Friday, March 14, 2014
Congressional B (Omni Shoreham)
This paper addresses the role of religious beliefs, practices, and identities for migrants’ structural integration. While European scholarship has repeatedly emphasized that religious minority affiliation constitutes “barriers” to structural integration, as evinced most notably by educational and occupational disadvantages of the Muslim second generation, several questions remain unsettled. In particular, we lack conclusive evidence on the effects of religion on newcomers’ structural integration across religious groups and across integration contexts. This paper draws on original data from a two-wave panel survey conducted among newly arrived immigrants from Muslim and Catholic background in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. We present findings on integration in the labor market as measured by employment. As a background, we first descriptively chart how religious practices (attendance, praying, fasting) change from pre-migration through the first years of settlement within the new country among Muslims from Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, and Bulgaria and Christians from Poland, Bulgaria, and Suriname. Second, we present a baseline model of labor market outcomes as predicted by standard socio-demographic variables. This allows us to analyze group differences by religious affiliation net of other factors known to affect labor market integration, thus testing the argument about religious boundaries that prevent religious minorities from access to the mainstrea. Third, we enter variables of religious participation into the baseline model, thus testing whether religious involvement provides access to embedded resources, or not. Fourth we focus on cross-national comparisons to establish whether the effects of religious affiliation and participation vary across macro-configurations of religious boundaries.
