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This Chapter aims to analyse immigrant integration policies in Europe. The ‘traditional national models of immigration and integration’, which for decades have oriented the integration of immigrants in Europe, have been gradually blurred by the European convergence towards civic integration—that is policies asking immigrants to demonstrate their knowledge of the language, culture, and traditions of their new country of residence, to obtain a residence permit or the citizenship status. Language and cultural skills generally favour the socio-economic integration of immigrants into the host society. Nevertheless, the current characteristics of civic integration, based on criteria of selection and control of immigrants, risk undermining the social cohesion of European societies, since they intend to pursue differentiated integration pathways. This Chapter provides an introduction to the concept of integration in Europe and explores the different ‘traditional models of immigration and integration’ in the continent. In doing so, I seek to demonstrate in what ways the previously distinct models are converging towards civic integration and what implications this shift could bear for immigrants’ integration in the host society.

This chapter systematically investigates whether EU asylum policies represented the lowest standard of the Member States and whether EU asylum policies entailed a race to the bottom in protection standards across Europe. Following the theoretical model advanced here, one would expect that EU asylum policies do not represent the lowest standard of all Member States, but the lowest standard among the strong regulators. Where the lowest standard of all Member States is provided by a weak regulator, this should not be reflected in EU law. In the next section, I will systematically assess which Member States’ standards appeared most similar to those laid down in the three directives. Subsequently, I will investigate whether Member States changed their policies after the directives were adopted or whether they maintained their status quo ante. The venue-shopping theory would expect states to change their policies, but the theoretical model I advance instead suggests that states will maintain the status quo ante. Strong regulators should be able to maintain their policies, as they had uploaded their status quo ante to the EU level. Weak regulators are expected to maintain their status quo ante due to either calculated non-implementation or their low levels of government effectiveness and the substantial degree of misfit which overburdens the already ineffective administrations of these countries. In the third section, I will summarise the key findings of this chapter.

In the previous chapter, I explained why the agreed protection standards did not represent the lowest common denominator of all Member States but only that of the strong regulators. In this chapter, I will explain the absence of a race to the bottom and illustrate why Member States did not change their policies in most instances when implementing EU legislation. Doing so is crucial to scrutinising the theoretical model proposed, which is based on the expectation that Member States try to maintain their current practice. I will also scrutinise whether the few instances of change that occurred were based on strategic venue-shopping or other dynamics.

Ayse Parla deals in great ethnographic detail with the changing importance of ethnic migration after the 1990s, as irregular labour migration rose to the fore. Over the past two decades the legal status of Turkish migrants from Bulgaria changed significantly. While in the past they were received as ethnic kin and prospective citizens, today they have become dispensable labour migrants moving back and forth between Bulgaria and Turkey.

In February 1869, on the initiative of Napoleon III, Brown-Sequard was appointed course lecturer to a Chair of Comparative and Experimental Pathology of the Paris Medical Faculty. Restrictions on his excessive demands for animals, chemicals and materials, lead to him suffering depression and resigning from his post in February 1872. In September 1870, he lectured at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, on the experiments that convinced him of the heredity of acquired characteristics, which was thought then to comply with the Darwinian theory of natural selection but was later on, categorically rejected.