The Three Tier System of the Regulation of Family Reunification in the EU

Family reunification is a fundamental right in EU law, but EU citizens who have not exercised their rights to free movement cannot benefit from the protection of EU Law. In addition to this, one notices the clear juxtaposition of two rival policy beliefs; on the one hand, in the EU legal framework governing the free movement of EU citizens, family reunification is a right that is associated with, and enhances, the right to cross-border mobility, whereas, with respect to TCNs, restrictive collectivism subsumes respect for family life to political expedience, migration control and to vague notions of integration, on the other. In EU free movement law, integration has always been firmly situated within the host Member State and has been intimately connected with processes of equalization so that an EU citizen becomes part of the fabric of the host society. In EU migration law, on the other hand, integration-testing is more about controlling, testing, restricting mobility and less about ‘integration’. It is not based on a sustainable theory of integration or on how community building works. Instead, it is based on a number of problematic assumptions, such as that integration can be objectively determined, can be measured and can be captured once and for all by a paper and pen exercise and thus the award of a passing score. The present paper discusses the three tier system of the regulation of family reunification in the European Union and argues that it is constitutionally unsustainable.