In recent decades, international migration has become a major phenomenon. While the number of persons living outside their country of birth worldwide was estimated at ‘more than 105 million’ in 1985 (United Nations, 1998: 1) this number had nearly doubled to approximately 200 million 20 years later (GCIM 2005). Figures for the European continent show an even steeper increase of residents in European countries that have been born outside their present country of residence: in a shorter period of 15 years their number grew from an estimated 23 million in 1985 (United Nations, 1998: 1) to more than 56 million,...

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...

With some notable exceptions, academic and policy attention for international migration has focused to a far greater extent on countries of destination than on countries of origin. Research projects have been motivated primarily by concerns of receiving societies, funded by agencies in destination countries and based on data collected on the receiving side. But it is clear that migration studies cannot do without indepth understanding of the sending context. In turn, a relative knowledge gap in this area has become particularly salient in the beginning of the 21^stcentury as various receiving countries in Europe are increasingly acknowledging the importance...

Citizenship has emerged only recently as an important topic of research on migration and migrant integration. Before the late 1980s there was little connection between migration research and the legal literature on nationality laws or political theories and sociological analyses of citizenship in a broader sense. In traditional overseas countries of immigration immigrants’ access to citizenship and eventual naturalisation was taken for granted as a step in a broader process of assimilation, while in Europe the largest immigration contingents had emerged from the recruitment of guest workers who had been invited to stay only temporarily and were never perceived as...

Although economic issues have not been the centrepiece of migration research in the last decades,¹ quite an amount of scientific material, literature and empirical data from different theoretical starting points has been accumulated dealing with topics of economic integration. The aim of this chapter is to provide a ‘state of the art’ by sifting the milestones of the existing literature focusing on economic approaches, and to structure them in a way that allows us to identify strengths and weaknesses of economic as well as non-economic approaches to the field of work, entrepreneurship and economic integration.²

In a first step we...

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...

This chapter considers developments surrounding ‘Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Diversity’ in Europe in recent years. It has three purposes: (1) to elaborate on the rise of the concepts of diversity and multiculturalism as they have emerged in the academic world and engaged public debate and policy development; (2) to give an overview of the academic literature concerning two key forms of diversity, namely religious and linguistic diversity, and (3) to analyse the recent critical debates on the concepts of multiculturalism and diversity in various national contexts. It is intended to be indicative of the major trends and topics, but does...

Social identities are of crucial concern. Collective social identities stand out and are articulated when groups coming from different social, cultural, ‘racial’, national, ethnic, religious and linguistic backgrounds share societal space in public places and arenas, in residential areas or when people compete in schools and in the labour market. ‘Race’, ethnicity and nation are represented in these identities, stereotypes and collective/social representations. However, the concept of representation also pertains to issues of power and influence in political assemblies, that is, political representation of the interests of disadvantaged ‘racial’, ethnic and social groups. In this chapter we will cover a...

The keyproblematiqueof this chapter is to understand how migration and the integration of migrants unfoldthrough time, across generations and as gendered processes. This is an extremely broad canvas on which to try to paint a picture of the temporal and socio-demographic dimensions of the processes of immigration and settlement in Europe.

Our first task is to stress the practical and theoretical importance of time in the study of migration. This is dealt with in section 1, where we deal in concepts and generalities. As a stimulus to think through the time factor in migration we briefly present...

The study of the processes of policy making for immigration and immigrant incorporation should be considered as a ‘young’ research field; most of the research in this area consists of ‘grey literature’ (i.e. PhD dissertations and research reports).

Policy-making seems to represent a sort of fourth-generation research topic.First generationstudies were essentially concerned with the demographic composition and evolution of migration flows into and immigrant stocks within European countries.Second generationresearch has focused primarily on immigrants’ economic integration and their social behaviour. Thethird generationhas dealt mainly with integration policies and political participation. Lastly, thefourth generation...

The foregoing chapters have illustrated abundantly that international migration and integration of immigrants have become hot topics in Europe. First of all, the fact of immigration into Europe and its tendency to grow is undeniable, although the timing and size of different immigration patterns vary. There are solid indications that immigration will persist and most likely increase in the coming decades. On the demand side such indications can be found in the demographic developments in Europe with its decline of natural growth and greying population, and in labour market developments that indicate a demand in an increasing number of sectors...