Immigrants In European Countries Research Articles

The Role of Immigration and Colonization in the Acculturation of Halal Food in European Countries: An Evidence-Based Systematic Review

Halal food consumption and the halal market economy in Europe have been steadily growing among both Muslim and non-Muslim populations. This growth has been propelled by the rising number of Muslim immigrants in European countries. The purpose of the present study was to systematically review and synthesize a multitude of existing scholarly findings extracted from peer-reviewed research and reliable web-based sources on the role of Muslim immigrants in the acculturation of halal food in European countries. An electronic database search in the available literature was conducted to identify and select data from cognate studies. The collected data were examined and analyzed employing a systematic review methodology. The combined findings of Muslim immigrants’ role and contributions to halal food acculturation in Europe are discussed. A systematic search of major electronic bibliographic databases, printed books, verified fact-based newspaper articles, and credible web-based sources was conducted. A cross section of a total of sixty-four data sources was included in this review. Findings suggest that the acculturation of the halal food process in European countries has been effective and facilitated by waves of Muslim immigrants, centuries of colonization of Muslim countries by many former European colonizers, adhering to religious requirements to consuming halal food, cultural and peer influences on halal food consumption, perceived control over consuming halal meat, developing a bicultural identity in the host country, as well as the increasing acceptance of the non-Muslim European consumer to consuming halal food as a healthier alternative to fast food and processed food products. There is a need for further research to better understand the economic and socio-cultural impact of the acculturation of halal food on the behavior of non-Muslim European consumers. This might serve as a paradigm for future research to better understand what influences halal food product consumption in non-Muslim European countries and globally.

The Struggle for Integration of Refugees and Immigrants: Examples of Integration of Refugees in European Cities and the Case Study of Athens

Abstract This paper focuses on the integration of refugees and immigrants into Greek society through the provision of housing. This topic is a hot one due to the fact that many refuges have arrived in Greece during the previous years and there is a need to remain for a long time. Thus, the provision of housing is imperative. However, due to the economic crisis, the creation of such spaces is expensive and unachievable. As a result, alternatives should be examined. For this purpose, different policies of the smooth integration of refugees and immigrants in European countries can provide such solutions. Three case studies were selected across Europe and they have been compared to the Athenian paradigm. Through this research, proposals about their successful integration have been derived. In that way, it will be possible to provide specific plans that reorganize various areas in Athens in order to make this vision a reality.

Filial Piety and Mental Health Among Older Chinese Immigrants in the Netherlands.

Filial piety is important to Chinese adults and is associated with mental health among older Chinese immigrants in the United States. However, it is unclear whether filial piety is linked to the mental health of Chinese immigrants in European countries. Therefore, this study aims to gain insights into the association between mental health and filial piety of first-generation Chinese immigrants in the Netherlands. A random sample of 143 participants took part in the study. A cross-sectional design was used. Data were collected through a postal survey conducted in the Chinese language between January 2021 and March 2021. The survey included a Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC), and expected and perceived filial piety scale. The results indicated that in general, perceived filial piety exceeded expected filial piety (‘filial piety sufficient’). Regression analysis revealed that ‘filial piety sufficient’ is associated with a higher emotional MHC (B =.498, p =.035). This study provided new insights into the wellbeing of older Chinese immigrants in the Netherlands and showed accordance with the literature that filial piety remains an important factor for mental health.

Breaking down the barriers: educational paths, labour market outcomes and wellbeing of children of immigrants

ABSTRACT The goal of successfully incorporating ethnic minorities represents a decisive challenge for modern societies. However, migratory background continues to negatively affect the life trajectories of migrants’ descendants. ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ barriers determine long-term inequality gaps and low intergenerational social mobility in both longstanding and more recent European immigration countries. This special issue complements the sparse findings on education, labour market outcome and wellbeing relating to immigrant offspring by providing original insight in order to individuate strategies for removing the obstacles that the descendants of migrants face. In-depth analyses have been performed for specific Southern European contexts in order to explore the specific inequality patterns that are emerging in these more recent and unexplored immigration contexts. The main findings suggest that the lower academic performances of immigrants’ descendants can be raised through language-support programmes, mentoring programmes, positive role and disciplinary climate, extra-scholastic activities and parental involvement. Equality opportunities in education should support school-to-work transitions and better allocate the underutilised human capital reserves of migrants’ descendants. Conversely, long-lasting penalties in educational careers and integration processes may arise when children are physically separated from their parents because of delayed family reunification.

