On Tuesday 3 October, the Dutch Senate voted against a proposal that would increase the residence requirement for naturalisation from the current five to seven years. Senators from various parties referred to recent studies by MiLifeStatus researchers Maarten Vink, Floris Peters, and Hans Schmeets, which showed that a longer period before naturalisation decreases the probability that acquiring citizenship will positively affect the labour market prospects of immigrants.
The Deputy Minister of Security and Justice Klaas Dijkhoff was asked to respond to these findings.
After the Social Democrats (PvdA) withdrew their support for the bill and also the Senior Citizens party (50PLUS) voted against there was no longer a parliamentary majority to support the proposal and the bill was rejected.
More information about the bill can be found on the website of the Dutch Senate.
The studies (in Dutch) co-authored by Maarten Vink, Floris Peters, and Hans Schmeets be found here
and here.
Maarten Vink wrote a blog (in Dutch) about the parliamentary debate on the extension of the residence requirement for naturalisation.
MiLifeStatus
MiLifeStatus is a five year research project (2016-2021), funded by a prestigious Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), which studies the relation between migrant naturalisation and integration. The MiLifeStatus research team, led by Maarten Vink, breaks new ground by investigating why, how, and for whom legal status transition matter, and how varying policies impact on this relation. Research is conducted in six European and two North-American countries.
