Strangers No Moreis the first book to compare immigrant integration across key Western countries. Focusing on low-status newcomers and their children, it examines how they are making their way in ...four critical European countries-France, Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands-and, across the Atlantic, in the United States and Canada. This systematic, data-rich comparison reveals their progress and the barriers they face in an array of institutions-from labor markets and neighborhoods to educational and political systems-and considers the controversial questions of religion, race, identity, and intermarriage.
Richard Alba and Nancy Foner shed new light on questions at the heart of concerns about immigration. They analyze why immigrant religion is a more significant divide in Western Europe than in the United States, where race is a more severe obstacle. They look at why, despite fears in Europe about the rise of immigrant ghettoes, residential segregation is much less of a problem for immigrant minorities there than in the United States. They explore why everywhere, growing economic inequality and the proliferation of precarious, low-wage jobs pose dilemmas for the second generation. They also evaluate perspectives often proposed to explain the success of immigrant integration in certain countries, including nationally specific models, the political economy, and the histories of Canada and the United States as settler societies.
Strangers No Moredelves into issues of pivotal importance for the present and future of Western societies, where immigrants and their children form ever-larger shares of the population.
This book addresses why some ethnic minority migrant groups have better economic and political integration outcomes than others. The central claim is that social integration leads to trade-offs with ...economic and political integration. The logic behind this claim is that socially segregated groups may have difficulties interacting with mainstream society but will have more capacity for group mobilization. That mobilization can improve economic and political integration. In comparison, socially integrated groups may have greater capacity to interact with mainstream society but also less likelihood of developing significant group mobilization resources. As a result, this can limit their economic and political integration outcomes. Rahsaan Maxwell develops this argument with evidence from Britain and France, claiming that similar group-level dynamics exist despite numerous national-level contextual differences, and provides a brief extension of the argument to The Netherlands and the United States.
The Children of Immigrants at Schoolexplores the 21st-century consequences of immigration through an examination of how the so-called second generation is faring educationally in six countries: ...France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United States. In this insightful volume, Richard Alba and Jennifer Holdaway bring together a team of renowned social science researchers from around the globe to compare the educational achievements of children from low-status immigrant groups to those of mainstream populations in these countries, asking what we can learn from one system that can be usefully applied in another.Working from the results of a five-year, multi-national study, the contributors toThe Children of Immigrants at Schoolultimately conclude that educational processes do, in fact, play a part in creating unequal status for immigrant groups in these societies. In most countries, the youth coming from the most numerous immigrant populations lag substantially behind their mainstream peers, implying that they will not be able to integrate economically and civically as traditional mainstream populations shrink. Despite this fact, the comparisons highlight features of each system that hinder the educational advance of immigrant-origin children, allowing the contributors to identify a number of policy solutions to help fix the problem. A comprehensive look at a growing global issue,The Children of Immigrants at Schoolrepresents a major achievement in the fields of education and immigration studies. Richard Alba is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. His publications include Remaking the American Mainstream (with Victor Nee) and Blurring the Color Line Jennifer Holdaway is a Program Director at the Social Science Research Council, where her work has focused on migration and its interaction with processes of social change and stratification.
The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims traces how governments across Western Europe have responded to the growing presence of Muslim immigrants in their countries over the past fifty years. Drawing on ...hundreds of in-depth interviews with government officials and religious leaders in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Turkey, Jonathan Laurence challenges the widespread notion that Europe's Muslim minorities represent a threat to liberal democracy.
Objective: A sense of belonging - the subjective feeling of deep connection with social groups, physical places, and individual and collective experiences - is a fundamental human need that predicts ...numerous mental, physical, social, economic, and behavioural outcomes. However, varying perspectives on how belonging should be conceptualised, assessed, and cultivated has hampered much-needed progress on this timely and important topic. To address these critical issues, we conducted a narrative review that summarizes existing perspectives on belonging, describes a new integrative framework for understanding and studying belonging, and identifies several key avenues for future research and practice.
Method: We searched relevant databases, including Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, PsycInfo, and ClinicalTrials.gov, for articles describing belonging, instruments for assessing belonging, and interventions for increasing belonging.
