Integrating Immigrants through the Policy of Multiculturalism as a State's New Response to the Sovereignty Challenge

Abstract

Today the EU and Canada experience a significant international migration inflow that requires a delicate treatment on the government side which would not contradict with these countries' adherence to a liberal nation-state idea. The non-ratification of the EU Constitution precluded the creation of a common immigration policy that could facilitate and level the social integration of immigrants within the EU member states that currently have different historically shaped strategies towards the newcomers. Even though the legal and economic barriers for immigration and naturalization have been reasonably decreased over the past decades across the EU, the legacies of nationalizing citizenship laws are still persistent and immigrants are expected to integrate into the host cultures. These path dependent repercussions contradict the idea of a liberal nation-state and erect the second level barriers (besides legal and economic ones) for integration of immigrants into the host societies. These cultural barriers are more persistent in the social consciousness than the institutionalized ones, which is a reason for why liberalizing laws are not the most effective means for facilitating the immigrants' integration into the host societies. This situation of intensive immigration combined with the low opportunities for social integration gives grounds to instability and dissatisfaction within certain social groups in the EU. This paper investigates how multiculturalism policy in Canada contributes to a higher level of immigrants' integration into Canadian society as compared to the EU memberstates. Moreover, the novel information from the Centre of Excellence for the Study of Immigration at Simon Fraser University suggests that maintenance of immigrant ethnicities contributes to the overall economic success of a country, which is another reason for the introducing multiculturalism and a common EU immigration policy.