Naturalization And Political Integration

Immigration is a political issue which reveals the inherent contradiction behind the notion of the liberal democratic nation state. That being the universal promise of human rights, and the exclusive promise of membership to the nation. Nowhere is this clearer than the debate surrounding naturalization and the granting of citizenship to immigrants. Historically in Europe, citizenship has been intrinsically tied to membership of a singular culture or ethnicity, but over the last few decades there has been a general trend of liberalization throughout Europe. However, for the most part naturalization is viewed as a reward granted to the immigrants who show an understanding and appreciation of the civic and cultural norms already in place. The
As most governments view naturalization as the natural endpoint of integrative processes, many scholars have treated naturalization as a reflection of integration, rather than a driver of integration. For that reason, many scholars who focus on naturalization as a method to encourage integration struggle with separating countries with high rates of naturalization from countries who are more successful with integrating new
explored whether naturalization led to increased political integration by looking at a select few counties in Switzerland. In Switzerland, prior to 2003, many municipalities use secret ballots as the method of making individual naturalization decisions, leading to a scenario similar to a natural experiment were similar and often adjacent counties have vastly different policies on naturalization. Thus allowing for the authors to control for whether naturalization is the driver of political integration, rather than merely the cause of it. The results of their findings suggested that immigrants who did not receive citizenship, even compared to cases who only won by a few cotes, remained disengaged from democratic and political processes. Hainmuller et al. does not examine the mechanisms through which naturalization may aid political participation, but it clearly underlines the positive effect that naturalization has on political engagement, separate from the initial point of political engagement of the immigrant. Reeskens and Wright study of 2008 data from the European Values Study focuses less on political participation, and instead shifts their attention towards feeling of affection and belong of immigrants to their new host country (2013). In their paper they examine how national pride and territorial identical, the later measured with the question ‘ Which of these geographical groups do you belong to first of all’, are dependent on