Regulating Membership

Abstract

In many European countries, family migration polices have grown increasingly restrictive in the past decade. At the same time, family migration rights are often highly stratified—for instance, depending on the nationality and also the occupation of the sponsor or the incoming family members, more or fewer conditions have to be fulfilled for reunification. This article maps out a framework for the analysis of family migration policies focusing on the concept of “membership.” Policies requiring certain levels of income, integration, or “attachment” all assess the membership of applicants in various ways. The stronger one’s membership and belonging to the community is considered to be, the stronger the claim to family migration rights. Different dimensions of membership, such as legal, socioeconomic and ethnocultural membership can thus be useful lenses of analysis to grasp how and why restrictive and stratifying family migration policies are conceptualized, justified, and implemented across Europe.

Keywords

family migration policy membership citizenship politics of belonging

Introduction: Making Sense of Restriction and Stratification in Family Migration Policies

In one way or another, all the contributions to this special issue deal with the increasing restriction of family migration policies in various European countries: the authors illustrate the specificities of recent family migration reforms in different country cases, and analyze the reasons governments present to restrict family migration, the impact restrictions have on actual flows, or the strategies incoming spouses and sponsors develop to deal with legal hurdles. However, family migration policies are becoming not only more restrictive in certain places but also increasingly stratified. More (and more complex) admission conditions and overlapping legal regimes are governing family migration, and thus factors such as nationality, income, and education increasingly determine whether it will be easy, difficult, or impossible for individuals to reunite with their family.

A second theme that connects the individual contributions of this special issue is integration. Integration has been increasingly connected with discussions on “the migrant family,” often suggesting a detrimental effect of family migration on integration. These assumptions have led both to the incorporation of integration conditions into immigration law and have been put forward as justifications for restricting family migration policies from the turn of the millennium onward in a growing number of European countries (see Oliver, 2013; Strik, de Hart, & Nissen, 2013). In its dominant conception, integration is usually thought of as “integration into one, single, indivisible (national) state, and one, simple, unitary (national) society” (Favell, 2001, p. 351). Therefore, integration is in turn intrinsically connected with the notion of membership: being “in need” of integration usually implies not being considered a full member of the allegedly homogenous nation, or conversely, “successful” integration often implies having “reached” at least some degree of membership in the national community.

Migration policies have previously been analyzed as instances of “politics of belonging,” that is, policies involved in “the maintenance and reproduction of the boundaries of the community of belonging by the hegemonic political powers¹ (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 205). Notions of “who belongs (more)” to the national community influence national migration policies. These policies, in turn, create hierarchies of membership by allocating rights according to “strength” or “degree” of different dimensions of membership. In the following, I will present an analytical framework useful in coming to terms with family migration policies by systematically exploring these policies as instances of politics of membership.

Membership and Family Migration

Membership, in the simplest terms, is the state of belonging to or being part of a group. Understanding membership as socially constructed identity categories, this membership and belonging can be contested and politicized at virtually all sites and levels of individuals forming groups (e.g., cities, neighborhoods, associations, churches, clubs), and the question “who belongs?” is especially pertinent at the level of the nation-state—even though postnational theorists might suggest otherwise (Brubaker, 2010, p. 64). Also, in the following, since the focus is on the analysis of national (family migration) policies, it is not individuals’ conceptions of identity and membership but the social construction of membership at the level of the nation-state that is of paramount interest—and how notions of membership are constructed and politicized by state actors through their policies.

When adopting a narrow understanding of citizenship as amounting mainly to full legal membership in a given polity, as I will in the following, citizenship and membership are strongly interrelated concepts, but distinct. Citizens’ membership can be contested, just as noncitizens can be constructed to possess some kind of membership in the political community in which they reside (and at the same time in the polity they originate from). Brubaker urges to distinguish the “politics of citizenship in the nation-state” from the “politics of belonging to the nation-state”; he suggests marginal or minority populations might undoubtedly be “formal state members”, that is, citizens, but at the same time their “substantive membership,” that is, their access to the rights citizenship entails and/or their acceptance as “full members” of the nation, might be very much contested (Brubaker, 2010, p. 64). I further suggest that also the membership of noncitizens, that is resident foreigners or new migrants, can be subject to scrutiny and contestation in the politics of belonging.