A longitudinal investigation of integration/multiculturalism policies and attitudes towards immigrants in European countries

ABSTRACT A number of recent studies find that integration and multiculturalism policies help soften anti-immigrant attitudes among the broader population. These findings, however, emerge from cross-sectional analyses and are potentially vulnerable to omitted variable bias. The analysis in this paper overcomes that limitation by adopting a longitudinal approach. This approach uses data from repeated cross-sections drawn from the European Social Survey and the European Values Survey. These data can be treated as panels in a longitudinal framework once it is recognised that the relevant variables (including the attitudes variables) can be handled effectively as country-level averages. Multi-level modelling (the default approach in existing research) is not necessary; in particular, there is no need to use individual-level control variables. In a fixed-effects analysis of country-level data, adoption of more open/accommodating integration and/or multiculturalism policies does not lead to a reduction in anti-immigration sentiment. The findings of the cross-sectional studies evidently suffer from significant omitted variable bias.

Diversity-mainstreaming in times of ageing and migration: implementation paradoxes in municipal aged care provision

ABSTRACT Accompanying a shift from multiculturalism to assimilation in integration discourse, several European immigration countries have shifted from multiculturalist to diversity-mainstreaming policies in the aged care sector. This paper answers the question to what extent diversity-mainstreaming policies provided scope for crafting care provision that is responsive to the needs of ethnic minority elders. To study the implementation of diversity-mainstreaming policies in aged care we conducted a two-year qualitative study in Nijmegen and The Hague, The Netherlands. We identified a mix of mainstreamed and ethno-specific aged care provision which reflected stakeholders’ ongoing practical concern with diversity among ethnic minority elders. Nevertheless, we found diversity-mainstreaming policies to be plagued by implementation paradoxes. In some interpretations, ‘diversity’ inhibited concrete action to address inequality experienced by ethnic minorities. When ‘diversity’ did provide space to tailor services, these were framed as temporary responses to the language barriers of the current generation of ethnic minority elders. We found this assimilationist framing to undermine long-term investment in the local knowledge needed to reach minority elders. We suggest that policymakers renew support for ethno-specific services and intercultural expertise to successfully meet the diverse care needs of current and future generations of older minority populations.

Long Term Migratory Dynamics and Context of a Territory: French Guiana

France, like other former European immigration countries, such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom, has recorded significant waves of foreign workers, sometimes accompanied by members of their family. In the 1950’s and 1960’s until mid-seventies, the first oil shock put a stop to active policies of recruiting foreign workers, but until today, immigration has not ceased fueled mainly by family reunification and the influx of refugees. From this context, it is important to ask the following question: how have migratory policies evolved in France since 1901 till date? How is this development beneficial to the regional economic integration of Guyane-one of the French territories bordered by Brazil and Suriname? The primary objective of this article is to compare migratory policies from 1901 to present day and to examine their impact on the integration and economic development of Guiana as well as their causes.

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, CHRISTIAN RELIGION AND SOCIAL INTEGRATION: EXPLORING THE DIFFERENCES IN RELIGIOUS BEHAVIOR OF IMMIGRANTS AND NATIVES IN EUROPE

This study aimed to point out the differences between the religiosity of immigrants and natives and how they hinder or facilitate immigrant social integration into the host society. The study took a multi-national perspective as the basis for analyzing religious views within Europe whereby both the natives and immigrants in European countries are evaluated and explanations for individual groups’ integration trajectories are emphasized. With respect to a thorough scholarly analysis, this study found out that the religiosity of immigrants tends to be high than that of natives in most European countries. It also noted that the initial religiosity of immigrants drops with an increase in the duration of time the individual immigrant stays in the host country. This study makes available knowledge about religious differences in a cross-cultural perspective and strives to help sociologists in outlining the differences in order to help in studying behavior patterns in different cultural settings.

Senses of Belonging and Identity within North American Turkish Diaspora in the post-9/11 Era

The Turkish diaspora is growing rapidly in North America. Despite the vast number of studies investigated social integration and the identity construction of Turkish immigrants in European countries, Turkish communities in the United States and Canada attracted lesser attention in the academic literature. This paper seeks to understand the identity formation and acculturation attitudes of Turks and their perceptions of rejection and acceptance from their respective societies in a post 9/11 context through interviews with Turkish opinion/community leaders living in the United States and Canada.

Why do settled immigrants commit terrorist acts against countries that have accepted them? Preliminary remarks

Some people behind terrorist attacks committed in the 21st century in Europe include immigrants or descendants of immigrants, which is abominable to the native population. In this paper, I analyse factors that account not only for cultural or political motivation of the terrorists, but also factors conditioned by interaction between immigrants or their descendants with indigenous people of the host country. One of the fundamental questions to be asked is whether immigrants in European countries are really accepted by residents of the host country. If they are indeed not accepted, they might have developed a sense of exclusion, even despite achieving apparent integration at certain levels of the social structure. The sense of being rejected is a major factor causing aggression, and such aggression can be used by terrorist organisations to recruit such people.

