Access to citizenship and its impact on immigrant integration. Handbook for Spain

The project ‘Access to Citizenship and its Impact on Immigrant Integration (ACIT)’ funded by the European Fund for the Integration of Non-EU Immigrants provides a new evidence base for comparing different elements of citizenship in Europe. The study has developed four sets of citizenship indicators on citizenship laws, their implementation, shares of citizenship acquisition among foreign-born immigrants and citizenship’s impact on integration for all 27 EU Member States, accession candidates and European Economic Area countries. This handbook for Spain, based on the results from the citizenship indicators and the responses of national stakeholders at the roundtable, provides a snapshot of how the vast amount of data of this project can be used for national policy debates. Some of the questions that this paper will try to address include: how likely are foreign born immigrants to become citizens in Europe and how long does it take them?; why more immigrants become citizens in one country and not the other, what are the legal opportunities and obstacles that they face in Europe?; What are the procedural obstacles to ordinary naturalisation?; Does citizenship matter for integration?