Importantly, membership is not conceptualized here as a fixed entity that might be either present or absent but along a continuum from strong to weak (thus rather than thinking of an “us/them” dichotomy, individuals can be considered “more part of us” or “less part of us”). Also, different membership dimensions can be distinguished, operating on distinct axes of social inequality. These membership dimensions can obviously intersect and interact with one another, offsetting and/or enforcing the degree of perceived or constructed “otherness,” as has been pointed out by scholars emphasizing intersectionality and belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2007). The dimensions of membership that will be explored in the following are legal membership, socioeconomic membership, and ethnocultural membership, though this list is surely nonexhaustive.

Furthermore, in the following, the way membership is employed by national governments in the context of (migration) policies and discourses is conceptualized as “membership regulation” or “regulating membership.” In this process of regulating membership, (family migration) policies are understood not only as policies aiming at controlling a certain specific phenomenon (e.g., family migration), but also as engaging in the wider process of politics of belonging, thus both reflecting the dominant conceptions of membership in the given polity and producing hierarchies of membership, that is, creating “stronger” and “weaker” members with accordingly more or less rights. In other words, policies (e.g., controlling migration) are understood to evaluate and scrutinize individuals’ membership in order to allocate or withdraw rights (e.g., the right to the protection of family life) according to the “degree” or “strength” of these individuals’ membership.

In order to understand why the concept of “membership” is so crucial specifically to the analysis of family migration policies, it is helpful to take a step back and consider the normative and legal basis of family migration provisions in European countries. The individual right to the protection of marriage and family life, which is not only prescribed by international human rights documents but also by more binding texts such as the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 8—protection of private and family life, Article 12—right to marriage) and articles in national constitutions, is the legal and normative basis for liberal democracies in Europe to allow for family migration. This right to the protection of the family does not automatically confer a universal right to the admission of family members, it does however provide a strong “humanistic and moral basis for countries to allow” it (Lahav, 1997, p. 354). However, this right to the protection of family life is only the first aspect; membership completes the logic behind allowing family migration. We need to consider that next to the vital interest any individual has in being able to lead a family life, all human beings can also be assumed to have a “right to remain,” which is a strong interest in living in the society where they have settled and in which they participate. This “rootedness” is a crucial consideration; otherwise governments could suggest joining one’s family abroad as an adequate means to satisfy the protection of family life. As Carens (2003, p. 97) puts it, “no one should be forced by the state to choose between home and family”—thus only when the legitimate and crucial interest of a society’s members to remain in their country of origin is combined with the individual right to the protection of family, the case for family migration provisions emerges in the first place. The “right to remain” is thus also why it is primarily established members of society (citizens or legal residents) who can lay claim to a state protection of their right to marriage and family. It is paramount to realize that this is one of the main distinguishing features characterizing family migration, in contrast to other types of migration: family migration is based on an existing, meaningful relationship between an outsider (or nonmember) of society, that is, the incoming family member, and an insider (or member) of society, that is the sponsor.² By granting family migration, the state, at least in theory, recognizes not only the importance of the relationship between individuals in the microunit of the family (thus respecting the “right to the protection of family life”) but also the importance of the relationship between individuals and the wider community they belong to (respecting the “right to remain”). Authors working on family migration have begun to explore the ways in which politics of belonging and issues of identity, especially gender and family norms, interrelate with the restriction of family migration policies in the last years (Bonjour & de Hart, 2013; Eggebø, 2012; Gedalof, 2007; Muller Myrdahl, 2010; Schmidt, 2011; Wray, 2009). What I will propose here is a systematic way of conceptualizing and analyzing family migration policies as politics of belonging through the lens of membership.

