Immigrant Incorporation in Western Europe

Joppke, Christian Georg (2013). Immigrant Incorporation in Western Europe. In: Oxford Bibliographies in Political Science online. New York: Oxford University Press

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Immigrant incorporation (or integration) is a subfield of migration studies, and it constitutes a genuinely interdisciplinary undertaking of sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, and historians. In none of these disciplines, however, has it carved out an established niche for itself. In contrast to the United States, where the study of immigrant integration (or “assimilation” as US researchers prefer to say) is more firmly grounded in sociology than in political science, a characteristic of the European scene is a larger prominence of political scientists, macro comparativists, and legal-institutional scholars. This reflects the fact that immigrant integration in Europe is, to a much larger degree than in the United States, framed by public policies, and it often goes along with major transformations of state institutions (most importantly citizenship) and national identities. European states (even France) are ethnic nation-states, where sedentariness and not moving is the norm, and they stand for countries that are much less attuned to, and constituted by, international migration than the classic immigrant nations of North America and Oceania. Overall, European scholarship is marked, on one side, by single-country studies by national experts, which are often solicited by their respective governments interested in policy advice (but increasingly also supported by supranational research bodies). On the other side, most agenda-setting work has grown out of qualitative single-person studies (often dissertations) by macro sociologists and political comparativists not (or only incidentally) rooted in national university systems and disconnected from policy contexts. The field is in need of further conceptual development and of theoretically reflected, genuinely comparative work of the second type, which is mostly off the public funding radar.

Item Type:	Book Section (Further Contribution)
Division/Institute:	03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Institute of Sociology
UniBE Contributor:	Joppke, Christian Georg
Subjects:	300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Language:	English
Submitter:	Mahboob Hasan
Date Deposited:	23 May 2014 08:50
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2022 14:30
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/45121