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While there are many quantitative studies examining the determinants of ethnic violence from the perspective of offenders, less is known about the effects of violence on the victims or target groups. In light of the increased refugee migration in Germany in 2015/2016, we provide empirical evidence that living in districts with a past of ethnic violence against refugees affects refugees' perception of the host country negatively. We are using survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel which we matched with data on ethnic violence. Albeit refugees had positive attitudes towards Germany – they felt overwhelmingly welcome, safe, and were barely worried about xenophobia – they were considerably less likely to feel this positive in districts with a high accumulated share of arson attacks on refugee homes. As living in contexts with higher levels of past and present ethnic violence can influence refugees' attitudes, this has implications for integration processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of how and in what terms states constitute ethnicity and citizenship around statistical categories when these categories lack explicitly ethnic principles of classification. It does so based on a qualitative content analysis of the way that the German statistical category of ‘persons with a migration background’ is deployed in parliamentary debates on education. We argue that state actors in organized politics, who are embedded in Germany's national cultural repertoire and integration policy repertoire, transform this nuanced statistical category into a homogenized social category that is defined in terms of language, class and exclusion from the imagined national community. Our findings demonstrate that, in order to understand how the state uses statistics to draw boundaries within a society, it is necessary to go beyond the content of statistical categories themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2005, German immigration law required all refugees receiving social welfare benefits to undergo language and civic knowledge tests as a pathway to the labour markets. The German integration regime, which was grounded in social imaginaries, legislative initiatives and supranational agreements, produced bureaucratic and ideological challenges following the "long summer of migration". Syrian asylum seekers entering Germany navigated shifts in the social imaginary and legal changes that both narrowed the definitions of a "good refugee" and expanded the benefits given to a select group of asylum seekers and refugees. I apply ethnographic fieldwork beginning on the Turkish border with Syria in 2015 and later fieldwork across Germany to analyse shifting social landscapes. The prerequisites of integration made long-term residency permits and citizenship contingent on "good integration". The public recognition of "good" or "deserving" refugees was thus conditional on the fulfilment of a universal criteria of achievement in social competences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "postmigrant perspective", which arose in the German-speaking countries and has been adopted internationally, offers a counter-hegemonic alternative to the everyday racist and ethnicizing discourses on migration. To understand migration as historical normality, to engage in migration research as social analysis and to focus centrally on the perspectives of the postmigrant generation leads to a rupture. This entails a radical interrogation of the binary thinking around migrants and non-migrants, which has significantly shaped not only established migration research but other areas as well. The present article, proceeding from a postmigrant perspective, analyses semi-narrative interviews with adolescents on their experiences of discrimination and racism. We seek to show there that the young people of the postmigrant generation have been impacted by everyday racist and ethnicizing discourses, but have not been subjugated by them. Despite encountering restrictive conditions, they develop empowering convivial everyday practices, from which society ought to learn something. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we compare rates of discrimination across German-born applicants from thirty-five ethnic groups in which various racial and religious treatment groups are embedded, this study allows us to better distinguish taste and statistical sources of discrimination, and to assess the relative importance of ethnicity, phenotype and religious affiliation as signals triggering discrimination. The study is based on applications to almost 6,000 job vacancies with male and female applicants in eight occupations across Germany. We test taste discrimination based on cultural value distance between groups against statistical discrimination based on average education levels and find that discrimination is mostly driven by the former. Based on this pattern, ethnic, racial and religious groups whose average values are relatively distant from the German average face the strongest discrimination. By contrast, employers do not treat minority groups with value patterns closer to Germany's different from ethnic German applicants without a migration background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it has been highlighted by several authors that the notion of diaspora has become a politicized identity discourse, little is known about how it becomes a banal part of migrants’ everyday lives. Based on a theoretical understanding of banality, the article focuses on the interaction of the banal and the non-banal within this context of the fiftieth anniversary of Ghanaian independence in Berlin in 2007. It is argued that diasporic nationalist rituals are spaces