Friday, March 14, 2014
Congressional B (Omni Shoreham)
It is a recurrent finding of research on immigrant integration, which seems to hold across a variety of immigration countries and immigrant groups, that there is a positive correlation between the degree of cultural assimilation of immigrant groups – e.g. attitudes and behaviors related to gender, sexuality and religion – and their structural integration into the domains of education and the labor market. While this correlation is well established, the causal direction of the relationship has remained unclear. Does a smaller cultural distance between immigrants and natives facilitate the former’s educational and labor market success, or does cultural assimilation result from higher education and participation in the labor market? This paper tries to bring this debate a step further by making use of the quasi-experimental situation that within the group of Turkish immigrants to Western Europe strong pre-migration cultural differences existed between the Alevi and Sunni religious groups, which however resemble each other closely in regard to other relevant pre-migration characteristics such as their low level of education, Central and East-Anatolian rural background, and migration in the context of guestworker schemes. Hypotheses are tested using data from two cross-national surveys: the 2008 SCIICS survey in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Austria, and the 2010 Eurislam survey in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