Violencia contra las mujeres, migración y multiculturalidad en Europa

Starting from a critical analysis of The Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention), the article deals with the issue of violence against women in two respects. In particular, on the one hand, it underlines the structural and (trans)cultural character of violence against women as a worldwide social and political problem. On the other, it focuses on the specific issue of violence against women in the multicultural contexts of European immigration countries, calling for a deeper investigation on the best instruments (beyond criminal law only) to grant the protection of the rights of women belonging to cultural minorities.

Till multiculturalism do us part: Multicultural policies and the national identification of immigrants in European countries

How do multicultural policies affect immigrants' identification with the country of destination? Theory suggests that these policies may have two opposite effects and either widen or diminish the gap between the national identification of natives and immigrants. In addition to these opposite effects, I expect that the effects of multicultural policies are also diverse depending on immigrants' cultural and social distance from the host society. In this study, immigrants are categorised based on generations and origins. Using newly constructed measurements for multicultural policies, as well as European Social Survey Round 7 with 20 European countries, I conduct a multilevel analysis. The results indicate that multicultural policies diminish the gap between the national identification of natives and immigrants. However, these effects are evident only for non-European immigrants and not for European immigrants. Furthermore, I find no evidence that the effects differ for the first and second generations.

Beyond instrumental citizenship: the Spanish and Italian citizenship regimes in times of crisis

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to contribute to the current debate on integration during economic downturn by analysing to what extent citizenship regimes may offer opportunities for instrumental uses of naturalisation in times of economic crisis. Its main goal is to provide a more nuanced view of citizenship acquisition, its implications and its alleged instrumental uses to stabilise legal status and improve mobility chances. For this purpose, our analysis focuses on the nexus between citizenship regimes and naturalisations trends in Italy and Spain as two major Southern European immigration countries that have similar migration histories, but rather different citizenship regimes. The first part of the article provides an overview of the scholarly debate on the concept of instrumental citizenship and elaborates a typology of the possible instrumental uses by states and migrants. The second part examines the citizenship regimes and analyses the opportunity structures opened up by citizenship acquisition channels in Italy and Spain. Finally, the article analyses naturalisation trends to show that instrumental uses of citizenship acquisition are closely connected to the different opportunity structures offered by the Italian and Spanish citizenship regimes.

The dynamic relations between economic conditions and anti-immigrant sentiment: A natural experiment in times of the European economic crisis

Theories on intergroup relations suggest that negative attitudes toward immigrants tend to rise when economic conditions deteriorate. However, these arguments were mostly tested during times of economic prosperity in Europe. We put this theoretical expectation to test by analyzing two rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS) with data from 14 West European immigration countries before (2006) and after (2010) the peak of the European economic crisis. Results show that anti-immigrant sentiments increased in countries where perceptions of economic insecurity also increased. Anti-immigrant sentiments decreased in countries where perceptions of economic insecurity declined. In contrast, changes in objective economic conditions (i.e. unemployment rates) during the same period of time did not display the expected effects in a similarly robust way.

Cultural Influence on Preferences and Attitudes for Environmental Quality

SummaryWe investigate national culture's influence on preferences for and attitudes to environmental quality. We use the cultural diversity of immigrants in European countries to isolate the effect of culture from the confounding effect of the economic and institutional environment. Results suggest that culture is a significant determinant of migrants' individual environmental preferences and attitudes. Migrants from countries with higher levels of environmental preferences are more willing to trade off income for environmental quality when controlling for individual characteristics, country of residence, and country of origin macroeconomic and environmental conditions. Furthermore, culture significantly influences individual beliefs about limits to growth, the fragility of the balance of nature, and the likelihood of an ecological crisis. The result is robust to alternative definitions of the cultural proxy and points to the significance of accounting for cultural influences in the design of domestic and international environmental policy and the application of environmental valuation techniques.

Intersectionality, Recruitment and Selection: Ethnic Minority Candidates in Dutch Parties

This article aims to contribute to explanations why ethnic minority women outnumber ethnic minority men in national parliaments of European immigration countries. Extending the intersectional lens it asks: which ethnic minority candidates are recruited and selected? Drawing on nine elections (1986–2012) in the Netherlands, I find that the success of ethnic minority women candidates is not related to a structural advantage: it changes over time and across and within groups. How gender and ethnicity intersect is informed by generation, (parental) birth country, a group's political starting position and how political parties in power incorporate gender or ethnic diversity.