Why Restrict Family Migration?

Since the late 1990s, somewhat of a policy trend has emerged across OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries toward an increased restriction of family migration³ (OECD, 2011, p. 115). In Europe, restrictions of family migration policy have been introduced at least in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Consequently, a decrease of family migration inflows can also be observed in many European countries (Pascouau & Labayle, 2011, p. 107). Connected to this restrictive policy shift have been negative perceptions of family migration, mainly connected to two disputed issues. First, does family migration facilitate or harm immigrant integration? Second, are family migrants an asset for the economy or a burden on the welfare state?

Regarding integration,⁴ two opposing arguments have been uttered. On the one hand, some scholars have claimed that family migrants integrate into host societies better than other migrants since they can make use of the established networks and support, that is, the social capital, of their sponsors. Furthermore, it has been argued that if sponsors themselves are recent migrants, being joined by their family members rather than being socially isolated is likely to enhance their capacity for integration in the host country, also since “families, especially children, themselves constitute channels for wider interaction through school and other activities” (Honohan, 2009, p. 772). In this view, allowing family reunification to resident migrants benefits both the sponsors and their receiving community (Cholewinski, 2002, p. 274). This “integration-through-networks” argument thus posits that family migration has a positive impact on integration, and is also the official view of the European Union (Strik et al., 2013, p. 48) which is, for example, mentioned in the preamble of the Family Reunification Directive 2003/86/EC.⁵ On the other hand, family migration, especially of spouses joining ethnic minority sponsors, is also claimed to contribute to self-reproducing, segregated minority communities, and is thus seen to hamper integration of both the sponsoring and the incoming spouses. This “ethnic-segregation” argument posits that family migration has a negative impact on minority integration. In the past decades, in particular, the ethnic-segregation argument has become increasingly popular among policy makers in various European countries who have been mainly influenced by observations regarding the marriage behaviour of second- and third-generation migrants opting for partners from their (grand) parents’ country of origin (see Beck-Gernsheim, 2007; Eeckhaut, Lievens, Van de Putte, & Lusyne, 2011; Sterckx, 2015).

A second set of arguments concerns the (economic) productivity of family migrants. Finding family migrants in the United States to be nearly as productive in the long term as employment migrants screened for their skills, Jasso and Rosenzweig (1995, p. 86) suggest that family-based support networks enhance the occupational upward mobility of spousal migrants. Hollifield (1992, pp. 80-95) illustrates how, after the recruitment stop in the 1970s, German and French employers gladly turned to family migrants to fill continuing labor needs in the construction and service sector. Also, Honohan (2009, p. 772) claims that in many instances family migrants indirectly enhance overall societal welfare by providing unpaid care and household work or by contributing informally but significantly to family businesses. Contrastingly, it has been argued that family migrants tend to be unproductive. Contrary to the treatment of labour migrants, receiving states do not select family migrants according to their skills or other resources but rather admit them solely due to their link to the sponsor. The ensuing “non-selection” is thus often seen as likely to produce an inflow of economically unproductive migrants, who are potentially a burden on the welfare state.⁶

Summing up, when family migration is viewed as furthering integration and producing productive inflows, family migration rights might be readily granted. However, when subscribing to the negative arguments of family migration as leading to unproductive, burdensome inflows that also have a negative impact on integration, the admission of family migrants is deemed to be potentially detrimental to the overall interests of society. Significantly, it is this negative view of family migration that has acquired salience in recent years: family migration thus seems to be increasingly perceived as unwanted in many Western European states. At the same time, however, these same states, especially in their capacity as liberal democracies, are under pressure to protect the fundamental rights of their individual members to the protection of marriage and family life. How can the liberal state limit family migration to achieve its migration management goals without completely disregarding its human rights obligations?

