infraestructura

Large-scale investment in (funding of) research on migration and integration Within the European Commission, the DG for Research & Innovation is the most prominent funder of research on migration and integration. The website of the Migration Research Platform of the DG mentions that not less than 80 large-scale projects have been financed since the beginning in 1994. Singleton (2009) has described 50 of these comparative research projects funded by the Research Framework Programmes (FPs) 4, 5 and 6 up until 2009. One of these early projects was the IMISCOE Network of Excellence (financed in the period 2004–10), which was meant to (and actually did) build an infrastructure for research at the European level. As a follow-up of Singleton’s overview, King and Lulle (2016) have recently analysed 17 large- scale comparative research projects of FP7. A recent listing of projects by the European Commission2 _{adds to these overviews of direct FP-funded projects}

another 20 projects that DG Research co-funded with national funding agencies in the ERA-Net NORFACE programme on migration in Europe and the ERA-Net programme on welfare state futures.

The funding of research in FPs and FP-related programmes is done according to institutionalised procedures. The size and the general topics of each FP research programme are proposed by DG Research after internal (with the policy DGs) and external consultation on importance and relevance, and decided upon politically by the European Council and Parliament. General FP programmes are specified later in time, in line with available funding and according to more specific issues in work programmes. The research world is given the opportunity to react to open calls by making specific research proposals for specific elements/issues of the work programmes. The societal relevance of the proposals is an important element in the evaluation and allocation.

Apart from DG Research, there is sizeable funding of research by DGs that are directly responsible for migration and integration policies, particularly by the DG for Migration and Home Affairs (DG HOME). Two ways of financing research by this DG can be distinguished. The first is financing policy-oriented research as a structural part of the policy programme. This started with the INTI programme 2003–07, which funded research projects related to (often local) integration of third-country

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nationals. From 2007 onwards, such research became part of the European Integration Fund (EIF). Numerous research projects – again selected in open competition – were funded by the community action programme of the EIF between 2007 and 2013. Of these, 69 are described by Bruquetas Callejo (2015).

Apart from the EIF, DG HOME has funded an uncounted number of short-term, policy-defined research projects. These are more instantly planned, short-term projects in which the research question stems directly from policy practice and is narrowly described. The research institutes (in this stream more often based in the commercial bureaus than in universities and academic institutions) are again chosen in open competition.

More ‘open’ integration research as compared with ‘closed’ migration research

All in all, the first question can be answered unequivocally: the European Commission has invested in research on migration and integration since 1994 and these investments have become sizeable since 2003. Both DG Research and DGs in charge of migration and integration policies have contributed to this. DGs have been explicit on their motivation to generate knowledge relevant for European societies and for EU policies. DG Research has done this in a somewhat more open way, by only selecting the relevant issues for funding and leaving the task of how to research these issues to scientists. DG HOME (and recently other policy directorates) have done this by defining more precisely the research aims, questions and contexts. Within this general conclusion, however, some observations can be made that differentiate this general picture.

An important observation is that there are significant differences in how the topic of migration appears in EU-commissioned research as opposed to the integration issue. Migration research was dominant at the beginning and its commissioning has always been more ‘closed’, i.e. the issues have been narrowly described and from a policy perspective. Integration research started later (in 2003), but became more dominant than migration research; integration research is relatively stronger in the more ‘open’ forms of research commissioning (by FPs and the EIF). Where do these differences stem from? Let us look back on these different tracks of policy- making and how they shape ‘demand’.

Migration policy has been a first pillar, communitarian policy since the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997. Policy-making in this field entails the politically sensitive balancing of making binding common regulations both for internal

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free movement (mobility) and for controlled external movement (international migration of third-country nationals). In such a context, there is little room or demand for external knowledge or for alternative framing. Indeed, there is a strong inclination on the part of the Member States to keep procedures in policy-making closed and data collection internal. This is well illustrated by the rejection in the late 1990s of the European Commission’s proposal to establish a European migration observatory, an external and independent data-collecting institution, such as those existing in a number of other areas (Salt et al., 1998). After this rejection, a long internal debate followed on how to organise data collection and research, ending with the establishment of the European Migration Network (EMN) in 2003. The national EMN teams are under the direct management of national governments, and in most cases within ministries. In the Dutch case, for example, the EMN team is located within the IND, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service of the Ministry of Justice.

Integration policy at the EU level started later than migration policy. The EU integration concept as defined initially in the 1999 Tampere programme is strictly legal: citizens of non-EU states are integrated at the moment that their formal rights are the same as those of national citizens. It was only in the 2003 Communication on Migration and Integration3 _{that a}

more comprehensive concept of integration was announced (still only for third-country nationals and not applicable to EU citizens who were supposed to be integrated by definition!). But the policy-making on integration is not communitarian, as in the case of migration, but intergovernmental. It has to be based on a consensus of nation-states and their voluntary cooperation; no binding legislation or directives underpin integration policies, but only soft instruments, such as the Common Basic Principles for Integration.4 _{The strategy for developing such a policy is the}

open method of coordination. In such an open context of non-binding policy- making that involves furthermore several levels (the city, the region, the state and the EU) and multiple stakeholders (migrants, civil society and government) systematic data collection, evaluation and research have become important tools of policy-making in this open method of coordination.

3 _{See European Commission, Communication on Immigration, Integration and}

Employment, COM(2003) 336 final, Brussels, 3.3.2003.

4 _{See European Commission, Common Basic Principles for Integration, adopted by}

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The explanation for the explosion of research funding on integration research since 2003 and its dominance over migration research over the whole period is to be found in the specific position of the European Commission in policy-making in the two domains of respectively migration and integration. In the migration domain, external autonomous scientific input was not in demand, but it was rather seen by Member States as a threat to (communitarian) policy-making. In the integration domain, research was drawn into multi-level and multi-stakeholder (non-binding) policy-making as a tool to build consensus. No wonder that most of the FP-funded research projects were on topics of integration rather than migration. And no wonder that the large European Integration Fund had a structural part earmarked for integration research, while a comparable fund for migration research does not exist; the European migration observatory was stillborn.