By Laleh Ashrafi
April 2019
As a part of Austria’s immigration law, non-EU/EEA immigrants are required to take the so-called integration test to prove a level of German language proficiency and knowledge of “basic values of Austria’s legal and social order” when applying for permanent residency. Some of the rather absurd questions applicants are required to answer include: Is a single woman allowed to live alone in Austria? What does a dentist do? And, only women are allowed to work in hospitals, true or false?
One might ask: how are these questions even relevant to integrating into Vienna -- a city that’s been dubbed the “most livable city in the world?” It could also be argued: are these questions meant to purposely exclude foreigners from residing in Austria? How can integration even be tested through a questionnaire?
The nature of the integration test is greatly discriminatory towards non-EU citizens. The fact that EU citizens -- regardless of nationality, religion, and language -- settling in Austria are not required to go through the integration test poses a paradox between the ongoing immigration laws and the integration test that requires basic knowledge of Austrian values and social order.
Categorizing immigrants into EU and non-EU citizens is bad enough, but it appears even worse when one becomes integrated simply by answering a set of absurd questions. Irrespective of some of the integration test questions that point out cultural and religious differences, the relevance of other questions to the integration process is highly doubted. Also, such an arguably ridiculous questionnaire used as a scale of integration suggests that integrating into Austrian society is taking on an Austrian identity and abandoning one’s own.
Moreover, other questions referring to the exact date of World War ll or the Third Reich, although informative, are not helpful. Could this be contributing to feelings of humiliation and isolation? One could argue that these very “integration tests” correlate to opposite effects of integration by causing many to feel isolated, as though they have to abandon their own set of values and beliefs in order to “integrate” into Austrian society.
The integration test is a symptom of sick Austrian immigration laws that bring the following questions to light: Does Austria actually want immigrants to be integrated? Are these integration questions a part of a bigger problem that are more deeply rooted in nationalistic ideologies? Are Austrian immigration laws becoming a threat to human rights?
The Austrian government’s anti-immigration and arguably Islamophobic politics have been heavily criticized as discriminatory, and this is just the latest example of nonsensical migration policy that certainly proves the point. The government has made the occasional half-hearted attempt to retain a semblance of non-racism, but the legislation does not lie. The integration test serves as a prime example of the government’s openly hostile and absurd policies on migration, and should only encourage us to question other laws put in place since the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition took office in 2017.
Laleh Ashrafi, the founder of World Dip magazine, is an international relations graduate student at Webster Vienna Private University with a background in linguistics and literature. Her passion for learning the German language in addition to Farsi and Russian brought her to Vienna. Having a rich involvement in humanitarian activities in different countries, including Afghanistan, lends her a wide perspective on immigration and war studies which are her main research interests.
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