Residential Segregation and Integration in the Netherlands.

In many Western European cities politicians express concerns about the lack of integration of immigrants from the so-called less-developed countries. A core issue in the debate is the relationship between the residential segregation of ethnic minorities and integration or assimilation processes. This paper deals with the relationship between segregation and integration in the context of two opposing visions in the debate in the Netherlands. Empirical evidence is presented on both the level of segregation and the indicators of integration as well as the relation between the two. A major conclusion is that the relationship between segregation and integration suffers from too much political and too little scholarly attention. Politicians focus too much on large-scale spatial social engineering projects. The empirical evidence shown in this paper provides support for more policy attention in the domains of education and labour market access. Policies in these fields have had much more positive effects in the past than many want us to believe. It is underlined that education appears to be a key factor for successful integration, both in socio-economic terms and in social and cultural terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]