Immigrants and participation beyond the nation-state: Opportunity-capability rift in EU immigration policy process

Abstract

Efforts at Europeanizing immigration policy in the post-Maastricht era were set against a backdrop of transformations in politics and governance in the European Union (EU). Commitments to increasing openness of, and participation in, the supranational policy process aimed to alleviate the democratic deficit in the EU through imagining an “ever closer union.” Accordingly, the tiers of EU policy making proliferated, the channels of participation into the EU policy process multiplied, and the policy actors diversified. As stakeholders, non-EU migrants themselves were the most recent newcomers to the emerging policy scene. In this chapter, I aim to investigate the supranational engagement of Turkish migrant associations in France and Germany in the EU immigration policy process: what explains similarities and differences in terms of forms and levels of participation by migrant associations in different national contexts as they engage in the EU immigration policy process? In addressing this question, I analyze the forms and levels of migrants’ supranational engagement by focusing on the combined impact of macro-level (EU institutional context) and micro-level (nation-state—level actors engaged in supranational collective organization) variables.