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Of the BaM respondents in a relation, no less than a quarter is in a mixed union. We still know very little about the non-migrant partner in unions with a partner with a migration background, including their propensity to adopt the cultural practices of their partner, and their propensity to reach out and embrace ethnic diversity more generally. The growth of intimate relationships between people with and without a migration background in majority minority cities in Europe provides an opportunity to explore the attitudes and experiences of non-migrant individuals in interethnic unions, and what such unions may portend for the wider society. This article makes a critical contribution to the general debate on the assimilation paradigm, which predicts 'a whitening' of norms and practices in mixed unions. We will use the BaM data to investigate the potential bi-directional effect of being in a mixed union. Does a mixed union, as assimilation scholars argue, primarily have a whitening impact on the minority partner, or is there also a potential diversifying impact upon the other partner? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As public attitudes toward gender roles in Western societies become increasingly liberal, Muslim immigrants and their children in Europe are regarded as conservative and unassimilated. This study treats acculturation as a process by which immigrants and their children shift from the attitude distribution in their origin country to that of their settlement country, and distinguishes the influence of Islam and origin-country gender norms on Muslim immigrants' and their children's gender role attitudes. Using data on gender role attitudes from 32 European settlement countries and 98 origin countries, the study models the relative influence of origin and settlement contexts on 25,220 first- and second-generation immigrants in Europe. Similar to previous studies, this study finds that Muslim immigrants have more traditional gender role attitudes than non-Muslim immigrants when controlling for the effect of origin-country gender norms. However, there is no evidence that Muslims are more attached to their origin country's gender norms than non-Muslims. Instead, Muslim immigrants' attitudes about gender norms are more similar to those in the settlement society than those of non-Muslim immigrants: Unlike their foreign-born parents, second-generation Muslims are as liberal as non-Muslim populations. Taken together, these results suggest that second-generation Muslims are adopting mainstream European gender norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although assimilation theories acknowledge that the host society adopts aspects of migrant culture, empirical work continues to focus on the assimilation trajectories of immigrants. This study represents the first effort to investigate, on a national level, whether Asians and Hispanics exert a cultural influence on local populations. We assess this possibility by using ethnic restaurants – both national chain and local establishments – as a test case. County-level data is pooled from the decennial U.S. Census, the American Community Survey, the Economic Research Service, the Voting and Elections Collection from CQ Press, and Reference U.S.A. to investigate the association of interest; Nielsen Marketing data is used to further supplement analyses. Results indicate that Asians and Hispanics may indeed influence local community expressions of culture – both in terms of restaurant availability and the extent to which those outside of the co-ethnic community engage in restaurant ownership. Moreover, we find compelling evidence that assimilation may be stronger in locations with advantaged majority populations. In combination, this manuscript offers innovative theoretical perspectives as well as preliminary evidence to suggest assimilation is indeed a multidirectional process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent macro-level trends have created a gendered context of assimilation for second-generation Latinos, pointing to favourable condition among Latina women and potential vulnerability among Latino men. This article examines second-generation assimilation in young adulthood for the top ten Latino groups using gendered reference groups to benchmark their integration into American society. We find a significant female advantage on individual-level indicators, but no clear gender differences on household-level indicators among Latinos. We also document significant heterogeneity in achievement among the top ten Latino ethnic groups, with Mexicans being the most disadvantaged group. In contrast, Cubans and South Americans are the most advantaged and have achieved parity with native whites. These findings point to the emerging significance of gender as a key dimension of stratification in the assimilation of Latinos into American life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on neo-assimilation ideas, we conceptualise the ‘mainstream’ and then find compelling evidence of its expansion in the U.S. in the rising number of individuals who come from mixed minority–majority backgrounds. In terms of the contexts in which they are raised and their social identities and affiliations, on the whole they resemble whites more than they do minorities, and they marry whites at very high rates. Individuals who are partly black are exceptions to some of these patterns. We note an important similarity between this expansion and the one associated with post-World War II assimilation: both are connected with growing diversity of identity and ethnic expression in the mainstream. An equally important difference lies in the more modest magnitude of the current expansion. We close with a series of questions for future research raised by our argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transnational perspective