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In Europe, the tendency among immigrants and descendants to seek out and interact with other coethnics has raised concern for their integration as it can reduce contact with the ethnic majority. Though policymakers implement large-scale integration programs to counteract these trends, it remains empirically and theoretically ambiguous whether exposure to coethnic peers impedes integration, and causal evidence is more limited for the growing population of migrant children. In this article, I use high-quality Danish administrative panel data over 28 y to investigate whether the ethnic composition experienced in childhood among immigrants and descendants with a non-EU background affects a core behavioral indicator of integration: naturalization. To isolate the causal effect of the childhood ethnic composition, I use the quasi-experimental assignment of siblings into different school grades in the same school. I find that being exposed to coethnic peers in the school grade increases the probability of naturalizing later in life. The main explanation is that exposure to some coethnic peers improves academic skills which are positively correlated with citizenship acquisition. These findings demonstrate the causal importance of non-EU migrant children's social environment for their later integration into the national community showing that the modest presence of coethnic peers can be a precondition for, not a barrier to, integration., Competing Interests: Competing interests statement:The author declares no competing interest.

What are the long-term differences in the propensity of immigrants to acquire destination country citizenship under different institutional contexts and how do these vary between migrant groups? This article draws on micro-level longitudinal data from administrative registers in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden—three countries with widely different and changing requirements for the acquisition of citizenship—to track the naturalization propensity of eight complete migrant cohorts (1994–2001) up to 21 years after migration. We find that after two decades in the destination country, cumulative naturalization rates vary remarkably with over 80 per cent of migrants in Sweden, two-thirds in the Netherlands, and only around a third in Denmark having acquired citizenship. We observe lower rates and delayed naturalization for migrants, especially among those with lower levels of education, after language requirements and integration tests were introduced in Denmark and the Netherlands. Dual citizenship acceptance in the Netherlands and Sweden, by contrast, is associated with durably higher citizenship acquisition rates, especially, among migrants from EU and highly developed countries. These findings highlight the long-term but conditional relevance of citizenship policy for immigrant naturalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the general context of naturalisation in Denmark, from a politico-legal angle, setting the frame of the current debate and introduction of the citizenship test. It also examines the content of the citizenship test and the arguments that have accompanied its adoption. It then provides a more theoretical approach to the use of citizenship tests, evaluating the arguments for and against this practice in citizenship regulation.

The article reports on the results of research which was conducted in an effort to determine whether medical students from one of the largest medical schools in Europe, the University of Copenhagen, would be intelligent enough to pass a test on Danish society that people who are applying for Danish citizenship are required to pass. Researchers used 40 questions from the 200 question multiple choice citizenship test and gave them to 158 medical students from the university. They found that only 42% of the students were able to correctly answer all of the questions.