Enabling Immigrant Integration: The Role of Public Services

This open access book provides a critical exploration of how public services, particularly school-related services, shape the ability of immigrant communities to exercise their fundamental rights in the city. It offers a methodological, evidence-based pathway to assess the enabling capacity of these services, especially in digitally mediated environments. Focusing on services as key interfaces between citizens and their rights, the book examines how barriers in access, comprehension, and interaction disproportionately affect vulnerable users, limiting their full participation in urban life. By centering the experiences of immigrant parents and their interactions with school procedures, it highlights the extent to which public services can enable or hinder processes of social and educational integration. At the heart of the book is the application of the Mediation Grammar (MG), a user-based service quality standard developed within the H2020 easyRights project. The MG is used as both an analytical and evaluative framework to assess the “empowerment gaps” that arise when users access and use public services. These gaps are examined through three dimensions essential to language accessibility, information adequacy, and rights actualisation, providing an overall evaluation of the enabling capacity of services from the perspective of service users and their ability to exercise their rights in the city.