Regulating Membership

Since, as outlined above, the right to family migration is so intrinsically connected to the sponsor’s individual membership in society and the corresponding right to remain, governments can contest and evaluate this membership in order to justify decreasing or increasing individual family migration rights. In this process of “membership regulation,”⁷ states thus control family migration by allocating family migration rights according to different dimensions of membership—by circumscribing eligible categories of members and scrutinizing the “strength” or even “quality” of membership. In the following, three of these highly interrelated membership dimensions and their regulation via family migration policies in Europe will be explored. First, legal membership can be evaluated through citizenship and residence categories stratifying family migration rights. Second, the quality of socioeconomic membership (occupation, income, education) and third, ethnocultural membership (language skills, civic knowledge and in some cases even ethnicity) can be evaluated and scrutinized within family migration policies.⁸ By analysing the ways in which policy instruments evaluate membership, we will be able to better understand mechanisms of restriction. Moreover, we may also come to terms with the stratification of rights, since here membership is not conceptualized as a fixed entity which is either present or absent, but rather imagined along a continuum from strong to weak membership—with the different dimensions of belonging entering the membership equation. For instance, unemployed ethnic majority citizens’ ethnocultural membership might be uncontested, but their socioeconomic membership is weaker (or “worse”) than other citizens’, who earn their own living and pay taxes. Accordingly, unemployed citizens might be less able to access certain rights. Unemployed ethnic minority citizens that fit into neither the economic nor the ethnocultural imagining of belonging might potentially be constructed by governments as even “weaker” members—and allocated even less rights. Unemployed foreign residents additionally lack a strong legal membership, and are likely to be confronted with even fewer rights. Thus, in the process of regulating membership, the stronger your membership and the “better” a member you are, the more rights you can claim and access. In the following, I will illustrate how this process works in the context of family migration policies—but further research might find the theoretical frame helpful for the analysis of other policy fields as well.

Legal Membership

Legal membership, in the form of citizenship or legal residence status, seems to be the most straightforward dimension of membership and it comes as no surprise that regulating this legal membership is a standard part of family migration policies. At the risk of stating the obvious, the sponsor is required to have a certain legal membership status in the community in order to claim family migration rights. The sponsor needs to be either a citizen or, if he or she is a foreigner, must be in a possession of a valid residence permit entitling to family reunification, which is usually limited to migrants with a long-term residence perspective.⁹

One consequence is that irregular migrants who do not enjoy legal membership in the national community do not enjoy family migration rights in most polities. Furthermore, in some countries such as France, immigrants must wait a minimum period before family members can join them. Thus, the sponsor’s status of legal membership in the host society is an important determinant in the allocation of family migration rights. These conditions can be tightened, thus raising the bar of “proving membership”: In France, the minimum residence period increased from 12 to 18 months in 2006, while the Dutch government introduced a residence period of 1 year in 2012 (Block & Bonjour, 2013, p. 206). Also, by making it increasingly difficult for migrants to obtain long-term residence permits, family migration indirectly gets restricted as well.

Another manifestation of regulating membership through legal categories is the preferential treatment of citizen sponsors vis-à-vis foreign sponsors. The legal rationale behind this is that only citizens’ legal membership in the community includes an unconditional right to residence. It is also partially sustained by the notion of a presumed stronger “rootedness” of citizens in society—the burden of migrating abroad to establish family unity is thus considered comparably higher. In practice, many policies award more favourable conditions of family migration to citizens than to denizens. In various European countries, including Germany and France, citizen sponsors must fulfill fewer conditions regarding housing, employment, and income than foreign resident sponsors.

Notwithstanding this (historical) preferential treatment of citizens vis-à-vis noncitizens, recent years have witnessed an overall restriction of citizens’ rights in Europe—many of the restrictions introduced in European countries have been directed at citizens and foreign residents alike. It has been shown that this is at least in part due to policy efforts to target especially ethnic minority citizens (Bonjour & Block, 2014). Therefore this aspect can and will also be regarded below under the light of regulating ethnocultural membership.

