FeMiPol

The European Commission has highlighted the contribution that immigrants could make to the Lisbon Strategy objectives, by acknowledging that the integration of migrants serves to enhance the potential of European societies for competitiveness, sustainable economic growth and greater social cohesion. In the Communication to the Council (2003) the EC lists, alongside young migrants, migrant women as a group that should be taken into account in formulating integration policies.

The FeMiPol project responds to these challenges by exploring and analysing the impact of integration policies on the position of migrant women within EU countries as a basis for the development of recommendations for appropriate integration policies.

A central assumption of the project is that integration policies should attend to the agency of the persons involved. Therefore the analysis of integration processes focuses not only on barriers that block social integration and on their removal, but also on the strategies and life plans of the female migrants. On the basis of an agency sensitive biographical evaluation of policy, the project will formulate recommendations for better policies both on the national and the EU level, aimed at the integration of female migrants.

The FeMIPol project started in February 2006 and will run until January 2008. The research covers eleven European countries: Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.