of intersection between politicized and banal spheres of social life. By enacting and institutionalizing particular forms of interaction that are ‘banalizing’ dissent and conflict among migrants the examined series of public rituals contributed to give life-worldly relevance to the otherwise questionable and contested identity category of diaspora. In this sense, the primary product was not group formation but the banalization of diasporic nationalism as a category of identification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the comparative literature on immigrant integration, Germany and the United States are frequently placed in distinct and opposing regime categories. Using cross-sectional data from the 1997 German Socio-Economic Panel and the 1997 Panel of Income Dynamics, we compare the process of integration of four generational cohorts of Turks in Germany and Mexicans in the United States, focusing on markets, welfare, and culture. The comparative analysis of the data supports Gary Freeman's 'patchwork' hypothesis that integration in Western democracies is happening not monolithically, or in a linear fashion, but rather in the form of irregular patchworks. The specific patchworks revealed by our data include some progress toward integration, in particular in the market sector, as well as stagnation, and perhaps exclusion, in others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of return migration of Christians to Mardin (Turkey) and the location of migrants in Essen's (Germany) nomination for the European Capital of Culture, this article focuses on the interface between urban restructuration, cultural diversity and migrant incorporation in the context of neo-liberal globalization. Despite the growing literature on the new role of culture in urban economics, scant attention has been given to the place of immigrants/returnees in urban dynamics and in the repositioning struggle between cities within and across border. This article aims to bring together the field of (transnational) migration and studies on culture in scalar politics. It argues that the structural changes taking place in the cities of migrants' departure and settlement shape the nature of migrant incorporation and transnationalism, the narratives about migrants' place in urban development, and the venues of translating cultural diversity into a competitive advantage in scalar politics. On the basis of the role migrants/returnees play in the involvement of supranational actors like the EU in Mardin and Essen in the prospects of urban development, this article draws attention to the impact of supranational actors in shaping territorial inequalities, as well as the local trajectories of urban politics. Finally, it raises questions about special European dynamics in changing imaginaries and topographies of cultural diversity in Europe, which go beyond conventional schemes of multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the impact of post-war immigration on citizenship in three Western states: the United States, Germany and Great Britain. While focusing on national variations in the immigration-citizenship relationship, this comparison suggests some general implications for the institution of citizenship in liberal states: citizenship remains indispensable for integrating immigrants; the content of citizenship may change. in deviation from nationhood traditions; and citizenship is becoming increasingly multicultural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International migration reflects the political divisions of the world. That is the reason migrants from the Caribbean are found scattered around the world according to the dictates of political geography. This article discusses the Mediterranean migration to Western Europe. Host countries are usually labor market that promote immigration. In the Netherlands, West Germany and Switzerland, shortage of labor during the 1960's was the motive behind immigration flows. Moreover, there are differences in laws under which an immigrant may enter and settle in the three countries. These regulations directly affect the legal status of immigrants. Immigrants are subjected to all kinds of regulations from the host countries. In general, their legal status becomes stronger as the duration of their stay is longer. The article then discusses the Mediterranean migration to the Netherlands, West Germany and Switzerland. In all three countries, legal status of immigrants becomes stronger with a longer duration of stay. A growth of Turkish and Moroccan populations and a much slower growth of Italian, Spanish and Yugoslav immigrant groups is observed. The number of returning migrants is linked to the number of immigrants entering the country shortly before. In all three host countries, the economic crisis and high unemployment rate favor an anti-immigrant climate.

The Federal Republic of Germany, in spite of official orthodoxies and public protestations, has become a land of immigration. Realities do not bear out the claim, reiterated time and again, that Germany is only a transient stop for guest workers who, in due course, will leave and be replaced by another group, equally mobile and determined to return to their individual homelands. Germany is rapidly evolving into a multicultural and ethnically diverse society. Policies regarding guest workers in Germany are frequently contradictory and irreconcilable, but this is hardly surprising, given that the basic economic and social/political forces in the society cannot agree as to the role and status of the guest workers. Economically, guest workers have become essential to current German production and labor arrangements. At the same time, however, the society rejects any political, cultural and social integration of the workers.