In Europe, nation-states are not the only entity granting rights to individuals. As the European Union (EU) has enlarged the scope of rights attached to “European citizenship” in the past decades, the set of family migration rights has also been progressively codified and established. According to the 2004 Free Movement Directive, EU citizens residing in other Member States have much more extensive family migration rights than the minimum standard for resident third-country nationals enshrined in the Family Reunification Directive of 2003. Nowadays, in light of increasing restriction all over Europe, the family migration possibilities connected to European citizenship (only “activated” and thus available for intra-EU movers) are among the most extensive ones on the continent—and often more generous than the rights awarded to native (nonmoving) citizens. Indeed, the gap between EU movers and nonmovers is growing in many places and leading to “reverse discrimination” (Walter, 2008; see also Wagner, 2015). This concerns, for example, the family members eligible to join the sponsor. In most EU countries, citizens can usually only sponsor the migration of their spouses and minor children, while according to the Free Movement Directive, intra-EU movers are entitled to be joined not only by their spouses or registered partners but also by their children up to the age of 21 years, and even older children and ascending relatives if they are dependent on them. Also, spouses of EU movers cannot be subjected to additional conditions, such as preentry integration requirements. This situation has led some transnational couples unable to fulfill strict national regimes to move (temporarily) to another (usually neighbouring) EU member state in order qualify as intra-EU mover and thus be granted spousal migration under the more liberal European rules. For instance, there are many accounts of Danish sponsors moving to Sweden and of Dutch sponsors relocating to Belgium and Germany. Various national governments, including the Dutch and German ones, have reacted critically to the EU’s influence on family migration policies as intrusion into their national sovereignty on migration issues (Block & Bonjour, 2013).

Socioeconomic Membership

Evaluating socioeconomic achievement is another widespread method of family migration control and can also be categorized as an instance of regulating social membership. In this context, I would propose that it is even the “quality” rather than the “strength” of membership that is evaluated. Put bluntly, the higher the socioeconomic status, the “better a member” the sponsor is, and, accordingly, the more rights are awarded to him or her in the field of family migration. For example, it is very common to oblige sponsors to fulfill certain socioeconomic standards regarding employment, income, accommodation, and independence from social welfare in order to sponsor family migration. While such material preconditions have been part of family reunification policies in Europe for decades, they have recently grown increasingly restrictive in many contexts. Housing requirements exist among others in Belgium, Germany, and France—and have been introduced in Sweden in 2010. Also, income requirements, which also serve as proxy for education and skill levels, have been increased. Next to securing the family’s livelihood, sponsors in Denmark are obliged to deposit a substantial bank guarantee since 2002—the amount was raised to the equivalent of €6,900 in 2014. In 2004, the Netherlands increased the income that sponsors needed to earn in cases of “family formation” to 120% (about €1,440) of the minimum wage. Though this provision was struck down by the European Court of Justice in the 2010 Chakroun case (C-578/08), while in place it especially obstructed spousal migration sponsored by groups structurally disadvantaged in the labor market. Research has shown how after 2004 particularly applications from ethnic minorities, women and young people declined (Leerkes & Kulu-Glasgow, 2011). Since 2005, couples requesting spousal migration in Austria must dispose of a minimum income threshold which is continually adjusted and had climbed to €1,255 per month in 2013. Swedish family migration policy foresaw no income requirement at all until it was introduced in 2010. Also in 2010, Norway extended its income requirement from foreign sponsors to Norwegian citizen sponsors and increased the required amount to €32,000 per year—the overall highest income requirement in Europe at the moment. In Belgium, since 2011, sponsors must earn 120% of the social minimum, about €1,300 per month, to sponsor family migration. Since 2012, sponsors in the United Kingdom must prove they have an annual income of at least £18,600 (approximately € 23.000) to sponsor a spouse’s immigration—about 140% of the minimum wage. It has been estimated that about half of the employed British citizens could not meet this threshold. Due to income differences, certain population segments are especially affected: 58% of jobholders between 20 and 30 years and 61% of female employees in the United Kingdom do not earn enough to bring a foreign family member into the country (Blinder, McNeil, Ruhs, & Varga-Silva, 2012, p. 18). Effectively, these kinds of policies tend to bar families and couples from lower social strata from living together in Europe. And due to persisting income inequalities along gender, age, education, and ethnicity lines, it is especially the young, the low-educated, the ethnic minorities, and the women that have a more difficult time to sponsor their partners to join them. High income requirements can thus also be interpreted as proxy for discrimination by other social differences.

