office initially considered registration with the

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Notes

4 5

6

7

NHS to cover the requirement, but then changed the interpretation and started asking, although not systematically, this kind of migrant to hold private health insurance. This paragraph is based on data collected together with Émilien Fargues. At the time of the interview, the list included Afghanistan, Angola, Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Zimbabwe, with Zimbabwe on the list for issues of police brutality rather than specific armed conflicts. Post Brexit, the nationality guidance was revised in 2020, calling on caseworkers to control the exercise of treaty rights for EEA nationals in the last ten years (Vassiliou, 2020). The references we heard were to prestigious UK universities; with degrees obtained outside the UK, checks are already conducted by a dedicated agency, UK NARIC.

three  Nationality in Belgium 1 2

3

4

5

6

An earlier version of this chapter has been published as Sredanovic, 2020b. No similar measure was taken for the other two former Belgian colonies, Rwanda and Burundi, which were occupied by Belgium during the World War I and then administered as mandates first from the League of Nations and then from the United Nations. But see also the more detailed reconstructions in De Jonghe and Doutrepont, 2013; Apers, 2014; Wautelet, 2014; Closset and Renauld, 2015. Some parquets and associations have lamented the fact that certain civil registers send manifestly incomplete applications without alerting the candidate that essential documents are missing. However, I have never encountered such situations, probably either because this mostly affects smaller municipalities that I have not contacted, or because such registers, by having less interest in nationality procedures, were among those who did not answer my request for an interview. In this chapter I use ‘H’ for associations and services that help candidates for nationality, ‘P’ for the parquets, and ‘B’, ‘F’ and ‘W’ for local registers located respectively in the Brussels Region, Flanders or Wallonia. Hajjat considers a further variable, the social position of the officers. Having chosen a less in-​depth exploration of each office and having conducted, in some cases, collective interviews with more than one officer, I have not explored this dimension in my research.

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four  Integration in Belgium 1

2 3

It should be reminded however that an important part of this demand was created by the nationality policy and the possibility to use the integration course to fulfil the integration requirements for acquiring nationality. In the interviews with several CRIs, nationality applicants were recognized as the main component of the ‘voluntary’ public. In 2018 the policy was, however, changed to refer exclusively to legal residence in Belgium. This point was also changed in 2019 as the condition for being exempt was changed from having a work permit to having a job with at least 50 per cent of normal working hours and at least three months of contract.

five  Comparative Analyses 1

2

3

4

As previously mentioned, concepts of integration were, however, more present among the NCS officers interviewed in Andreouli and Stockport, 2009 and Andreouli and Dashtipour, 2014. As mentioned, Kristol and Dahinden (2020) show how much citizenship interviews in Switzerland are marked by prejudices linked to gender, class and ethnicity, even when they are conducted by specialized officers. There is some anecdotal evidence, as testified to by lawyers, that the Home Office as a whole (as opposed to the Nationality Team specifically) has a tendency occasionally to issue written decisions that are patently in contradiction to the facts of the case, but I am not aware of any systematic studies on how frequent this tendency is. The UK nationality law has its own version of complexity in the several types of postcolonial sub-​citizenship that still exist. However, most of the NCSs I met had never encountered a case based on this type of partial citizenship, and the Nationality Team did not seem to require extensive work on the matter, which suggests that applications based on these routes were rather rare.

