The 2012 update of the report describes the various aspects of the organisation of asylum and migration policies in Belgium.

After an introduction in chapter 1 regarding the purpose and methodology used in this report, chapter 2 offers an overview of the political and institutional framework of migration and asylum policy in Belgium, focussing on the actors involved on every policy level and in the field, as well as the legal framework and the judiciary actors involved. The institituonal chart gives a simplified scheme of the institutional framework.

Chapter 3 provides a brief, historical overview of how the migration and asylum policy has evolved in Belgium since World War II till the end of 2012.Also some main statistics are given, e.g. the numbers of immigrations of foreigners towards Belgium during the last decade and the types of immigration.

Chapter 4 provides an overview of the different stages of the migration procedures:

• entry procedures,
• admission conditions,
• legal residence (e.g. on the basis of family reunication, employees, students, ...),  
• integration measures,
• obtaining Belgian citizenship,
• access to the labour market,
• return,
• and the links with other policy areas.

Chapter 5 tries to give a brief analysis of lessons learned on migration and asylum policy and looks ahead to the future. In the annexes an overview is given of the publications and sources used to undertake this study.

All of the national studies allow the European Commission to make up "summary factsheets". This way one can have easy access to brief and factual information on the organisation of migration and asylum policies in the other Member States. These factsheets, together with the institutional charts from the different member states are available here. The complete national reports of the other member states are available here.