Furthermore, legal status (i.e., citizenship) may serve as a rough proxy for (assumed) quality of socioeconomic membership: In both the Netherlands and Germany, the integration requirement introduced in 2006 and 2007 specifically exempted spouses joining foreign citizens from certain “privileged,” mainly high-income countries. Since the exempted countries were basically high-income OECD countries (United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, etc.), the implicit assumption was probably that foreigners from these developed countries were more likely to be “better” socioeconomic members than foreigners from other, poorer countries.¹⁰ Also, some third-country national sponsors that are considered to be (socioeconomically) desired migrants, such as highly-skilled researchers or entrepreneurs, are subjected to less stringent conditions in order to have their family join them than others. These privileges are also occasionally intertwined with imaginings of ethnocultural membership: migrants from high-income countries and higher social strata are assumed by policy makers to be closer to Western values and behaviour, and thus less “in need of integration” (Block, 2014, p. 219). The fact that spouses of U.S.-Americans, South Koreans, and rich business people do not have to fulfil the integration requirement abroad, and are thus treated better than spouses of native citizens, has led to a great deal of polemic among affected spouses and commentators in Germany and the Netherlands, who, for example, in Germany speak of Inländerdiskriminierung (discrimination of natives). This exemplifies how (presumed) socioeconomic attainments can even override legal membership claims.

Ethnocultural Membership

Ethnocultural belonging can be contested as part of family migration policies as well, though obviously often intermingled with legal and socioeconomic criteria. As mentioned above, in countries where citizens previously enjoyed more extensive family migration rights than foreign residents, a general tendency toward a deterioration of citizens’ family migration rights is discernible. It has been shown that this policy trend has been discursively linked by politicians and policy makers in various European countries to the “problem” of marriage migration to ethnic minority citizens—thus clearly positioning these citizens outside of the nation due to their ethnicity, regardless of their legal citizenship status (Bonjour & Block, 2014). For instance, in France and Germany, spousal migration policies were devised that actually tried to differentiate between ethnic minority and “true” citizens. This is not such an easy task in a liberal democracy where one of the core values is the equal treatment of all citizens, but requires somewhat “creative” law making instead. In France, Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) politicians were keen on privileging (White) French expats working abroad wishing to return and exempted spouses of French citizens relocating to France “for professional reasons” from the predeparture integration requirement in 2007 (Bonjour & Block, 2014, p. 9). The German 2007 migration reform included a clause that extended the income requirement, usually only applicable to foreign sponsors, to German citizens when the couple could be “reasonably expected” to settle together outside of Germany—thought to be the case when the sponsor had dual citizenship or had links to the country of origin of the foreign spouse. The policy was praised by the government as “integration incentive” for naturalized immigrants who would also help fight abuse and marriages of convenience.¹¹ While a federal court struck down the provision in 2012¹², research has shown how policy makers and conservative politicians clearly point to (unemployed) ethnic minority Germans as target of this policy (Block, 2012, pp. 214-216). In interviews, policy makers justified the differential treatment and allocation of fewer rights along ethnic lines with ethnic minority citizens’ supposed continuous bonds with their native country of origin, which were equated with a weaker membership in the German nation:

