Family Reunification and Integration Policy in the EU: Where Are the Women?

Abstract

In its early efforts to create a migration regime, the EU passed the 2003 Directive on the Right to Family Reunification. This directive has long been considered controversial, in part because of the directive's treatment of migrant women. In 2011, the EU published a Green Paper on the right to family reunification as a way to begin to assess interest in revisiting this directive. While one could consider this a positive step due to the initial uproar over the 2003 directive, it is clear that the EU's interest in reopening the debate on family reunification is problematic for many reasons. This paper explains the consultation process in the EU to expose the concerns of various constituencies and uncovers the ways in which family reunification and integration policy in the EU are still conceived of as "gender neutral" policy areas. While reopening the 2003 family reunification Directive could have been a positive move for migrant women, this paper underscores the ways in which the EU, and even parts of the nongovernmental community, continue to fall short in crafting gender sensitive policies that would benefit migrant women, their families, and the EU a whole.