ABSTRACT
Belgium has a peculiar form of federalism. The federal state has both territorial and group-based federated entities, respectively known as ‘regions’ and ‘communities’. As a result, public policy making is often a matter of multi-levelled governance (Favell and Martiniello, 1998). Migrant policy is no exception. It is fragmented across the various levels of the federal state (national level, community level and regional level) and, therefore, in the Belgian context it is advisable to speak about ‘migrant policies’ in the plural rather than ‘migrant policy’ in the singular. The migrant integration policy, however, has become a policy competence of the ‘subnational’ federated entities. As a result, a wide variety of – sometimes even contradictory – migrant-related policies and practices have come to coexist in Belgium. Equally, there has been an influence of Europeanization. The process of European integration has substantially marked the Belgian approach towards immigrants, increasingly distinguishing EU-citizens from third-country nationals (Martiniello and Rea, 2003, pp. 1–2). It should be noted, however, that immigrant admission policy has always remained an exclusively national prerogative.