What is behind [the requirement] is the fact that there are definitely cases where somebody is German, but has only been German for five years, and prior to that for 30 years was, let’s say, a Serbian national. Why should he, if he wants to marry a Serbian woman, not continue to be married in Serbia with her? (Interview with civil servant, Interior Ministry, North-Rhine Westphalia, November 5, 2009, emphasis added)

The most recently emerging trend in regulating membership is that of also imposing conditions on the incoming spouses. I propose that this new type of policy instrument can also be understood to constitute a form of membership regulation, as here the (future) membership qualities of the incoming spouses are evaluated.¹³ These provisions are mainly politically framed within the aforementioned sceptical view concerning family migration’s impact on minority integration. This notion of membership is intimately connected to the recently emerging perspective that “the lack of integration or the assumed unfitness to integrate are grounds for refusal of admission to the country” (Groenendijk, 2004, p. 113). Obligations to prove language capacity and civic knowledge, often prior to admission, have been introduced emphasizing both the fundamental necessity and supposed current deficiency of family migrants’ integration into the social, economic, and cultural life of the host society. To date, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Denmark, Austria, and the United Kingdom have installed such integration requirements for incoming family migrants. By assessing language and civic knowledge, key markers of cultural identity, the preentry requirements thus mainly evaluate incoming spouses’ capacity for cultural membership. However, socioeconomic membership is arguably also evaluated: The higher the education (of the incoming spouse) and income situation (of the couple), the more likely they will be able to manage the financial and cognitive hurdles imposed by preparatory courses and language exams abroad—and potentially fare better in the labour market after their immigration.

Finally, minimum ages for both spouses (sponsoring and incoming) have been installed in various European countries, setting it at 24 years (in Denmark), 21 years (in Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands) or 18 years (in France, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). All governments argued this measure would prevent young adults from arranged and forced marriages (Strik et al., 2013, p. 54). As these are mainly thought to be Muslim practices, the restriction can also be interpreted as contesting the cultural membership of Muslim minorities. It has, for instance, been shown how in the 2007 U.K. consultation on raising the minimum age, the government juxtaposed supposed White middle-class family values (e.g., marrying later) with ethnic minority transnational marriage practices, associating them with force and victims (Wray, 2009, p. 607). Similar observations have been made in German (Block, 2014) and Dutch political discourses (Bonjour & de Hart, 2013).

Membership Reloaded: The Danish Attachment Requirement

One recent rather inventive policy instrument operating at the crossroads of various dimensions of membership is the so-called “attachment requirement” in Danish spousal migration law. It very directly exemplifies the idea of scrutinizing the quality of membership through an assessment of rootedness and “belonging.” Since 2002, this provision requires all transnational couples applying for spousal migration in Denmark, both with citizen and foreign resident sponsors, to prove that their “combined attachment” to Denmark is “greater” than their attachment to any other state (Danish Immigration Service, 2014a). A closer look at the membership definitions implicitly present in this policy is illuminating. The required attachment is measured by evaluating the length and continuance of the sponsor’s (and possibly the incoming spouse’s) prior residence in Denmark, the presence of other family members and acquaintances in Denmark, the level of the couple’s Danish language skills and their education, and/or labour market participation in Denmark. If custody or visiting rights to a child living in Denmark exist, the requirement is usually waived entirely. Extended visits to other countries as well as the presence of children and other family members abroad are weighted negatively (Danish Immigration Service, 2014a). Here, membership leading to family migration rights is thus defined by length of residence on the one hand, but also by other variables such as language skills and personal strong bonds to other members (especially children) of the host society. Participation in gainful employment and language skills are regarded as especially important factors enhancing social membership: the regular residence requirement of 15 years stipulated for sponsors is reduced to 8 years if the sponsor is in continuous full-time employment and speaks Danish on the job. It can be even further reduced to 5 years if the sponsor’s job is considered “particularly integration-furthering,” that is, requiring high levels of Danish skills (Danish Immigration Service, 2014b).

