Thomas Huddleston Senior MACIMIDE Visiting Fellowship

THActionThomas Huddleston, Programme Director on Migration and Integration at the Migration Policy Group and part-time PhD fellow at Maastricht University, Campus Brussels will be taking up a part-time Senior Visiting Fellowship at the Maastricht Center for Citizenship, Migration and Development (MACIMIDE) from 1 March until the end of 2017.

Huddleston will use his fellowship to work on the completion of his PhD dissertation on ‘European citizenship in practice: Implementation and effectiveness of naturalisation policies across Europe’. This PhD project, supervised at Maastricht University by Maarten Vink and Rene de Groot, aimes at analysing the extent to which immigrants’ uptake of citizenship in practice is determined by the differences in naturalisation procedures and implementation across Europe. Whereas recent research demonstrates that the uptake of citizenship among the foreign-born is to an important extent determined by the inclusiveness of countries’ citizenship policies, what has so far remained understudied is the extent to which naturalisation rates may be explained by differences in practical implementation of such policies. Immigrants must apply through a naturalisation procedure in order to access the opportunities enshrined in law. Authorities may interpret or apply the law in a correct and consistent way at national or even local level. Without the proper procedures in place, the law will not have the expected effects on naturalisation rates.

As part of his Senior Visiting Fellowship, Thomas Huddleston will give two seminars open to the academic community at Maastricht University in March and April 2017. The first event on 15 March 2017 has been announced here.

The MACIMIDE Executive Board congratulates Thomas with this fellowship and wishes him a fruitful and productive time in Maastricht.

For more information about Thomas Huddleston and his doctoral research project, see here.