Last year, COMPAS worked with Migration Policy Institute Europe on a project for the Dutch government on mainstreaming migrant integration. The report of that work, written by Elizabeth Collett and Milica Petrovic, has now been published:
Liz and Milica are presenting this work at the COMPAS Breakfast Briefing this week, on Friday 13 June.
How to strike a balance between mainstream and targeted efforts for immigrant integration in Europe?
The UK debate has been obsessed with numbers, limits and caps since 2010, and arguably a generation. This misses the real story of immigration: how immigrants integrate into society. When do migrants cease to be migrants? The integration story is a complex one but its importance cannot be understated: whether or not groups are successfully included will ultimately shape immigration policy. MPI Europe has been interested in what governments can do to encourage such a process. In the UK, policy responsibility for integration is diffused through a range of national and local government agencies, often with unclear or overlapping mandates. In contrast, countries in mainland Europe, such as the Netherlands and Denmark, tend to resource specialised actors within government that design and manage integration policies in isolation from mainstream policy, with clear targets and tailored interventions. As policy-makers in these countries grapple with the need to infuse integration priorities into mainstream policy portfolios across government, what can be learned from the British experience, and vice versa?
Partly building on this work, Erasmus University Rotterdam developed the UpStream project, which aims to explore the politics and practice of mainstreaming in more depth. UpStream’s first publications are now out:
The literature review and policy brief on the conceptualization of mainstreaming are the result of the first phase of the UPSTREAM project. Now published online! The study approaches mainstreaming from both migration- and policy-literature providing a comprehensive conceptualization of mainstreaming. The literature review serves as the first step of the UPSTREAM project. Currently the conceptualization is applied to the different EU, country and city cases as part of the following workpackage, analyzing mainstreaming at a policy level.
UPSTREAM RESEARCH REPORT: Van Breugel, Maan and Scholten (2014). Conceptualizing Mainstreaming in Integration Governance; a literature review (workpackage 1). Click here.
UPSTREAM POLICY BRIEF: UPSTREAM project (2014). Policy Brief nr.1: Conceptualizing Mainstreaming in Integration Governance. Click here.
August 12th, 2014 at 11:43 am
[…] The work was done last summer as part of an MPI Europe project for the Dutch government described here. The work informed the Upstream project which we subsequently developed with Erasmus University […]