This policy instrument suggests that acquiring a strong membership claim through long residence can be partly offset by personal rootedness in the country and especially through participation in the education and the labour market, and by language skills. At the same time, the policy punishes transnational links and lifestyles, more likely to occur among ethnic minority sponsors, by awarding less family migration rights. Put differently, through the attachment requirement the Danish government regulates membership by creating a “hierarchy between citizens in which, based on an assumption of ‘true’ belonging, some have certain rights that others do not” (Schmidt, 2011, p. 262).

There were protests following the initial implementation by expat Danes, who were prevented from returning to Denmark with their foreign family members because they failed to fulfil the attachment requirement (Ersbøll, 2010). Thus, the policy was changed in late 2003 to exempt citizens holding Danish citizenship for more than 28 years (since 2012, for more than 26 years). While the policy now clearly discriminates between naturalized and Danish-born citizens (Ersbøll, 2009), as well as against young adults (younger than 26 years) vis-à-vis older citizens, the policy change also points again at the ethnic conception of membership that is implicitly present within family migration policies—devised to target ethnic minority Danes marrying partners from their (parents’) homeland, legislators rushed to amend the requirement when they realized it also affected White Danish diplomats serving their country abroad, by all accounts imagined to be “good members” of society.

The attachment requirement has significantly reduced spousal migration into Denmark: while 6,500 spouses entered Denmark in this way in 2001, the amount had been reduced to a mere 40% of that by 2008. Failing to fulfil the attachment requirement was the most common reason spousal migration applications were rejected (Rytter, 2010). Inspired by this Danish policy and the successful reduction of family migration in this manner, various other European governments contemplated introducing similar measures, though none have actually done so, also since it is deemed incompatible with the Family Reunification Directive. A French interministerial committee recommended the introduction of an attachment requirement in 2007¹⁴ and the Dutch government repeatedly proposed amending EU law to establish a test of attachment in the Netherlands.¹⁵ In July 2011, the U.K. government specifically cited the Danish policy as a model when proposing the introduction of a similar attachment requirement (U.K. Border Agency, 2011, p. 19). Concluding, despite the Danish attachment requirement being, at least up until now, unique, it exemplifies a very differentiated evaluation of social membership on various dimensions (social, economic, ethnic), and clearly allocates family migration rights according to the supposed “strength” and “quality” of the membership.

Conclusion: The Complex Construction of “Good Members”

It can surely be argued that most recent family migration policy restrictions aim at preventing (especially low-skilled) family migrants from being admitted and/or from becoming a burden on the welfare state. However, it has been suggested here that, when conceptualizing family migration polices as part of the politics of belonging, we can explore how highly normative notions of “good members” of society are reflected by these policies. At the same time, policies “regulating membership,” that is allocating family migration rights according to “degree” of individual membership, create hierarchies of membership. Sponsors are expected to be law-abiding, economically self-supporting individuals, who actively engage with society at large through their language skills and civic involvement (see also Kraler, 2010, p. 49), in order to “earn” the right to sponsor family migration. Recently, incoming spouses are being obliged to prove their fitness for membership even before being admitted.

Discerning a clear pattern of the norms of membership and belonging across or even within countries in Europe can be tricky—the membership regulation mechanisms are complex, sometimes contradictory and in parts, very inventive. At the same time, looking at family migration policies through the lens of membership can be a very helpful analytical tool to explore in what ways governments achieve restriction and stratification—and why they do so. What seems clear is that all over Europe, “[c]lass intersects with ethnicity in establishing who is to be most severely regulated” (Wray, 2009, p. 593). Specifically targeting ethnic minority citizens within family migration policies and at the same time exempting spouses of high-skilled migrants or sponsors from OECD countries from new restrictions exemplifies that “good membership” is a complex notion.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Miriam Aced, Saskia Bonjour, Albert Kraler, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

References

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