Citizenship bonus: naturalization and social cohesion

Research Theme: Citizenship and Immigrant Integration

Citizenship bonus: naturalization and social cohesion

This project aims to examine the relevance of citizenship acquisition for the socioeconomic, sociocultural and political integration of immigrants. Its contribution to the overall objective research theme is to study whether citizenship makes a difference: are immigrants with citizenship, as often claimed, indeed better integrated, in comparison to those with only the citizenship of their country of residence. And what about those ‘dual citizens’ who naturalize, but retain their citizenship of origin? Hereby also the EU law perspective has to be taken into account. The project intends to intensify the already existing scientific collaboration between the UM and Statistics Netherlands, with the goal of using the currently under-explored data available through the population register in the Netherlands, combined with survey data. The project develops and tests a set of hypotheses on the ‘bonus’ of citizenship acquisition and will analyze the impact of naturalization on labour market performance as well as a broader set of social capital indicators, such as political participation, church attendance and norms and values.

Project leaders: Maarten Vink (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences), Hans Schmeets (CBS & Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences). Other UM participants: Gerard-René de Groot (Faculty of Law). Societal partners: Statistics Netherlands (CBS); Eurostat.