The Self-Defeating Politics of Language Tests

Language policy has grown to become the most palatable face of immigration restriction. Across Western democracies, governments are tightening language requirements for permanent residency and citizenship, quietly narrowing the pool of people who can stay. Instead of supporting integration, language is now being repurposed as migration control.

In the Netherlands, the 2021 Civic Integration Act raised the general required Dutch proficiency for permanent residency from A2 to B1 on the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), a level demanding complex grammar, abstract vocabulary and the ability to engage in extended discussion.

France has followed a similar path: its 2024 Immigration Law raised the bar for permanent residency from A2 to B1 as well. These new tests have been widely criticized for their difficulty. When ten native French volunteers took the written examination required for citizenship, half of them failed – including one with a master’s degree in literature. Officials estimate that up to 60,000 migrants could be denied long-term status in France alone.

The United States has historically been an outlier in that it does not require a language test for permanent residency. English proficiency is assessed only when applicants seek citizenship through the naturalization interview and test. Yet in the current political climate, changes in language policy are gaining traction among the American right.

Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order declaring English the official national language may be mostly symbolic, but it repeals prior commitments to multilingual access in federal services with the same political goal of the European measures: to discourage immigrants from settling rather than helping them integrate.

Globally, this trend amounts to what researchers Carlsen and Rocca call ‘language-test misuse’, which occurs when tests designed to measure linguistic ability are being used as tools of migration control. Failed scores can mean delayed or denied status, blocked access to work and services, family separation and heightened deportability – effects that fall most heavily on low-literate adults who are least supported by government-designed course provisions and testing systems.

Decades of research – including Jim Cummins’s interdependence hypothesis – shows that skills in a second language depend heavily on foundational literacy in the first. When those foundations are weak because schooling was interrupted by poverty, war or displacement, learning a new language becomes exponentially harder. Yet the very people facing these structural barriers are now being impacted most by policies that treat disparate starting points for language learning as personal failure.

Only a handful of the states that require language tests for residency or citizenship offer exemptions or adequate support for learners with limited schooling. Many of those that offer learning support cap instruction at 200–250 hours, though research suggests that adult beginners need at least double that to build even basic literacy in a new language. Instead, many of these policies punish people who lack an educational history they were never given the chance to acquire.

Even when such political trends are deliberate, they are alarming. Liberal democracies don’t just promise equal dignity, they promise a fair chance to climb the ladder and build a better life. When permanent residency and citizenship hinge on a high-stakes language exam, social mobility stops being something people can earn through work and participation and instead becomes something you either arrive with or you don’t.

That is precisely what makes language policy such a bad instrument of migration control. These restrictions don’t ‘solve’ migration pressures – they simply shift the burden onto integration and turn language learning from a public good into a punitive hurdle.

Instead of reducing migration, language policy makes settlement more unequal by filtering people according to prior schooling, time and money, compromising a core liberal idea: that people should be able to build security and belonging through effort and participation, not be permanently penalized for deprivation they did not choose.

Tightening language requirements as a tool of migration control is also economically self-defeating. Countries recruit newcomers to fill jobs, stabilize tax bases and sustain public services, then keep many of those same people in legal limbo – or shut them out altogether through tests that often measure essay writing more than day-to-day communication.

The result: wasted potential and avoidable resentment. Rather than supported by literacy and language instruction that would improve integration into workplaces, schools and communities, workers who could contribute to the labor force are pushed into prolonged insecurity and repeated testing.

Language policy aimed at integration would treat proficiency not as a precondition for belonging, but as a public investment. Policy should provide accessible adult literacy support alongside language instruction, flexible class schedules, childcare, transport and assessments that prioritize real-world communication over essay writing. In other words, it would lower the costs of learning, precisely because the social and economic returns of successful integration accrue to the country too.

We talk about ‘learning the language’ as if fluency were a moral test, a measure of worthiness to belong. But language is not a barrier to citizenship – it is a bridge. When states turn that bridge into a toll gate, they do more than exclude migrants: they impoverish themselves. In a world that celebrates diversity but punishes linguistic differences, it’s time we started talking honestly about the politics of language tests, and how liberal values have become quietly lost in translation.