Adult vocational training for migrants in North‐East Italy

AbstractThis article contributes to the study of policies for the integration of immigrants into the labour markets of European immigration countries by focusing on the specific issue of vocational training for immigrant workers in Italy. Vocational training has a central role in the European employment strategy. Moreover, with regard to migrants, it is also relevant to the topical issue of the governance of international labour migration.The article analyses both the demand and the supply of vocational training in north‐east Italy, generally regarded as the rich and industrialised heart of the country. It draws on 30 interviews conducted with key informants and experts from local and regional governmental bodies, trade unions, employment offices, and private educational agencies in the main towns of the Veneto region.Various types of vocational training for immigrant workers are considered, from traditional full‐time courses financed by the European Social Fund to new projects for the selection and pre‐training of immigrants in their countries of origin. The extent to which these policy tools are able to meet the actual needs of immigrant workers and of the local business sector is investigated, as well as their problematic interaction with the national regulatory framework for immigration control.

Do Attitudes to Immigrants Change in Hard Times? Ireland in a European Context

ABSTRACT: The enlargement of the European Union (EU) and the subsequent global economic recession has drawn attention to individual-level attitudes towards immigrants across Europe. In this context, using the European Social Survey (ESS), we compared Irish attitudes towards immigrants with those in 12 other European countries at 3 critical moments in time – prior to large immigration flows in 2002; at the height of the economic boom in 2006; and after the global financial crash in 2008. Our descriptive analysis examines whether significant changes in attitudes towards immigrants has occurred in the EU as a whole and within individual countries over time. We predicted that fluctuations in economic condition such as the rise in unemployment would affect attitudes towards immigrants. This relationship receives some support from our findings. In Ireland, positive attitudes to immigrants between 2006 and 2010 decreased and negative attitudes increased, on all attitudinal measures, more sharply than in any of the other European countries. Taking the 12 countries as a whole, attitudes have tended to polarise particularly with regard to allowing access to immigrants and their impact on the economy. This research reveals worrying trends in attitudes to immigrants in European countries, particularly in light of the importance of immigrants to the European labour market, both currently and in the future.

National and regional proportion of immigrants and perceived threat of immigration: A three-level analysis in Western Europe

Immigration is of growing significance to the demographic makeup of Western Europe. A long-standing and highly disputed question is whether a larger number of immigrants are associated with more negative attitudes toward immigration or whether the reverse is true. Previous studies yielded contradictory results on various levels of analysis (national, regional, local). These inconsistencies may partly be linked to what is known as the ‘modifiable areal unit problem’ in spatial analysis. This article seeks to address this issue by analyzing the relationship between the percentage foreign-born and perceived group threat in 15 Western European countries on the national as well as on three differing regional levels ( N = 70, 207, and 624 regions, respectively), together with survey data from the European Values Study’s fourth wave. I expect threat effects to operate through national communication systems while contact and habituation to immigrants to work on the regional level. Consistent with theoretical expectations, the results show a positive correlation between the national proportion of immigrants and perceived threat, while the coefficients are negative on the regional level. More immigration might thus lead to a more negative evaluation of the presence of immigrants in European countries, but apparently not within the regions where most of the newcomers reside. Two recent examples illustrate this seemingly paradoxical relationship. As a methodological result, effect size and statistical significance vary with the delimitation of the regional units of analysis ( Nomenclature des Unités Territoriales Statistiques (NUTS)-1, -2, or -3). This suggests that research in this field should pay more attention to how and why spatial units are defined.

Is There a North–South Divide in Integration Outcomes? A Comparison of the Integration Outcomes of Immigrants in Southern and Northern Europe

Integration models are often viewed as a necessary tool for framing integration policies, and for measuring integration efficiency. While “old” European immigration countries in Europe account for a systematic framework of integration policies embedded in a given integration philosophy, new immigration countries (particularly Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain) have lacked a coherent set of integration policies and practices and, it goes without saying, a philosophical approach to integration. This vacuum has often been seen as a source of marginalization and ‘differential exclusion’, suggesting the existence of a North–South divide in integration matters, and more importantly, outcomes. However, there is still a striking lack of appropriate comparative empirical evidence backing or dismissing this divide. The objective of this article is to explore national-level differences in the real performance of immigrants in selected European countries of immigration along key indicators of integration outcomes, including school attainment and labor market participation. We here discuss the position of Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal as a coherent cluster of countries and compare the performance of their migrants with that of other foreign-born workers settled in the West of Europe. Our evidence provides little support for the idea that the Southern countries are a unique cluster and that they homogeneously lag behind in terms of integration outcomes.