"Welcome to France.” Can mandatory integration contracts foster immigrant integration?

Abstract

European governments, struggling with the incorporation of diverse immigrant populations, introduced integration contracts. Through language training and compulsory civics courses, the goal is to induce immigrants to adopt host society culture and respect its values. Despite their popularity, little empirical evidence exists whether they catalyze integration or trigger a backlash. To shed light on this question, we leverage the staggered introduction of France’s integration contract across metropolitan departments between 2003 and 2006 to implement a regression discontinuity design. We use census and labor force surveys to precisely estimate the effect of the contract on standard integration outcomes, and conduct our own survey of refugees to enrich our integration measures. We find that the integration contract did not increase economic and social integration, nor immigrants’ identification with France. However, we also do not find evidence of a backlash, suggesting that both hopes and criticisms of civic integration policies are exaggerated.

In or Out? Xenophobic Violence and Foreigner Integration. Evidence from 19th century France

“…Other measures have attempted to increase the benefits of assimilation. This includes, among others, language training and compulsory civic courses (Emeriau et al, 2022), facilitating the accession to the host society's nationality (Dahl et al, 2022) or indirectly the abolition of military service for nationals (Govind and Sirugue, 2023). Such policies, building on our theoretical findings, are likely to favour well-integrated foreigners over those with lower level of integration.…”

Citizenship and integration

“…Looking more broadly at the whole integration program CAI, (Emeriau et al, 2022) take advantage of the staggered introduction of the policy across metropolitan areas in France to implement a RDD. They find that the integration policy did little in the medium-run to foster the economic and social integration of immigrants and refugees.…”

Cash-Based Interventions Improve Multidimensional Integration Outcomes of Venezuelan Immigrants

“…Following Harder et al (2018), we define integration as immigrants' knowledge and capacity to lead a self-sufficient and successful life in the host society and employ an adapted version of IPL-24 integration index to measure it. This index is a pragmatic, survey-based measure of immigrant integration and is increasingly adopted in a diverse set of contexts (Aksoy, Poutvaara, and Schikora, 2023;Schilling and Stillman, 2021;Alrababah et al, 2023;Emeriau et al, 2022;Knefel et al, 2020). In line with the above definition, the IPL-24 integration index puts emphasis on knowledge and capacity.…”