The Chronikler

New model citizens

By Khaled Diab

Tougher naturalisation laws are counterproductive. What we need is to redefine our understanding of citizenship.

7 August 2009

The British government has unveiled tough new proposals to make it even harder for immigrants to gain citizenship. The measures range from the draconian – such as a ban on anti-war protests and testing people’s “integration” into the “British way of life” – to the more sensible, such as rewarding would-be citizens for their engagement in the democratic and civic life of the country.

But this new points-based system misses the point. If a government and society feel that the inflow of people is too high or unsustainable, they can reduce the number of immigrants entering their countries. Immigration can be made more difficult, but citizenship should be made easier.

Once people are resident in the country, they should have the right to become full members of the social compact between citizens and the government: people pay taxes and in return they have the right to choose the government and hold it to account. Expecting immigrants to pay but not play in this way is like the old-fashioned attitude to children: they should be seen but not heard.

It is also grossly unfair. Anyone living in a country for a number of years is affected by the decisions of the political apparatus. Depriving them of full citizenship also deprives them of their right to hold the government to account and to choose a government that defends their interests.

The inequity of the situation is made even worse when you consider that non-resident citizens are allowed, in many countries, to vote and shape the political landscape, but don’t live with the consequences – and often don’t even pay taxes in their home country. In fact, in countries with large communities abroad, the diaspora can be a major political force at home. There are even situations where people who have never lived in a country have more rights than those who have spent many years there.

With increasing levels of mobility around the world, we need to rethink and redefine our concepts of citizenship. Personally, I long for the day when supranational and international citizenship become the norm, and you pay taxes and vote where you happen to be living at the time. But that remains a distant and dim prospect.

It is sensible for countries to say that immigrants cannot apply for nationality until after a certain number of years living in the country (though this should not be set too high: four to five years perhaps) but they should reduce the number of bureaucratic hoops people have to jump through to become citizens. Belgium’s snel Belg wet is a good model in this regard: simple, straightforward procedures, no silly integration tests and no idiotic pledges of allegiance.

But residents who have not yet applied for nationality or, for whatever reason, do not wish to should have the right to vote in local and national elections. Likewise, citizens who have emigrated abroad or are living out of the country long term, especially if they are not paying taxes, should not have the right to vote.

Giving immigrants a voice in the affairs of state is not only good for them, it is also good for society. The elusive integration of immigrants everyone talks about is most likely to be achieved when they are made to feel they have a stake in society and can exercise their rights as active citizens.

We’ve come a long way from the exclusive origins of citizenship as being the free men of a city state. But we still have some way to go yet before our understanding of citizenship is truly inclusive.

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Immigrant labours lost

By Khaled Diab

Immigrants in Europe are more likely to be over-qualified for the jobs or unemployed than the native population.

December 2008

A supermarket I frequent in Brussels is much like any other, except for one key difference. Many of the people who work there have university degrees, including a few master’s and PhDs.

Younis, a young Moroccan with a small family, has been working there for at least the past seven years. When he arrived in Belgium already armed with a master’s from Morocco, he could not find suitable work, so he decided to work at the supermarket while he completed a second post-graduate degree in political science, something which should be fairly useful in Brussels.

But even with that additional qualification in hand, he has not managed to check himself out of the supermarket. Younis has recently embarked on a new campaign to break out of the supermarket aisles and negotiate broader avenues to the future: he has become a volunteer local party activist.

 Younis and his colleagues are not alone. A new OECD report of four European countries – Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Portugal – has found that first- and second-generation immigrants there are more likely to be doing jobs for which they are overqualified than the population at large. They are also more likely to be unemployed, except in the case of Portugal where unemployment is lower among immigrants due to the fact that many moved there with the express purpose of filling labour shortages.

Interestingly, despite the fact that the Netherlands was among the first European countries to develop a proactive integration policy, the results since the severe economic recession of the 1980s have been poor, with the position of immigrants and their offspring in the labour force among the worst in the 30-member OECD.

Here, in Belgium – which, with more than 12% of its population born in another country, has one of the highest immigration rates in Europe – labour market outcomes for non-EU immigrants is also disappointing. The reasons behind this are complex. The collapse of Belgian heavy industry and mining has hurt disproportionately those migrants, and their families, who moved here decades ago to fill the post-war labour shortages.

These early immigrants tended to be uneducated rural dwellers, many were even illiterate. Although better educated than their parents, second-generation immigrants are often less qualified than more recent immigrants and significantly less educated than the population at large. This is because, in many poverty-ridden immigrant households, children are often discouraged from pursuing or unable to go on to higher education.

 Their families either undervalue the benefits of education or the youngsters don’t believe that going the extra mile will improve their employment prospects – as this report partly confirms. In addition, schools with sizeable numbers of immigrants tend to be under-funded and teachers there often advise their students to work towards a technical qualification rather than go to university.

 This prejudice continues into the workplace, where employers, even if they are not overtly racist, do not believe that qualified immigrants truly possess the requisite skills or cultural understanding to do the job. “Testing in the past has pointed to the existence of discrimination against immigrants in hiring,” points out the OECD report.

Unemployment among immigrant communities is 2.5 times that of the native population. Only one third of immigrant women are in employment. Nevertheless, despite the oppressed popular image of women in many immigrant communities, more Belgian-born North African and Turkish women go on to university than their men. Studies have also shown that immigrant girls perform better than boys in school and university.

Despite their underprivileged roots, economic hardships and the burden of prejudice, many immigrant families have struggled hard to make a go of things. For instance, one Algerian family I know of five sisters and a brother have all, thanks to their parents sacrifices and their own dedication and hard work, received university educations and are building good careers for themselves. One of the sisters, an academic, has even become an adviser to the minister of integration.

This is all the more remarkable when you consider that their parents are illiterate and can barely speak French or Dutch. In fact, language is a major barrier in multilingual Belgium, where many jobs require applicants to be competent in three languages (French, Dutch and English) or more.

In recent years, the Belgian government has been dedicating significant resources to the challenge. For the past decade, there has been a robust anti-discrimination drive and a comprehensive diversity policy, and indirect incentives and mechanisms to bring about equal opportunity in both the labour market and the education system. Belgium also has one of the most liberal naturalisation policies in the OECD and this, among other benefits, has gradually opened up the substantial public sector to immigrants.

As the economic crisis deepens, immigrant communities are likely to be among the most to suffer. The report urges governments to continue investing in policies to boost the job prospects, and long-term integration, of immigrants.

This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 10 December 2008. Read the related discussion.

This is an archive piece that was migrated to this website from Diabolic Digest

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