Integration and cultural diversity
Massey – theories on why people migrate
Simon – different ways and views on collecting ethnic statistics
Schinkel – ontzettend ingewikkeld… immigration
Alba, R., Sloan, J., & Sperling – Immigrant children in white schools: We consider how three features
of such systems—the division of labor among schools, families, and communities (how much can
parents invest in the education of their children, like time and stuff and being attached to the school
or something); tracking; and inequalities among schools—impact immigrant-origin children
Friberg - In this article, we explore the real and perceived content of the various skills immigrant
workers are assumed to posit, and ask how employers shift their view of different ethnic groups as
immigrants from new countries of origin enter the immigrant niche.
- it reads as an example of statistical discrimination
Platt - Can specific policies support the economic integration of immigrants? We find that
immigrants’ employment chances are negatively associated with national levels of expenditure on
welfare benefits but positively associated with policies facilitating immigrant access to social
security.
Abdelgadir - investigation of the effects of the 2004 French headscarf ban. Results show that the
educational outcomes and economic integration of Muslim women was negatively affected by the
law. Group identity was also affected, with both French and religious identities becoming stronger
for affected Muslim women. These effects are moderated by existing identities:
Foner & Alba - Our argument has been that a combination of factors – religious similarity between
natives and immigrants, the religiosity of the native population and historically rooted institutional
structures – explain why the United States is more welcoming to immigrant religion than is Western
Europe and, as a consequence, why the social science literature on religion among immigrants in the
United States emphasizes its integrative role while in Europe conflict and exclusion come to the fore.
Helbling - This article reveals that while Muslims have a surprisingly good reputation in Western
Europe, the wearing of the headscarf in schools is opposed by a large majority of people. While
attitudes towards Muslims vary little across countries, there is a lot of variation in levels of
opposition to the headscarf. It appears that the more state and church are separated in a country or
the more a state discriminates against religious groups the more opposed people are to allowing
new religious practices in schools.
Kang – CV whitening works, and these findings suggest a paradox: minorities may be particularly
likely to experience disadvantage when they apply to ostensibly pro-diversity employers. These
findings illuminate the role of racial concealment and transparency in modern labor markets and
point to an important interplay between the self-presentation of employers and the self-
presentation of job seekers in shaping economic inequality.
Small - Sociological perspectives on racial discrimination – taste based / statistical (1) / institutional
discrimination. We have shown that institutional discrimination can exist independent of the
intentions of the current employees, because discrimination is institutionalized (2). We have
suggested that institutional discrimination is a vehicle through which past discrimination has
,contemporary consequences, via organizational things (3) and legal things (4). We have proposed
that the minor forms of everyday discrimination people may experience deserve attention, because
discrimination can matter cumulatively, not just episodically (5). And we have posited that the
perception of discrimination is an important, independent topic deserving serious attention (6).
Ratzmann – In summary, local job centre administrators predominantly saw mobile EU citizens as
foreigners, and therefore as less deserving of tax-financed social subsistence benefits in Germany
than their fellow German-born applicants. Nationalistic or ethnicising readings of (not) being
‘German enough’, relating to van Oorschot’s (2008) identity-based criterion of deservingness,
informed street-level bureaucrats’ views on the legitimacy of mobile EU citizens’ entitlements to
social assistance in Germany.
Boterman – School context. Black schools/white schools. Amsterdam context. How parents navigate
Koopmans – Letter experiment - We find strong support for the negative effect of ethnic diversity on
cooperation. We find no evidence, however, of in-group favoritism. Letters from Turkish or Muslim
organizations were as often returned as those from German and Christian organizations, and the
ethnic diversity effect was the same for all types of letters.
Hartmann - More specifically, this model will distinguish between the social and cultural bases for
social cohesion in the context of diversity— where the ‘‘social’’ dimension refers to the interactions
among and between individuals, groups, and the nation (what Durkheim called ‘‘social integration,’’
or Tocqueville termed ‘‘association’’), and the ‘‘cultural’’ aspect has to do with the more normative
basis for social order (‘‘moral regulation’’ in Durkheim’s terms; ‘‘mores’’ for de Tocqueville). We use
these two dimensions to produce a two-by-two table specifying three distinct types of
multiculturalism (cosmopolitanism, fragmented pluralism, and interactive pluralism)
Bonjour - Based on an analysis of parliamentary debates about civic integration policies in the
Netherlands, this paper asks which migrants are considered likely or unlikely to integrate based on
which presumed characteristics. We find that Dutch civic integration policies aim at barring
“migrants with poor prospects”. In sharp contrast with a long history of Dutch social policies,
politicians deny state responsibility for migrants’ emancipation based on a discursive racialization of
these migrants as unassimilable.
