Stricter conditions on family migration are becoming increasingly common across Europe. Yet as Anton Ahlén, Karin Borevi, Lutz Gschwind, Jonas Hultin Rosenberg and Johan Wejryd show, new survey evidence from Germany, Italy and Sweden suggests the public may be less supportive of these conditions than policymakers assume.
Family migration occupies a peculiar place in immigration politics. It involves a person already living in a country who wishes to reunite with one or more family members from abroad. Unlike other forms of migration, it is therefore not only about “outsiders” seeking admission but also about the claims of “insiders”: legal residents who want to live with their families.
The scale of family migration makes this topic politically consequential. According to the OECD, family-related migration accounted for 44% of total permanent migration flows to OECD countries in 2024, exceeding labour migration and humanitarian migration combined. Family migration is therefore not a marginal issue, but one of the main routes through which people move to advanced democracies.
At the same time, family migration has become increasingly contested. In political debates, it is often framed as a challenge for integration, social cohesion and immigration control. The term “chain migration”, used prominently in the United States, illustrates how family migration can be portrayed as an uncontrolled process through which immigrants bring large numbers of relatives into the country.
The spread of conditional family migration policies
Across Europe, family migration policies have become more restrictive over recent decades. A particularly important trend is the growing use of conditions targeted at the resident family member.
Many countries now require residents to show that they have sufficient income, adequate housing, secure legal status or language skills before they can reunite with a spouse or other family member from abroad. These requirements are often justified as tools to promote integration and reduce welfare dependency, but they also operate as instruments of immigration control.
Sweden illustrates this development well. Long seen as a comparatively generous case in European family migration policy, Sweden has over the last decade introduced stricter conditions as part of a broader restrictive turn in migration policy.
Resident family members today are required to have a stable income and be able to support the incoming family members. They must also hold a sufficiently secure residence status, which in practice excludes many people with temporary permits, including those granted subsidiary protection. This raises an important question: do these increasingly conditional policies reflect what the public actually wants?
Testing public support
Research on the link between migration and public attitudes has for a long time been focused on the so-called “opinion-policy gap”. According to this view, immigration policies in liberal democracies are often far more inclusive than public opinion would suggest.
However, recent research has complicated this picture by showing that people are not simply “for” or “against” immigration. Rather, they tend to prefer migrants who are perceived as likely to contribute economically, integrate successfully or pose fewer social and cultural costs. This has been described as a “hidden consensus” on migrant selection.
If this logic applies to family migration, we would expect the public to support rules that tie family reunification to stricter conditions. People might thus favour resident family members who work full-time, have sufficient financial resources, speak the majority language fluently or hold a secure legal status. These are precisely the kinds of attributes that many family migration policies now emphasise.
But one could also expect attitudes toward family reunification to follow a different logic. Because it concerns residents who are already living in the country, public attitudes may be shaped less by ideas of economic contribution and more by the view that family reunification is a legitimate claim of membership in itself.
To examine this, we conducted a conjoint survey experiment in Germany, Italy and Sweden with over 4,000 respondents. Participants were shown hypothetical profiles of adults living in their country who would like their spouse, living abroad, to receive a residence permit.
Attributes of the resident family members were varied in terms of work experience, financial resources, language skills and legal status. This allowed us to examine whether respondents were more likely to support family reunification for residents who met the kinds of requirements that are increasingly found in European family migration policies.
Little support for conditioning family reunification
The results are striking. Across Germany, Italy and Sweden, respondents did not show substantive support for conditioning family reunification on the resident family member’s economic resources, work experience, language skills or legal status.
This implies that respondents were not more likely to choose a resident family member simply because they worked full-time, could support the incoming spouse financially, spoke the majority language fluently or had citizenship rather than a temporary residence permit.
Figure 1: Average Marginal Component Effects (AMCE) of attributes on profile selections
Note: AMCE represents the average difference in the probability that a profile is selected when comparing two levels of the same attribute. Markers represent point estimates, while bars indicate 95% confidence intervals. Dotted, vertical lines indicate the assumed minimum sizes of relevant effects in the underlying power calculation.
This pattern was also consistent across different groups of respondents. Men and women, younger and older respondents, people with higher and lower levels of education, and those on the left and right all showed the same broad pattern. Even respondents who were generally more restrictive toward family reunification did not show meaningful support for conditioning it on these attributes.
This does not mean that respondents were indifferent to family reunification: they varied in their overall support, but did not use income, work, language or legal status as meaningful criteria when choosing between resident family members.
One attribute did matter: religion. Resident family members described as Christian were more likely to be selected than those described as Muslim. This finding is consistent with previous research showing that Islamophobia shapes public attitudes toward migration. At the same time, the broader pattern is important: respondents were generally reluctant to condition family reunification on migration background, country of origin, economic resources, language skills or legal status.
A new opinion-policy gap?
These findings challenge both the traditional opinion-policy gap thesis and the newer hidden consensus perspective. In family migration, policies appear to have become more conditional than public opinion demands. Rather than revealing a public desire for stricter conditions, our study suggests that many people apply a more universalist logic when evaluating residents’ opportunities to reunite with their spouses.
This has important policy implications. Strict family migration requirements are often presented as necessary responses to public concern about immigration and integration. But our findings suggest that policymakers may overestimate public support for such conditions, at least when they are targeted at resident family members.
Family migration is not only about regulating future arrivals. It is also about deciding what kinds of claims residents can make as a part of society. If the public does not strongly support conditioning those claims on income, work, language or legal status, then the political case for ever-stricter family migration requirements may be weaker than often assumed.
For more information, see the authors’ accompanying paper in European Union Politics.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.
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