Immigrants face a series of obstacles during their long naturalisation process, in the path to citizenship, and legal provisions offer them both opportunities and obstacles. Legal conditions are complemented by administrative, bureaucratic procedures for their practical implementation.

Based on existing literature on the implementation of naturalisation policies, the ACIT project calculated 38 ‘Implementation Indicators’ (CITIMP), which measure the formal steps of the ordinary naturalisation procedures in 35 European countries.

The CITIMP results suggest that most countries’ procedures contain as many obstacles as opportunities for ordinary naturalisation. Promotional measures are often missing or insufficient, with scarce information. Legal exemptions for documentation rarely exist on humanitarian or vulnerability grounds. Documentation from countries of origin is especially complicated for applicants. Most procedures involve potentially long processing times and some amount of bureaucracy, especially when the deciding authority is the executive or legislative. In many cases the claim and complaint procedures are not separated by competencies, there is no transparency or objective criteria in their review, sometimes not even for discrimination claims.

According to ACIT, European countries that improve their ordinary naturalisation law do not necessarily facilitate the procedure. The measure of the effective access to the naturalisation procedure is actually given by the analysis of relevant practical procedures.

The report “The naturalisation procedure: measuring the ordinary obstacles and opportunities for immigrants to become citizens”, produced by Thomas Huddleston, can be consulted at http://eudo-citizenship.eu/images/acit/rscas_pp_2013-16.pdf.

Source: MPG Newsletter no. 38 of October 2013 http://www.migpolgroup.com/portfolio/naturalisation-procedure-measuring-ordinary-obstacles-opportunities-immigrants-become-citizens/?utm_source=Migration+Policy+Group+E-newsletter&utm_campaign=42e9fdd3c7