emerged in the early 1990s as an alternative to assimilation theory, gaining instant and wide influence. But curiously, the intellectual confrontation between these two perspectives was averted, as scholars concluded that persistent homeland engagement was fully compatible with hostland integration. This paper seeks to pick up that challenge. I demonstrate how a cross-border perspective, encompassing places of origin and destination and the flows of people, ideas, and resources between them, highlights the ways in which population movements across state borders create tensions on both receiving and sending sides. In the process, I will show how looking across borders paradoxically highlights the centrality of the territorial boundary, as it simultaneously underscores the importance of dissimilation – the social and political separation of immigrants from the people they have left behind – yet also the ways in which non-citizen status and foreign origins simultaneously hamper immigrants’ ability to gain acceptance in receiving states while furnishing sending states with opportunities to reconnect with nationals abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the current debates on assimilation and multiculturalism, France occupies the position of the incontrovertible case in colour-blind civic assimilation. This description of France overlooks the empirical turn in immigrant assimilation France took when the first ever census-based survey conducted on the assimilation of immigrants and their France-born children, known after its French acronym MGIS (Mobilité géographique et insertion sociale), promoted ethnic origin as its primary principle of classification. This article offers an institutional account of the making of the MGIS survey and a critical examination of its ethnic categorisation. It argues that the MGIS survey generated a paradox in assimilation according to which only by violating the precept of colour-blindness in the realm of public statistics can immigrant assimilation be measured and only by reconstructing a presumably culturally homogeneous core population ofFrançais de souche(‘French of French stock’) as opposed to the cultural and ethnic difference of those of ‘foreign descent’ can immigrant assimilation be evaluated. The MGIS survey marks a step towards the unmaking of the French institutional mainstream by instilling these categories across state institutions as the way to read and act upon French society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How to think about the impact of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation on ethnic and religious accommodation? Much of the literature draws on the concept of ‘suspect community’, suggesting it has primarily alienated the Muslim community, favouring an assimilationist model of ‘muscular liberalism’. In this article, while I consider the merits of the ‘suspect community’ hypothesis, I argue that it only partially accounts for the effects of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation on multicultural societies. I contend that much of the literature has focused too narrowly on the discriminatory effects of counter-terrorist policies and has been unable to grasp the more insidious political effects of counter-terrorism policies based on the active participation and involvement of Muslims in their own policing. The main hypothesis of this paper is that rather than promoting ‘assimilation’, as the government would expect, or alienation, as the advocates of the ‘suspect community’ hypothesis would contend, counter-terrorist policies produce and reinforce a government of society in discrete and divided ethno-religious groups. Such ‘policed multiculturalism’—understood as the recognition and the management of diversity through a security perspective—has an important consequence in that it removes fundamental questions about pluralism from political debate, casting them instead in a depoliticised language of security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entering the debate over segmented assimilation, this paper seeks to refocus discussion on a core, but neglected claim: that inter-group disparities among immigrant offspring derive from differences in a contextual feature shared by immigrant and immigrant descendants: a nationality's mode of incorporation. The paper engages in both theoretical and empirical assessment. We critically examine the concept of mode of incorporation, demonstrating that its operational implications have not been correctly understood; consequently, the core hypothesis has never been appropriately tested. The second part of the paper implements those tests, making use of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey. We do so by using nationality as a proxy for mode of incorporation, systematically contrasting more advantaged against less advantaged nationalities. We show: (a) that tests systematically varying modes classified as more or less advantageous yield inconsistent outcomes; (b) that positive or negative modes of incorporation are associated with few long-lasting effects; (c) that differences in governmental reception are particularly unlikely to be associated with interethnic disparities; and (d) that compared to theoretically relevant nationalities, neither Mexicans, a nationality assigned to a negative mode of incorporation, nor pre-Mariel Cubans, a nationality assigned to positive mode of incorporation, prove distinctive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-1990s, assimilation has gradually regained momentum as both a normative and an analytical concept for understanding the ways in which migrants are incorporated into societies at large. Although scholars have investigated various dimensions of this process, they have tended to privilege the experience of migrants themselves. Comparatively little attention has been dedicated to the perspective of the dominant