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Abstract
Immigration to Germany, Italy and Finland represent different stages of the ‘new
migration’ to Europe. The scale and types of immigration also differ between the three.
Though each country is experiencing different stages of immigration, they all recognize
the necessity to better integrate foreign minors. The three countries seem to have only
recently started to regard themselves as countries of immigration. As a result, their
policies towards foreign minors seem to be based on tolerating, not integrating them.
The presence of foreign minors in the juvenile justice system is a reflection on their
approaches and attitudes towards immigrants. Therefore, we set out on an 18-month
project funded by the European Commission to study how being ‘foreign’ affects the
treatment of minors in the penal systems in Italy, Germany and Finland. The project is
called “INTO: Inside the Outsiders: Deviant Immigrant Minors and Integration
Strategies in European Justice Systems.” In this paper, we will present the difficulties
encountered when creating comparable data in terms of contrasting labels for and
definitions of the target group and data collection as well as the solutions created for
addressing these difficulties. At the outset of the project, it became clear that the terms
used to define the target group had different meanings for each of the partners and one
term was not deemed sufficient for use in all three contexts, both due to the immigration
history in each country and due to the counting methods used by the data collection
institutions in each country (National Censuses, Justice Systems, etc.). In the project
proposal, we defined ‘immigrant minors’ as including two categories of children: 1)
those born in the host country and are either naturalised citizens, hold dual citizenship
or are permanent residents 2) children who immigrated to the host country with their
family or by themselves. Yet statistical data in each country uses multiple and diverse
terms to describe our target group – foreign minors, migrants, ethnic minorities, foreign
citizens, etc. Clearly, this made the collection and comparison of three different sets of
national statistics quite challenging. The diverse terminology and categorisation of
‘immigrant minors’ in the three countries made it difficult to find directly comparable
statistics. The discussion of how to resolve this ‘technical’ difficultly revealed the
different conceptions of what it means to be an ‘immigrant’ and a ‘minor’ in each
country and within their respective social and judicial systems. This discussion reflected
each country’s individual conceptions and laws regarding citizenship as well as their
past and present approaches to integration. We argue that despite their different labels,
social class and rights, foreigners, ethnic minorities and migrants share similar social
conditions. Foreigners, even when they become citizens, still experience social
constraints and suffer in the process of cultural integration. Migrants, who must
overcome the legal and economic challenges and risks of migrating, have difficulty
fully integrating into the host society. The second generation seems to experience
greater frustration from their continued exclusion. Ethnic minorities are often
identifiable and visibly different from the majority which prevents their full integration
despite being long-established in a country. They all remain ‘foreign’ from the
perspective of the autochthonous population. And when examining discrimination, we
find that these terms often overlap and are used interchangeably. Given this background,
it is no wonder that there are difficulties in addressing this ‘new migration’ to Europe.
The social conflicts arising from the recent migration, during the last fifty years (at
most), cannot be easily understood in terms of class, racial or ethnic conflict. While we
might say the subjects of this conflict belong to a socially disadvantaged group or that
our societies are quick to discriminate against them, we cannot, since the situation is
still not clear. What is clear is that it will continue to be difficult to study these difficult
issues in a European setting if we lack of adequate, comparable data collection
techniques in Europe. However, refining the techniques will require serious reflection
and discussion of the terms currently in use and of the theoretical approaches to
immigration in each of the European member states. This is a reflection we intend to
begin in this paper.