140

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165

Index References to endnotes show both the page number and the note number (231n3). languages  83 bureaucracy, theory of  115

A Ankara Agreement (1963)  14, 91 armed forces, citizenship applications from members of  47 assimilation  6–​7, 57 in France  7, 19–​20, 115, 118, 135 asylum seekers  41–​3, 54 suspicion towards  41, 47, 48, 111

C Canada  7, 19, 28, 29 Centlivres, P.  13, 20, 128 Centres Publiques d’Action Sociale (CPAS)  96–​7, 104 Centres Regionaux d’Intégration (CRIs) [Regional Integration Centres]  112–​13, 125 assessment of individual needs  97–​104, 105–​6, 117 and implementation of integration in Wallonia  86, 88–​97, 119, 121–​2, 125, 127, 129 children  31, 49 acquisition of Belgian nationality  59 stateless  10 transfer of citizenship to  9–​10 citizenship  benefits of  3–​5 centralized approach  39–​40 centralized vs. decentralized approach  78–​9, 120–​2 ceremonies  8–​9, 30–​1, 35, 138n2 component of Belgian integration course  98 cultural conformity and legal guarantees  9–​16 decentralized approach  62, 76–​7, 78, 122, 136–​7 future of integration and 129–​32

B Bangladeshis  48–​9 Bauböck, R.  107, 120 Belgium  Brussels Region  22, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87 colonial migrants  56 family reunification  56 German-​speaking Community  24, 82, 85, 86–​7 guest workers  55–​6, 57 language competency  60, 65–​7, 98–​9, 99–​100, 105–​6, 135 marriage to a Belgian national  61 migration history  55–​6, 82–​3 work permits  87–​8, 96 see also courses in Belgium, integration; Flanders; integration in Belgium; nationality in Belgium; Wallonia Brexit  131 British Nationality Act 1948  28 Brussels Region  integration policies  22, 82, 85, 86, 87

166

Index

increasingly particularistic laws  130–​1 legal status of  3 policy implementation  16–​20 politicizing of  130 power to attribute  115–​16 reducing discretion in policy implementation  133 rights and inequality  3–​9, 15, 16 see also nationality in Belgium citizenship in United Kingdom  28–​54 barriers to acquisition  35–​7 citizenship ceremonies  8–​9, 30–​1, 35, 138n2 citizenship tests  8–​9, 12, 13, 30, 31, 62, 112, 132 colonial migrants  28–​9, 53 comparing Belgian nationality policy and  114–​15, 116, 122 compassionate considerations  47 cultural conformity  30–​1, 53 denaturalization  32–​3, 51–​2 discretion in awarding  32, 36–​7, 47–​50, 53–​4, 114–​15, 116, 121 discrimination against certain national groups  48–​9 EEA applicants  38–​9, 44, 46–​7, 73, 129, 131, 138n3 history and policy  28–​33 Home Office implementation  see Home Office, citizenship implementation in integrationist ideology driving  125 judicial review  53, 117, 123, 134 language tests  13, 30, 31, 48, 62, 132 legislation  28, 29, 30–​1 differences with Belgium  62, 77–​8, 78–​9 minor infractions of the law  37, 50 Nationality Checking Services  see nationality checking services (NCSs) in United Kingdom

residency requirement  31, 36, 38–​9 routes to acquisition  31–​2 sensitive applications  43, 44, 110 variation in policy implementation  119, 120, 121, 129 civil registers, Belgium  61, 64, 72, 111, 117, 137 geographic variation in interpretation of law  73, 74, 75, 120 and high volumes of applications  75, 124 processing of nationality applications  65, 67, 69 refusing of nationality applications  65 colonial migrants  to Belgium  56 to UK  28–​9, 53 comparative analyses  107–​26 applying law and changes to law  124–​6 discretion  113–​19 migration policies behind frontline  108–​13 variation factors  119–​24 compassionate considerations  47 Conservative-​Liberal Democrat coalition  31, 53, 125 Council of Europe  10 courses in Belgium, integration  67–​8, 80–​1, 133–​4 assessment of individual needs for  97–​104 correcting categorization errors  93–​5 course components  90, 98–​9 CPAS requirement for attendance at  96–​7 difficulties with working and course completion  96 discretion in obligation for  98, 100–​1, 105–​6, 133–​4 dossiers of non-​attendance  102

