Introduction

In many EU countries, political mobilisation, participation and representation of immigrants and their offspring were for a long time not considered to be important issues both in academia and in politics. Immigrant workers were not regarded as potential citizens. They were not supposed and expected to be politically active. As guests, they were even asked to observe a kind of ‘devoir de réserve’. In other words, they were invited not to interfere with their hosts’ political and collective affairs. Migrants had only an economic role in the host society: to work and to produce.

This has changed, at least in those European countries that have already faced several waves of immigration in the past five decades. Here, political mobilisation, participation and representation of ethnic immigrant minorities have become topical issues especially at the local and city levels. The sensitive debates about the integration of immigrants cannot exclude this political dimension.

This chapter is not a bibliographical review of the European literature on political participation, mobilisation and representation of immigrants. Its aim is rather to provide a qualitative overview of the state of the art on these issues and also to present some research perspectives to be explored in the future. As a matter of fact, we now have a reasonably good knowledge of immigrants’ political activities but some gaps remain to be filled. The chapter is divided into six parts. The first part addresses very briefly conceptual and definition issues. The second part presents and discusses the earliest major hypothesis to be historically found in the literature, namely, the thesis of political quiescence of immigrants. The third part focuses on the explanations of the various forms of immigrant political participation. The fourth part presents a typology of immigrant political participation in the country of settle ment. This typology serves to map areas for further research. The fifth part discusses specifically the issue of transnational political participation. The sixth part identifies a few gaps in the literature to which new research perspectives could correspond. Finally, the concluding policyoriented part will address the issue of how to evaluate and assess political participation of immigrants and their offspring in the country of residence.