Results: By identifying the core components of belonging, we introduce a new integrative framework for understanding, assessing, and cultivating belonging that focuses on four interrelated components: competencies, opportunities, motivations, and perceptions.
Conclusion: This integrative framework enhances our understanding of the basic nature and features of belonging, provides a foundation for future interdisciplinary research on belonging and belongingness, and highlights how a robust sense of belonging may be cultivated to improve human health and resilience for individuals and communities worldwide.
KEY POINTS
What is already known about this topic:
Belonging is a fundamental human need that all people are driven to satisfy.
However, there is disagreement in the literature regarding how a person should go about increasing their sense of belonging.
There is also little consensus regarding how belonging should be conceptualized and measured.
What this topic adds:
The review article draws together disparate perspectives on belonging and harnesses the strengths of this multitude of perspectives to help advance the field.
The paper provides a framework that can help inform researchers, practitioners, and individuals seeking to increase a sense of belonging in themselves and in the organizations and groups in which they work and live.
We posit that competencies, opportunities, motivations, and perceptions are central elements in strategies that can be used to increase our individual and collective sense of belonging for the betterment of society.
This book critically examines the issues and challenges of social development faced by societies in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, with particular reference to the major strategies these ...societies adopt to promote social cohesion and civil harmony in the context of globalization. It focuses on people who have been socially marginalized by the Asian financial crisis in 1997, and examines the measures Greater China has adopted to balance economic growth with social development. The book will be of interest to readers who wish to know more about societies in Mainland China, and the effects of globalization.
Just as we learn from, influence, and are influenced by others, our social interactions drive economic growth in cities, regions, and nations--determining where households live, how children learn, ...and what cities and firms produce.From Neighborhoods to Nationssynthesizes the recent economics of social interactions for anyone seeking to understand the contributions of this important area. Integrating theory and empirics, Yannis Ioannides explores theoretical and empirical tools that economists use to investigate social interactions, and he shows how a familiarity with these tools is essential for interpreting findings. The book makes work in the economics of social interactions accessible to other social scientists, including sociologists, political scientists, and urban planning and policy researchers.
Focusing on individual and household location decisions in the presence of interactions, Ioannides shows how research on cities and neighborhoods can explain communities' composition and spatial form, as well as changes in productivity, industrial specialization, urban expansion, and national growth. The author examines how researchers address the challenge of separating personal, social, and cultural forces from economic ones. Ioannides provides a toolkit for the next generation of inquiry, and he argues that quantifying the impact of social interactions in specific contexts is essential for grasping their scope and use in informing policy.
Revealing how empirical work on social interactions enriches our understanding of cities as engines of innovation and economic growth,From Neighborhoods to Nationscarries ramifications throughout the social sciences and beyond.
The document analyzes basic ideas and principles of research applied to problems of identity and social integration of different communities and interest groups. The author reviews national and ...international empirical research for the study of social cohesion. The applied method is the comparative analysis, which considers the conditions for the appearance and the mechanisms for the study of social integration in different social groups used by scientists from around the world. The conclusion is the summary of the main empirical results and the promising guidelines for the development of the study of social solidarity in world science. The research topic of this document shows a set of data for the precursors that define the conditions of the social environment.
This book deals with the impact of welfare states on immigrants' social rights, economic well-being and social inclusion, and it offers the first systematic comparison of immigrants' social rights ...across welfare states. To study immigrants' social rights the author develops an analytical framework that focuses on the interplay between 1) the type of welfare state regime, 2) forms of entry, or entry categories, and 3) the incorporation regime regulating the inclusion or exclusion of immigrants. The book maps out the development of immigrants' social rights from the early postwar period until around 2010 in six countries representing different welfare state regimes: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden and Denmark. Part I addresses three major issues. The first is how inclusive or exclusionary welfare state policies are in relation to immigrants, and especially how the type of welfare state and incorporation regime affect their social rights. The second issue concerns changes in immigrant rights and the direction of the change: rights extension versus rights contraction. The third issue is how immigrants' social rights compare to those of citizens. Part II shifts from policies affecting immigrant rights to the politics of the policies. It examines the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the six countries, focusing on social rights extension and contraction and changes in the policy dimensions of the incorporation regime that impinge on immigrant rights.