Refugees and naturalisation policy

Migration Department

Project head: Dr. Zeynep Yanaşmayan

Project team members: Liam Haller

This project aims to better understand the relationship between forced migration and naturalisation policies in the specific context of Germany. After a long period of stagnation in the last decade, recent projections identify an increase in naturalisations, especially of migrants from Syria (e.g. Gülsau, Schneider and Courtman 2022). Yet we know little about the decisions and underlying considerations of refugees, which we will explore in this project. The project is divided into two modules.

The first module focuses on refugees from Syria in Germany who are currently or will soon be eligible for naturalisation. The aim of this module is to shed more light on naturalisation decisions at the individual level through in-depth interviews. In the second module of our project, we will build on our findings to capture the relationship between acquiring citizenship and further migration. We want to investigate who plans to "use" German citizenship to migrate out of Germany and why. The idea is to develop survey items that measure this.

Funding: Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (Institutional funding)