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evaluation  88 exemptions  86–​7, 90–​2, 93, 96, 99–​100 extension applications  103–​4 fees  87, 132 fines  101–​3 organization  86–​8 target populations  91, 92, 93 voluntary attendees  95 in Wallonia  67–​8, 88–​97, 112, 117, 119, 125, 127, 129 courses, integration  6, 7–​8, 13, 14, 132 in France  81, 104 in Netherlands  104, 110, 132 reduced role for  131–​2 research in Europe  81 see also language competency; tests crimes  faits personnels graves  70–​1, 111, 118–​19, 123, 135 minor infractions of UK law  37, 50 removal of citizenship for serious  51–​2, 59 war  42, 43 cultural conformity  in Belgium  58–​9, 60–​1, 67 in Europe  10–​14, 15, 130 in UK  30–​1, 53

comparative analyses  62, 113–​19 complexity of law and room for  123–​4 in obligating migrants to Belgium to complete integration courses  98, 100–​1, 105–​6, 133–​4 recommendation to reduce  133 street-​level bureaucrats and  104, 113–​14 in UK awarding of citizenship  32, 36–​7, 47–​50, 53–​4, 114–​15, 116, 121 and undefined concepts  123, 135–​6 discrimination towards migrants  20, 48–​9, 88, 128–​9 documentary system  59, 62, 76 dual citizenship  10, 52, 130 Dubois, V.  18

E economic integration  16, 128 and assumption of language competency  135 in Belgium  60, 68–​70, 96, 135 and difficulty in attending integration courses  96 English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL)  13, 21, 132 equality, rights and  3–​9, 15, 16, 63, 78 policy recommendations to improve  133–​7 Erasmus students  91 EUDO Citizenship  2–​3 European Economic Area (EEA), applicants from  14, 86 in UK  38–​9, 44, 46–​7, 73, 129, 131, 138n3 European Union (EU)  14, 55, 66 citizens and exemption from integration courses  91, 125, 138n3 citizens applying for British citizenship  46–​7

D democracy and principle of equality  15, 16, 63, 78 policy recommendations to uphold  133–​7 denaturalization  4 in Belgium  59–​60 in UK  32–​3, 51–​2 Denmark  5, 81, 115 deservingness, notion of  8, 13, 17, 19, 47, 114, 128 diplomas  65–​6, 87, 133 discretion  18–​20 in Belgian nationality policy  78, 114, 117, 118–​19, 133

168

Index

Directive 2003  11 framework for integration policy  10–​11, 84 residents in UK post-​Brexit  131 exemptions from integration courses in Belgium  86–​7, 90–​2, 93, 96, 99–​100 extension applications  103–​4

Gossiaux, A.  88, 89 Gourdeau, C.  6, 81, 97, 102, 104, 110 guest workers  55–​6, 57 guidance documents  45–​7

H Hajjat, A.  7, 12, 19, 20, 28, 39, 46, 55, 74, 115, 118, 120, 125, 128, 133, 135 health insurance  38, 44, 138n3 healthcare  44, 104 Helbling, M.  20, 39, 58, 73, 115, 116, 118, 120, 128 Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC)  43 Home Office, citizenship implementation in  39–​52 centralized organization  39–​40 fees  34, 35, 40–​1, 46–​7 marriages of convenience  49 Nationality Team  21, 34, 35–​6, 39–​40, 40–​2 and concept of integration 50–​1, 53–​4, 112 discretion  45–​51, 114–​15, 116 guidance documents  45–​7 rejection of applications  31, 47, 48–​9, 50, 116, 134, 135 routinization of decision-​ making  45–​7, 53, 114–​15 procedures  40–​5 security checks  41–​3, 110–​11 Special Cases Unit (SCU)  40, 43 Status Review Unit  40, 51 suspicions of fraud  47–​9, 51, 54, 111, 112, 116, 132 war crimes unit  42, 43 withdrawal and annulment 32–​3, 51–​2

