Life Satisfaction and the UK Citizenship Process: Do Tests and Ceremonies Enhance Immigrants’ Lives?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12477 |
| Author | David Bartram |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
Life Satisfaction and the UK Citizenship
Process: Do Tests and Ceremonies Enhance
Immigrants’Lives?
David Bartram*
ABSTRACT
Gaining citizenship in the UK requires applicants to pass a “Life in the UK”test and (if suc-
cessful) attend a citizenship ceremony. Critics of this policy agenda assert that it exacerbates
exclusion of an already vulnerable and disadvantaged population. The UK government justifies
the requirements in part on the basis that they facilitate integration, thus enhancing immi-
grants’lives. This article, using data from the UK longitudinal household survey (“Under-
standing Society”) considers outcomes for immigrants by investigating whether gaining
citizenship in the current period is associated with immigrants’subjective well-being. Results
from regression models and matching analyses show that participating in the citizenship pro-
cess (or not) is not generally associated with individuals’life satisfaction.
INTRODUCTION
The adoption of a new “citizenship process”in the UK in the mid-2000s was met with great con-
cern by academics and activists. To gain citizenship, immigrants now had to pass a “Life in the
UK”test and then attend a ceremony. These policy requirements were adopted as a response to
social unrest and riots in three northern English cities in 2001; they emerged also out of a more
general concern about “social cohesion”, i.e., the notion that immigration was creating “excess”
diversity along with residential segregation and social fragmentation (e.g. Putnam, 2007; Goodhart,
2004). But many observers took the view that the new citizenship requirements were rooted in a
faulty diagnosis of the riots (e.g. Ratcliffe, 2012). Deeper concerns were expressed about the likely
impacts on immigrants: some writers anticipated that the policy would exacerbate the marginaliza-
tion of members of minority groups by signalling their alleged deficiencies and erecting hurdles to
full membership (e.g. Kalra and Kapoor, 2008; Burnett, 2004), and Kundnani (2007) described the
new policy orientation quite directly as racist (against Muslims in particular).
These concerns are worrying insofar as one can imagine that the people subject to the require-
ments will perhaps experience significant negative consequences, in ways that are apparent to them.
This article emerges from the premise that a more directly empirical approach is needed to investi-
gate whether the policy indeed has such consequences. Identifying intrinsic problems in the policy
itself is a valuable exercise, but our concern is surely even deeper if there is evidence that the pol-
icy requirements impinge on the lives of the people who are subject to them, in ways they gen-
uinely experience.
* University of Leicester
doi: 10.1111/imig.12477
©2018 The Author.
International Migration ©2018 IOM
International Migration Vol. 56 (6) 2018
ISSN 0020-7985
This is an open access article under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited.
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