Measuring Immigrant Integration in the European Union

In 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel claimed that multiculturalism had “utterly failed,” a statement, which was quickly echoed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron. This belief that multiculturalism had created divided populations across European had also been debated fiercely in the academic literature on immigration and immigrant integration since the turn of the century. Yet this is not the only debate about integration taking place in the literature. Many scholars debate whether European integration processes due to supranational norms and institutions, such as the EU. Yet, these qualitative debates about integration policy appear to be taking place in a vacuum. In the academic literature, there is little discussion of ways to measure the efficacy integration policies in a quantitative fashion. Amongst EU policy-makers, this idea has been on the table for almost fifteen with only a few reports to show for it. Thus, my research seeks to add to the body of research on European immigrant integration, by examining what makes an integration policy more or less effective. To do this, I have examined the issue from both angles: quantitative and qualitative. On the quantitative side, I created a scale to measure integration policies of 25 EU countries against each other, using EU definitions of integration and Eurostat, Eurobarometer, OECD, and MIPEX data. Furthermore, I seek to examine immigration integration in greater depth by examining three different cases, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. Thus, by examining it from multiple angles, I aim to better understand this important issue.