F faits personnels graves  70–​1, 111, 118–​19, 123, 135 family reunification  6, 56 fees  in Belgium  64, 87, 132 in UK  34, 35, 40–​1, 46–​7 fines  101–​3, 111 Flanders  immigration to  82–​3 integration policies  67, 82, 84, 86, 87–​8, 104–​5, 125, 132 political parties  83, 84 FOREM  99, 100 France  assimilation  7, 19–​20, 115, 118, 135 hostility towards Muslim candidates  12, 19–​20 integration contract  84 integration courses  81, 104 nationality policy  55, 115, 128 fraud  statelessness as a consequence of  52 suspicions of  47–​9, 51, 54, 111, 112, 116, 132

G gender discrimination, reduction in  9–​10 geographic variation  72–​7, 78–​9, 120 German-​speaking Community in Belgium  24, 82, 85, 86–​7 Germany  12, 55, 56 GLOBALCIT  3, 130 good character  32, 43, 48, 135–​6

I implementation studies  16–​20, 108, 109 implementation theory  115 integration  and citizenship  3–​9

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in Europe  9–​16 defining  6–​7 differences between UK and Belgian policy on  62 future of citizenship and  129–​32 Home Office attitudes to concept of  50–​1, 53–​4, 112 Muslims a target for  12, 30, 84, 134 uncertain development of mandatory policies  131–​2 see also courses, integration; tests integration in Belgium  80–​106 CRIs and  see Centres Regionaux d’Intégration (CRIs) [Regional Integration Centres] determination of individual needs  97–​104 discretion  98, 100–​1, 105–​6, 133–​4 exceptions to general requirements  61 federal policy  82, 86, 104–​5 French and Dutch influences  84 history and policy  80–​8 divergent approaches  82–​6, 104–​5 organization of mandatory policies  86–​8 local politics and  83, 84, 85, 103, 120 need for simplification of requirements  134–​5 variation in policy implementation  106, 119, 120, 121–​2 see also courses in Belgium, integration integrationism  6, 8 comparing role in different integration policies  107, 125–​6 critiques of  14–​16 and future of integration  132–​3 Netherlands a laboratory for  12, 84

political implications  127–​9 spread of  12–​14, 84 Ireland  122, 130 Italy  50, 55, 115, 130

J judicial review  in Belgium  59, 76–​7, 117, 121, 122–​3, 134 in UK  53, 117, 123, 134

K Kosovans  48

L language competency  assessment in Belgium  60, 65–​7, 98–​9, 105–​6 tests  60, 99–​100 critique of tests for  16 economic integration and assumption of  135 tests in UK  13, 30, 31, 48, 62, 132 suspicions of fraud  48, 132 laws  applying and changing  124–​6 complexity of  123–​4, 136 countries without any integration  130 differences between UK and Belgian  62, 77–​8, 78–​9 increasingly particularistic citizenship  130–​1 minor infractions of  37, 50 and policy implementation  16–​20 reform of Belgian nationality  55, 56–​7, 58–​9 UK citizenship  28, 29, 30–​1 variation in application of Belgian  74–​7, 78, 129 ‘Life in the UK’ test  8–​9, 13, 30, 31, 62 Lipsky, M.  17, 45, 50, 57, 63, 113, 115

170

Index

children  59 civil registers  see civil registers, Belgium comparing UK citizenship policy and  114–​15, 116, 122 cultural conformity  58–​9, 60–​1, 67 decentralized procedure  62, 76–​7, 78, 122, 136–​7 discretion  78, 114, 117, 118–​19, 133 documentary system  59, 62, 76 geographic variation  72–​7, 78–​9 in application of law  74–​7, 78, 129 inter-​bureaucracy relationships  74 role of local politics  73–​4, 120 history and policy  55–​62 reintroduction of integration requirements in 2012  58–​9, 60–​1 implementation  63–​72 actors  64–​5 economic integration  60, 68–​70, 96, 135 faits personnels graves  70–​1, 111, 118–​19, 123, 135 integration courses  see courses in Belgium, integration language competency and diplomas  60, 65–​7, 98–​9, 99–​100, 105–​6 police interviews  57, 71–​2, 78, 114 refused applications  64–​5 residency requirement  60, 68 integrationist ideology driving  125 judicial review  59, 76–​7, 117, 121, 122–​3, 134 legal reform  55, 56–​7, 58–​9 legislative differences with UK  62, 77–​8, 78–​9 mandatory integration and integration requirements for  85–​6, 90, 99

