Why Regions Matter in Immigrant Integration Policies: North Rhine-Westphalia and Emilia-Romagna in Comparative Perspective

Immigration policies in Europe, since the late 1980s and the early 1990s, have become politicised, challenging, for example, attempts to recruit migrant labour and more and more emphasis on demands for immigrants to adhere to cultural, social legal norms of the host societies. Despite these developments, however, the situation in remains rather puzzling: besides the adverse political climate, certain European have experienced remarkable progress in promoting the integration of newcomers non-EU member states. In order to explain the dynamics behind integration policy in Europe, we consider it necessary to move beyond a conceptualisation that is to national politics.We link this observation to the structural changes in Europe’s system of multi-level governance, which has empowered sub-national levels of in their efforts to design and implement integration policies. Employing a opportunity structure model, we hypothesise that the diversity of these dynamics(i.e. competition between parties and interaction with organisations within civil society) produce different policies than those at the national level. Our argument is based on a case study of Emilia-Romagna in Italy and North Rhine-Westphalia in.