Since the late 1990s a class of political measures that can be called “obligatory integration policies” has constantly gained importance in Europe (cf. Goodman, 2010; Goodman & Wright, 2015; Joppke, 2017; Michalowski & van Oers, 2012; Triadafilopoulos, 2011). These policies require immigrants to take certain actions or to demonstrate certain competences that, in the eyes of the host society, serve their integration.
Some of these measures are aimed at integration in a general sense. The requirement in several European states to take up residence in a particular place (“residence condition”), for instance, is intended to “facilitate the integration [of immigrants]” (EuGH Press Release No. 22/16), without specifying what integration consists in. Typically, however, these measures focus on learning the host society's language as the key to integration. In particular, many Western states prescribe some groups of immigrants to attend language classes. Often, these measures additionally seek to promote “civic” integration, for example, when integration courses encompass, beside language lessons, units about the host society's values, politics, culture, and history.
Obligatory integration policies are obligatory in the sense that they do not seek to promote attendance with incentives, but to compel it with sanctions or penalties. In case of incentives, immigrants are at liberty to respond to them or not. If, for example, the state subsidizes language courses so that the fee is very low or if the state pays grants to immigrants for successfully joining classes, many immigrants will decide to participate of their own free will. In case of obligatory integration policies, however, immigrants cannot choose whether or not they respond to an incentive; they simply have to comply with the legal obligation and any violation is deemed to be wrongdoing. In recent decades, there has been a shift in many European states from integration policies based on incentives toward obligatory integration policies. When, for instance, publicly subsidized integration courses were established in Germany in 2005, about a third of the participants in the courses were obliged to attend, whereas a majority chose voluntarily to embrace the opportunity to learn the language for a low price. The amendment of the legal rules underlying integration courses through the so-called Integrationsgesetz in 2016, lead to an increase in the share of the obligatory participants to two-thirds (193,000 persons in 2017).1
From the point of view of normative theory, the distinction between obligatory integration policies and those merely involving incentives for voluntary compliance is of major importance. Obviously, there is nothing pro tanto unjust about states creating incentives for immigrants to integrate, as long as the incentives in question are reasonable in scope and
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