M Manby, B.  120 marriage  to a Belgian national  61 to a British national  31, 49 of convenience in UK  49 and giving up citizenship of birth  10 methods  20–​4 migration policies  behind the frontline  108–​13 comparative analyses  107 history of Belgian  55–​6, 82–​3 liberal convergence in  11 study of ‘frontline’  108 mobility rights  5–​6 Mouvement Réformateur (MR) [Reformist Movement]  85, 103 multiculturalism  7 backlash against  12, 15 Muslims  hostility towards  12, 19–​20 targeted for integration measures  12, 30, 84, 134

N national cultures  1, 13, 16 see also cultural conformity Nationality Checking Services (NCSs) in United Kingdom  21, 33–​9, 47–​8, 111, 121, 125 closure  33 discretion  36–​7, 116, 121 economic considerations  35 EEA candidates and Permanent Residence issues  38–​9, 44, 73, 129 Home Office helpline  34, 35, 121 interest in concept of integration  112, 125 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002  30–​1 nationality in Belgium  55–​79 application fee  64

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parquets  see parquets, Belgium processing of applications  61–​2 rejection of applications  64–​5, 68, 71, 72, 74, 117 requirements under current law  59–​60 volume of applications  75, 124 withdrawal  59–​60 workload levels  75–​6, 124 Nationality Team, Home Office  21, 34, 35–​6, 39–​40 and concept of integration  50–​1, 53–​4, 112 internal guidance and discretion  45–​51, 114–​15, 116 procedures  40–​2 rejection of applications  31, 47, 48–​9, 50, 116, 134, 135 routinization of decision-​ making  45–​7, 53, 114–​15 naturalization processes  arguments against limiting access to  15 attitudes to  8–​9 ethnographic studies  13, 19 significant discretion and variation in  19–​20, 133 see also citizenship; citizenship in United Kingdom; nationality in Belgium Netherlands  applicants for Belgian nationality  66, 78, 110 integration courses  104, 110, 132 integration policy  81, 84, 104 a laboratory for integrationism  12, 84 New Labour governments  30, 31, 35, 53, 125 New Public Management  45, 113 Northern Ireland  33, 122, 138n2 Norway  81, 130

approaches to linguistic competence  66–​7, 99 attitudes to police interviews 71–​2, 114 decentralized procedure and variations in decision-​making  76–​7 determination of economic integration  68, 69–​70 differing attitudes to faits personnels graves  70–​1, 111, 118–​19 examination of nationality applications  64–​5, 117, 122, 134, 136 negative opinions  62, 117 workload levels and links with variations in decision-​ making  75–​6, 124 permanent residence  4, 6, 10, 14 EEA candidates  38–​9, 44, 46–​7, 73, 129 police interviews  57, 71–​2, 78, 114 policy recommendations  133–​7 politics, local  in Belgium  73–​4, 83–5, 103, 120 in Switzerland  20

R Regional Integration Centres (CRIs)  see Centres Regionaux d’Intégration (CRIs) [Regional Integration Centres] rejection  of citizenship applications in UK  31, 47, 48–​9, 50, 116, 134, 135 of nationality applications in Belgium  64–​5, 68, 71, 72, 74, 117 of PR applications in UK  44 residency requirement  in Belgium  60, 68 UK  31, 36, 38–​9