groups, particularly in relation to what ethnic majority people demand that migrants do in order to be accepted. This article explores these demands of assimilation through qualitative data collected among white local elites in four regional case-studies in Western Europe. The analysis reveals a different picture from the one usually portrayed by ‘new assimilation theory’. Accordingly, I suggest rethinking assimilation in ways which incorporate more fully the plurality of demands put forward by dominant ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this study, language transition among the children of Caribbean immigrants in the US is examined from two main perspectives. First, speeds of language transition among children in French- and Spanish-Caribbean immigrant families are compared. Second, the mediating roles of socio-demographic factors and sibling characteristics in language transition are also examined. The results reveal that, with increasing assimilation, children in French-Caribbean families experience a faster transition to English monolingualism than their counterparts with Spanish-Caribbean parents. Transition to English monolingualism is also negatively associated with the number of first-generation siblings within a household. However, increases in the number of second- and first-generation monolingual-English siblings significantly shift children's language use towards complete Anglicisation. Instructively, this impact offsets the influence which ethnically endogamous parents have on the retention of the mother-tongue within immigrant families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the introduction to this special issue of JEMS, we question the strong link which is often made between the integration of minority ethnic groups and their residential segregation. In the literature on neighbourhood effects, the residential concentration of minorities is seen as a major obstacle to their integration, while the residential segregation literature emphasises the opposite causal direction, by focusing on the effect of integration on levels of (de-)segregation. The papers in this special issue, however, indicate that integration and segregation cannot be linked in a straightforward way. Policy discourses tend to depict residential segregation in a negative light, but the process of assimilation into the housing market is highly complex and differs between and within ethnic groups. The integration pathway not only depends on the characteristics of migrants themselves, but also on the reactions of the institutions and the population of the receiving society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper introduces this special issue of JEMS on the role of the local context in immigrant and second-generation integration in the United States. Recent literature has argued that national contexts are important for understanding the integration of immigrants and their descendents. The articles in this issue make the case that local contexts, broadly defined at any sub-national scale, are also important for understanding integration within the US; they suggest that it is incorrect to think of a singular and spatially undifferentiated integration process for US immigrants. In addition to previewing the contents of the articles in this issue, our paper includes a review of the meaning of generations and integration and a general discussion of the roles of local contexts in mediating processes of integration. This discussion raises questions about the appropriate spatial scale for the analysis of integration and for comparisons of the integration experience across contexts. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research on local contexts of integration within the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution explores the issues of assimilation, acculturation and radicalism in American mosques and is largely based on a 2005 study of 25 mosques, although data from three other studies are also extensively used. Analysing the demographics of mosque-goers and their views on Islamic conservatism, women, political involvement and pluralism, the essay concludes that American mosque participants are well integrated and acculturated into American society, but that they are resisting a full assimilation of intrinsic religious values and customs. Although fairly conservative, mosque participants neither exhibit radical tendencies nor the literalist Salafi/Wahhabi thinking. The American mosque, therefore, should be viewed as a partner for American law enforcement in preventing the emergence of Muslim radicalism and home-grown terrorist groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on two recent studies of Jews in the Netherlands: a randomised survey of 1,036 people and a qualitative study of 30 non-religious, postwar-born Jews. Those with two Jewish parents and a Jewish upbringing were the most likely to exhibit a strong bond with Judaism, especially if they had a Jewish partner. The varied ties that secular, postwar-born Jews felt to Judaism have been deeply influenced by individualism and fragmentation in life. Judaism has become less self-evident for them compared to their parents and grandparents, and has increasingly become a matter of choice, comparable with developments in other ethnic and religious groups. At the same time their bond includes elements that are less uncommitted. Their various ties have different potentials for continuity. Attachments most resembling traditional forms, expressed in observance of Jewish holidays and anchored to social units wider than the family, have the greatest likelihood of continuity. More individualistic forms of Jewish ties, often restricted to personal sentiments and family idiosyncrasies, are the least likely to survive. Rising anti-Semitism and endangerment of Israel may strengthen existing ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]