https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6403-7342
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ABSTRACT
How do sub-state regions respond to immigration and what drives their policy choices? Combining the cross-national literature on citizenship and integration policy with the literature on immigration federalism, it is hypothesized that sub-state nationalism and multilevel party politics explain why some regions formulate more restrictive immigrant integration policies than others. Analyzing integration laws of German, Italian and Spanish regions demonstrates that socioeconomically inclusive measures dominate, regardless of national context. Where restrictive provisions occur at all, they are associated with minority nationalism and the strength of anti-immigrant parties, while leftist regions facing right-wing national governments tend to adopt a more inclusive policies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author thanks Romy Hansum, Katharina Potinius and Annika Stein for excellent research assistance with collecting and coding the integration laws, and Leonce Röth for generously sharing data on regional party politics and regional economies. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops 2017 in Nottingham and at the CES 2017 Annual Conference in Glasgow. Very helpful comments were given by Ilke Adam, Alexandra Filindra, Sean Müller, Lorenzo Piccoli, Anita Manatschal and Michael Tatham, as well as by two anonymous referees.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Integration and citizenship policy may also target immigrants’ offspring born in the host state. All regional laws analyzed here target third-country nationals (i.e., non-European Union citizens) residing in the region. Some laws additionally target residents from other European Union countries (if provisions in the integration laws are more favourable than the status they enjoy otherwise), as well as natives whose parents were born abroad.
2. The terms ‘national’, ‘state’ and ‘country’ are used interchangeably to refer to the highest level of government. The terms ‘regions’ (Italy), ‘autonomous communities’ (Spain) or ‘Länder’ (Germany) are used to refer to the regional level of government. In multinational states, using the term ‘national’ is ambiguous, since we find groups conceiving of themselves as nations at the regional level. To delineate the difference, the latter are qualified as ‘sub-state’ or ‘minority nations’, and the regions they inhabit as ‘minority regions’.
3. Italy has 20 regions. The autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano (which constitute the region Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol) are treated as separate cases since the provinces hold the relevant legislative competencies. Vernacular names of sub-state units are used throughout to ease the tracing of original sources.
4. These differences are often described in terms of ‘ethnic’ versus ‘civic nationalism’, but this emphasis on a categorical difference obscures the explanatory power of the sequence of state and community formation.
5. Empirically, national minorities in Europe differ from each other in terms of how narrowly they construct their group identity. Political elites in Scotland and Catalunya, in particular, are consciously avoiding ethnic constructions of the sub-state nation, emphasizing shared social-democratic, egalitarian values (Scotland) or a shared linguistic and cultural identity (Catalunya) instead.
6. For an analysis of the integration plans of all Spanish ACs, see Iglesias de Ussel (Citation2010). Henkes (Citation2008) analyses headscarf legislation in all German Länder.
7. This holds regardless of whether regions have special or ordinary statutes in Italy, or whether or not they have special fiscal regimes in Spain.
8. Except for Basilicata, which made a new law after the first round of coding had been finalized.
9. Regional laws in other policy domains (e.g., education, health, social housing) and whether (and in which way) regional autonomy statutes make reference to immigration and integration are topics for future research.
10. Gesetz über den Aufenthalt, die Erwerbstätigkeit und die Integration von Ausländern im Bundesgebiet in der Fassung der Bekanntmachung vom 25.02.2008 (BGBl. I, 2008, p. 162).
11. For results of the coding, data and replication code, see the author's website at http://christinazuber.com/data/.
12. The description of the coding scheme in Appendix C draws on Zuber (Citation2014).
13. Averages for Spain and Germany should be treated with care, since they are based on a small number of laws.
14. Appendix D in the supplemental data online shows that the effect of minority nationalism is robust to the exclusion of Bavaria across all models.
15. Regional GDP data as of 1990 were kindly provided by Leonce Röth. GDP per capita for Italian regions before 1990 were taken from the Associazione per lo Sviluppo dell’Industria nel Mezzogiorno (SVIMEZ) (Citation2000).
16. Fixed effects take into account unobserved heterogeneity between countries. Ideally, one would add country-clustered standard errors to account also for potential interdependencies among regions within the same country. However, with only three clusters, the assumption of the number of clusters approaching infinity would be severely violated (Cameron & Miller, Citation2015, p. 318).
17. To determine outliers, leverage and squared residuals of observations were plotted using Stata's lvr2plot command and DFITS statistics were calculated to summarize the graphical information from the leverage plots into a single statistic following Welsch and Kuh (Citation1977).
18. Bavaria's integration law was perceived by many as a law of exclusion, not integration. The Bavarian Social Democrats and Greens filed a case against the law at the Bavarian constitutional court, which is still pending.