Une meilleure insertion professionelle des personnes issues de l’immigration: allons au mainstreaming Issue 2015/2 mars 2015 = Immigrant labour market participation in Belgium - high time to mainstream. IES Policy Brief Issue 2015/2 March 2015

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Arbeidsmarktparticipatie van mensen met een migratie-achtergrond in België: hoog tijd om te mainstreamen Issue 2015/2 maart 2015 = Immigrant labour market participation in Belgium - high time to mainstream. IES Policy Brief Issue 2015/2 March 2015.

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Immigrant labour market participation in Belgium - high time to mainstream. IES Policy Brief 2015/2 • March 2015

The gap in labour market participation between natives and people with an immigrant background is significant in Belgium, one of the largest in the OECD. In this Policy Brief, we present research1 that investigated one of the possible causes of this poor performance, and we propose three main policy recommendations. The research project studied whether Belgium’s complex federal state structure, and the subsequent division of responsibilities and lack of intergovernmental cooperation helps to explain this poor performance. The study concluded that governance complexity does not appear to be a main cause for Belgium’s poor results. However, more policy coordination would improve policy efficiency. Issue 2015/2 • March 2015 can be found. The research also investigated what opportunities could arise from the sixth Belgian state reform to promote labour market participation of people with an immigrant background. After presentin

The first year of implementation of the EU Action Plan on Integration: An evaluation of European policy coordination on migrant integration. Policy Brief Issue 2017/02 • July 2017

In June 2016, the European Commission launched the ‘EU Action Plan on Integration of third country nationals’. The Action Plan provides a common policy framework for integration policies in the Member States and aims to promote cooperation and policy coordination in the field of migrant integration. Due to the multilevel and cross-sectoral character of migrant integration, policy coordination is crucial to an effective policy strategy in this area of policymaking. In this policy brief, we take the one year anniversary of the Action Plan as an occasion to evaluate the role of the European Commission in European policy coordination on migrant integration. We discuss the relevant European tools for policy coordination that have been put into place over the last decade and recommend an evaluation of the effect of these tools on the policy responses and outcomes in the Member States

Mainstreaming or retrenchment? Migration-related diversity in Dutch and Flemish education policies

This article analyses how states adapt generic policies to the increasing diversity that characterises contemporary European societies. More particularly, it zooms in on how migration-related diversity is mainstreamed into education policies in the Netherlands and Flanders and why we observe different policy trends in these two cases. We find that the focus on migration-related diversity largely faded in Dutch education policies in the period from 2000 to 2014. In Flanders, this trend towards ‘migration-related diversity retrenchment’ is less prevalent during this period, even though a similar evolution has started to take place more recently. These findings present a puzzle, as the most evident explanation for diversity retrenchment, namely the increasing politicisation of migration and diversity, cannot account for this difference since the Netherlands and Flanders are characterised by similar degrees of politicisation of migration-related diversity. Our findings thus call for an exploration of underemphasised explanations for diversity retrenchment. We show that the diverging degree of diversity retrenchment can be explained by the presence or absence of a sub-state nationalist project and diverging degrees of neoliberal retrenchment policies. Sub-state nationalism seems to have temporarily offered a buffer against the neoliberal retrenchment of migration-related diversity.</p

The UK in Justice and Home Affairs: the engaged outsider. IES Policy Brief Issue 2016/6• April 2016

By bundling the manifold policy expertise of the researchers of the Institute for European Studies (IES), this paper forms part of a series of analyses investigating the potential implications of a ‘Brexit’ scenario for different EU policies. All papers ask the same three questions: 1) What is the state of the EU policy in focus? 2) What is the UK’s role/interest in this policy field? 3) What are the potential implications of a ‘Brexit’ scenario at the policy-level? After Claire Dupont and Florian Trauner introduce the project, Richard Lewis sets the historical and cultural context and explains how the UK and the EU have come to such a low-point in their relations. Next, five policy fields are analysed: justice and home affairs; free movement policies; EU external representation; the (digital) single market; and environmental policy

An Electrocorticography Device with an Integrated Microfluidic Ion Pump for Simultaneous Neural Recording and Electrophoretic Drug Delivery In Vivo

The challenge of treating neurological disorders has motivated the development of implantable devices that can deliver treatment when and where it’s needed. This study presents a novel brain implant capable of electrophoretically delivering drugs and recording local neural activity on the surface of the brain. The drug delivery is made possible by the integration of a microfluidic ion pump (µFIP) into a conformable electrocorticography (ECoG) device with recording cites embedded next to the drug delivery outlets. The µFIP ECoG device can deliver a high capacity of several biologically important cationic species on demand. The therapeutic potential of the device is demonstrated by using it to deliver neurotransmitters in a rodent model while simultaneously recording local neural activity. These developments represent a significant step forward for cortical drug-delivery systems

‘Street-level’ agents operating beyond ‘remote control’: how overseas liaison officers and foreign state officials shape UK extraterritorial migration management

Extraterritorial migration management perspectives on how states try to enforce immigration controls beyond their juridical borders are strongly influenced by ‘remote control’ metaphors. This is conceptually limited and outdated. Most research fails to sufficiently acknowledge agency by a destination state's officials acting abroad, foreign states and their officials, when evaluating extraterritorial measures and ‘outcomes’. We study UK liaison officers abroad, specifically, how they see their efforts to implement extraterritorial immigration control through interactions with foreign state officials. Our approach links inter-state relations to the social world of on-the-ground ‘street-level’ interactions between officers abroad and their foreign counterparts. The empirical analysis draws from original interviews and official sources. We compare factors accounting for the UK's activities and perceived ‘outcomes’ across USA, France, Thailand, Egypt and Ghana. Findings show the UK's extraterritorial migration management results from a very long chain of decisions and actions, by foreign and UK state actors, operating at different institutional-levels, with uncontrollable local circumstances abroad. Realising extraterritorial goals depends strongly on liaison officers’ agency, ‘soft power’ over foreign officials and foreign officials’ willingness to cooperate. Meanwhile liaison officers’ ‘feedbacks’ importantly influence Home Office decision-making. Against the simplistic one-way causality of ‘remote control’, this is ‘street-level’ agency beyond ‘remote control’