P Panorama  48 parquets, Belgium  21–​2, 62, 111, 112 allocating more resources to  137

172

Index

marriage to a British national  31, 49 New Labour governments  30, 31, 35, 53, 125 riots in 2001  30 Visa and Citizenship Application Services  33 Windrush scandal  29 see also citizenship in United Kingdom; Home Office, citizenship implementation in; Nationality Checking Services (NCSs) in United Kingdom United States  7, 19

S security checks  41–​3, 110–​11 Special Cases Unit (SCU), Home Office  40, 43 Spire, A.  17, 18, 23, 50, 57, 108, 109, 120, 126 statelessness  avoidance of  10, 130 as a consequence of fraud  52 denaturalization resulting in  32–​3 Status Review Unit, Home Office  40, 51 Switzerland  39, 73, 118 discrimination  20, 128, 140n2 naturalization applications  115, 116 naturalization policies  13, 20 variation in citizenship policy implementation  73, 120

V variation, factors of  119–​24, 129 centralized vs. decentralized approach  120–​2 complexity of law and  123–​4 geographic  72–​7, 78–​9, 120 local political orientation and  120 volunteering  31 voting rights  5

T terminology  138n2 tests  6, 8, 11, 12 UK citizenship  8–​9, 12, 13, 30, 31, 62, 112, 132 UK language  13, 30, 31, 48, 62, 132 suspicions of fraud  48, 132 see also courses in Belgium, integration; courses, integration; language competency Turkey  Ankara Agreement  14, 91 migrants to Belgium  14, 91–​2 Swiss discrimination against applicants from  128

W Wallonia  courses in Belgium, integration in  67–​8 CRIs and implementation of integration  86, 88–​97, 119, 121–​2, 125, 127, 129 assessment of individual needs  97–​104, 105–​6, 117 integration courses  88–​97, 112, 117, 119, 125, 127, 129 integration policies  85, 86–​7, 103 migration to  82–​3 move to mandatory integration course  67–​8 political composition of local government  103 war crimes unit  42, 43 Weber, M.  17, 115

U United Kingdom (UK)  Brexit  131 colonial migrants  28–​9, 53 Conservative-​Liberal Democrat coalition  31, 53, 125

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welfare, access to  4–​5, 96–​7 Windrush scandal  29 withdrawal of citizenship  4 in Belgium  59–​60 in UK  32–​3, 51–​2 work  see economic integration work permits  87–​8, 96

workload levels and links with variation in policy implementation  75–​6, 124

Y Yugoslavia  55, 128

174

“In this striking book, Sredanovic sheds new light on the central role played by the implementation processes of citizenship and integration policies. This is a powerful demonstration of how discretion and institutional organization produce variations.” Andrea Rea, Université Libre de Bruxelles

“The wealth of empirical material in Sredanovic’s book paints a wonderful picture of the complex implementation of naturalization procedures. It offers a welcome contribution to understanding the workings of discretion in different legal and political contexts.” Jelena Džankić, European University Institute

“This distinctive book uncovers how the meaning of integration changes at the point of implementing policy, and tracks how discretion and diverging interpretations of the law can hinder but also help migrants seeking citizenship status.” Anne-Marie Fortier, Lancaster University

In this incisive analysis, Sredanovic compares and contrasts the experiences of citizenship and integration policies in the UK and Belgium. In-depth interviews with officials illuminate both the everyday application of approaches to citizenship and integration, and their evolution in recent years. By examining the levels of discretion that exist within the two countries’ systems, this book explores the variations within the implementation processes.

Djordje Sredanovic is a F.R.S.–FNRS postdoctoral fellow at the Group for Research on Ethnic Relations, Migration and Equality at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

The first comparative work of its kind, this book goes beyond the analysis of legislation to explore how citizenship and integration policies are applied on the frontline.

ISBN 978-1-5292-1988-3

@BrisUniPress BristolUniversityPress bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

@policypress

9 781529 219883