Michalowski - the analysis has produced a surprising result: no hypothesis from the existing
citizenship and civic integration literature can explain the content of all five citizenship tests.
Furthermore, I find that the characteristics of a citizenship policy regime are not a good predictor for
the content of the respective citizenship tests.
Course introduction video:
Very interdisciplinary course
Story of the migration history of the teacher – Italy.
Definitions that were used over time to refer to migrants and different group of migrants. Economic
reasons, student reasons.
Within Europe lots of freedom to move around.
Brexit
,Migration and integration in relation to things happening in society.
Outline of the course
- Language of integration
- Integration processes 1: education and labour market (microlevel)
- Integration processes 2: social and cultural integration (micro)
- Integration challenges 1: discrimination – at the workplace (meso)
- Integration challenges 2: residential and school segregation (meso)
- Integration policies and multiculturalism. (macro-perspective)
All lectures will be recorded
In subunits – posted on Fridays
16:15-17:00 on Tuesdays to ask questions about literature and lectures
Tutorials on campus with mandatory attendance
Discuss literature – practical activities
And presentations
Week 1 – The classification of ethnic and cultural
diversity and the measurement of integration
Massey
Massey, D. et al. (1998). ‘Why does immigration occur? A Theoretical synthesis’. Pp. 34-52 in The
Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, edited by C. Hirschman, P.
Kasinitz and J. DeWind. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Available at:
https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/pony2014shama/files/2014/02/Kaczmarczyk_R eading-1.pdf
The Modern History of international Migration
Divided into four periods
- Mercantile period (1500-1800)
o Colonization and economic growth
Europeans immigrating and immigration of slaves.
o Agrarian settlers, administrators and artisans, entrepeneurs
- Industrial period (18:00-1925)
o Search for new lives in Americas and Oceania
- Period of limited migration (1920-1960)
o Due to wars and great depression way less emigration
- Postindustrial migration (1960…
o Immigration became a truly global phenomenon. Before it was Europeans going
somewhere, but now more and more people from developing countries are
migrating. Moving to the postindustrial societies.
THEORIES OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION
Neoclassical economics
According to this theory and its extensions, international migration, like its internal counterpart, is
cause by geographic differences in the supply of an demand for labor. The resulting differential in
, wages causes workers from the low-wage or labor-surplus country to move to the high-wage or
labor scarce country.
Skilled/unskilled workers
Associated with this macroeconomic theory is an accompanying microeconomic model of individual
choice. People choose to move to where they can be most productive, given their skills, but before
they can reap the higher wages associated with greater labor productivity, they must undertake
certain investments, which include the material costs of traveling, the costs of maintenance while
moving and looking for work, the effort involved in learning a new language and culture, the
difficulty experienced in adapting to a new labor market and the psychological costs of cutting old
ties and forging new ones. (a formula is explained). In this theory – a potential migrant goes to
wherever the expected net returns to migration are greatest.
The new economics of migration
A key insight of this approach as compared to the neoclassical theory, is that migration decisions are
made not by isolated individuals, but within larger units of interrelated people.
Households are in a better position than individuals to control risks to economic well-being by
diversifying the allocation of productive resources. They can allocate different family workers to
different labor markets – geographic diversification.
A key proposition of the new economic model is that income is not a homogeneous good, as
assumed by neoclassical economics. The source really matters. And the new economics of migration
also questions the assumption that income has a constant effect on utility across socioeconomic
settings – that is that a 100 euro real increase in income means the same for everyone.
Summary neoclassical vs new economics of migration
These two lead to divergent conclusions about the origins and nature of international migration,
both are essentially microlevel decision models. They differ in the units assumed to make the
decision (the individual or the household), the entity being maximized or minimized (income or risk),
their assumptions about the economic context of decision making (complete and well-functioning
markets versus missing or imperfect markets, and the extent to which the migration decision is
socially contextualized (whether income is evaluated in absolute terms or relative to some reference
group).
Segmented labor market Theory
This theory discounts decisions made by individuals and argues that international migration stems
from the intrinsic labor demands of modern industrial societies.
Michael Piore (1979) – immigration is not caused by push factors in sending countries, but by pull
factors in receiving countries (a chronic and unavoidable need for low-wage workers). This demand
for low-wage workers stems from four fundamental characteristics of advanced industrial societies
and their economics:
- Structural inflation
o Wages are socially defined. Therefore you cannot just simply increase wages of jobs
at the bottom of an occupational hierarchy.
o Wages must be increased proportianalty throughout the job hierarchy in order to
keep them in line with social expectations. This is expensive and employers may
seek easier and cheaper solutions. migrant workers will accept lower wages
- Job for accumulating social status.
