Una oportunidad perdida: el proyecto europeo y la ciudadanìa para los inmigrantes

This article discusses the need to overcome the derogatory focus that still pervades the EU in its approach to immigration policies, as the challenge of immigration reaches much further than the difficulty of adapting statistics and tools to suit the requirements of the labour market, or the measures to be adopted to maintain the standard of public order. Migratory flows are the catalyst that obliges us to face up to the need to reappraise the roots of our responses to the democratic construct of the social and political bond: responses that now feature a high deficit of inclusion and plurality in the extent to which they institutionalise the exclusion of immigrants as actors in the public space, their conceptual impossibility of managing to become citizens. The failed EU constitutional treaty was a lost opportunity to define an inclusive, plural notion of citizenship that could have opened up the possibility of full equality of rights to immigrants, including political rights. The article argues in favour of opening access for immigrants to a multilateral form of citizenship based on the notion of residents and residence that takes shape gradually, starting after three years of stable and legal residence.

Javier de Lucas, Una oportunidad perdida: el proyecto europeo y la ciudadanìa para los inmigrantes in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO " 3/2006, pp 45-63, DOI: