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3 - ‘Old’ Immigration Countries in Europe: The Concept and Empirical Examples
- Edited by Marek Okolski
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- Book:
- European Immigrations
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 03 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 21 August 2012, pp 65-90
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Summary
Introduction
In the course of their immigration experience, transitioning receiving countries go through a specific demographic development and policy learning process that is called a migration cycle. It appears that this migration cycle is to some extent similar to that which old immigration countries experienced in the past. Migration processes of the past will never be repeated in exactly the same way, but if the stages of the migration cycle are generalised, the similarities become apparent. This chapter applies this conceptual model to the past and recent migration history of the ‘old’ immigration countries in Europe. The authors critically evaluate the grouping of the old immigration countries, prod for specific as well as general driving forces and look for a general model to be applied to the shift that countries undergo from emigration to immigration. For this purpose, the most important ‘old’ immigration countries are included in the considerations – namely Germany, France, Great Britain and Austria. Also elaborated is the case of Spain as an illustration of a ‘new’ immigration country in order to show how the concept can also be applied (for more detailed information on Spain, see chapters 5 and 7 in this volume).
Notions and concepts
The notion of ‘old immigration countries’
The notion of an ‘immigration country’ plays an important role in public debate and signals a change in perception, but there is no commonly accepted definition. There are at least two approaches to operationalise this concept. The first one defines an immigration country as a declared selfperception. The political elite and the general public agree that immigration is part of the nation-building process. Society is built upon migration – that is the general idea. Whether the real number of immigrants is high or low does not play a significant role; what is important is general self-perception. The so-called classical immigration countries (the United States, Canada, Australia) adhere to this definition. The other approach is more statistically based. Immigration countries are defined by a considerable and systematic surplus of immigration over emigration over time, and thus by positive net migration. It is assumed that positive net migration is not a singular event and is more or less a steady, stable situation.
6 - Social Integration of Immigrants with Special Reference to the Local and Spatial Dimension
- Edited by Rinus Penninx, Maria Berger, Karen Kraal
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- Book:
- The Dynamics of Migration and Settlement in Europe
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 23 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 28 August 2006, pp 133-170
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter deals with the social dimension of integration processes of immigrants. The organisation of work units within IMISCOE defined the social dimension as distinct from the political, the economic and the cultural/religious dimension which are treated in the two preceding and the following chapter respectively. This field is a vast one covering a significant amount of research in the past decades. In surveying the literature on social integration we will focus specifically on its local and spatial expressions for reasons that we will unfold in the next pages.
In the first section, we discuss some of the conceptual issues related to the term ‘integration’ and its use in the academic and policy fields. We discuss the notion of integration as a general sociological concept and propose to use the social environment, in which individuals and groups form interdependencies, as the special unit of study. Focusing on spaces as the locus of developing interdependencies, we emphasise the spatial dimension of immigrants’ social integration processes.
Section two focuses specifically on the spatial dimensions of integration. It reviews the relationships between the characteristics of the housing market and their implications in terms of socio-ethnic segregation, emphasising the spatial dimension of social integration. Immigrants’ and ethnic minorities’ geographical placement and the extent of their mobility condition their access to urban resources (e.g. housing, education, health, jobs and different kinds of goods and services). We discuss the basic concepts of ethnic segregation as well as its advantages and disadvantages by drawing on contemporary literature. The main determinants of residential segregation and the manner in which they are explained and conveyed in the literature are surveyed. Finally, we discuss the issue of accessibility to urban resources, as a spatial expression of social integration and its measurement.
In the third and final section, we seek to synthesise the key ideas and conclusions of the previous sections and present a number of proposals for future lines of research.
From assimilation to integration and back again
If the current use of the concept of integration in social sciences and policy when dealing with immigrant settlement is relatively recent, the associated notions of assimilation, acculturation and accommodation have a longer history.
2 - International Migration and Its Regulation
- Edited by Rinus Penninx, Maria Berger, Karen Kraal
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- Book:
- The Dynamics of Migration and Settlement in Europe
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 23 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 28 August 2006, pp 19-40
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Summary
Introduction
At the centre of this chapter are the process of migration, its structural trends, geographical patterns, conceptual delineation and statistical measurement. In describing and analysing these, we do not follow traditional theoretical concepts that interpret migration as a ‘natural’ function and only as a consequence of economic or political disparities. This perception of migration as an automatic flow in an uneven world does not do justice to the complexity of this phenomenon. Migration is regulated and defined by various forces, two of which will be in the centre of attention in this chapter: the economy and the society. The economy and its specific demand for qualified and unqualified labour are of critical importance because they have the societal power to define the size and the structure of the labour markets to which the migrants have to adapt. The institutional approach, by contrast, is central to explaining why and which migration takes place. It underlines the significance of policy and administrative procedures for canalising migration flows. Of course, these two forces interact. The enterprises and their political representatives formulate their needs and economic interests and influence the institutional rules. The institutional rules, in turn, delimit the scope and options of entrepreneurial action.
The economy and the societal institutions open and close gates for migrants; they also define and differentiate between spatial mobility and migration. Usually, only some forms of spatial mobility are perceived as migration – a fact not reflected in the general and rather technical definition of migration given by the United Nations recommendation dating back to 1998: ‘a long-term migrant should be defined as a person who moves to a country other than that of his or her usual residence for a period of at least a year (12 months), so that the country of destination effectively becomes his or her new country of usual residence.’ According to these guidelines, EU citizens moving within the EU are migrants while in reality they may not be perceived as such. On the other hand, in some countries labour migrants are categorised as guest workers and not as migrants. And it is also a matter of public perception whether asylum seekers, who are obviously mobile, are migrants.