Promoting Evidence-Informed Immigrant Integration Policymaking
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Highlights
Migrant integration lags other fields in use of evidence to inform policymaking and programming. Five strategies can help EU and national policymakers build a stronger, more data-driven integration culture.
- Despite growing EU efforts since the early 2000s, integration policy remains among the weakest fields for evidence use, with evaluations rarely covering the full policy cycle or informing future design.
- Politicisation, crisis-driven urgency, frequent shifts in goals and governance, and resource gaps all obstruct systematic evidence collection, evaluation, and dissemination.
- Most capacity building targets evaluators rather than policymakers and practitioners, leaving those who shape and deliver integration programmes without the tools to act on research findings.
- Tiered-evidence funding models, stakeholder co-creation, and improved online evidence databases can each help build a culture of evidence across the full integration policymaking cycle.
Across Europe, immigrant integration policy has often been forged in the heat of crisis and driven by political priorities. This can be seen in the response to millions of people fleeing war in Ukraine and to the 2015–16 migration and refugee crisis. Resources and attention are much less frequently devoted to gleaning lessons from integration initiatives and using them to improve policymaking going forward. Yet, pressing labor shortages, strained government budgets, and social cohesion challenges all point to the importance of implementing integration policies that efficiently use limited resources—and that work.
This policy brief explores why immigrant integration has fallen behind other policy areas in embracing an evidence culture and suggests ways to remedy this lag. It first examines recent progress and key gaps in this area, and then maps the obstacles that continue to hinder an evidence revolution in integration policy. The brief concludes with recommendations for creating an environment in which evidence-informed integration policymaking can thrive, including through the effective use of pilot projects, targeted funding, stakeholder engagement, and capacity-building initiatives.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 The State of Play for Evidence-Informed Integration Policymaking in Europe
Persistent Challenges
3 Strategies to Promote an Evidence Culture
A. Cultivating Political Buy-in through Pilot Projects
B. Incentivizing Government Investments in Evidence-Informed Policymaking by Using a Tiered Funding Model
C. Facilitating Stakeholder Involvement throughout the Policy Cycle
D. Building Capacity through Better Access to Training Resources
E. Improving Access to Evidence and Mutual Learning with Online Databases and Multistakeholder Networks
4 A Look Ahead
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