The Children of Immigrants in Western Europe: Three Studies on Networks, Diversity, and Integration

Abstract

This dissertation explores the implications of population composition for social integration, particularly integration in social networks, in three empirical chapters. In the first empirical chapter, I advance a theoretical framework of consolidation as a measure of structural intersectionality to study interethnic friendships in Western European classrooms. Results show far fewer interethnic friendships in more consolidated classrooms (in which students from different ethnic backgrounds also tend to differ in socioeconomic status). This implies that the salience of ethnic boundaries is contingent on the joint configuration of socioeconomic status and ethnicity within social contexts. As populations and social settings are increasingly characterized by multidimensional configurations of attributes that range from superdiversity to consolidation, scholars should analyze multiple axes of differentiation to understand the conditions under which intergroup boundaries are more salient. In the second empirical chapter, I use a large sample of immigrant-origin individuals, including many in the later generations, to study multiple forms of integration in England, Germany, and the Netherlands. Results show that while structural and cultural integration increase significantly in later generations for all immigrant-origin individuals studied here, integration in networks and identities hit roadblocks and remain relatively low among some ethnic groups. By studying multiple forms of integration and including later generations, findings reveal setbacks in some forms of integration, while showing that other forms of integration are more widespread than anticipated. In the third empirical chapter, I address the recent idea that there is an association between the ethnic composition of settings and the extent of ethnic homophily (the propensity for same-ethnic friendship ties) in those settings. Since most recent studies are cross-sectional, it remains an open question whether this association persists in how individuals update and maintain friendships. I analyze two years of data on adolescent classroom networks and find that relative group sizes in classrooms predict how individuals select new friendships and possibly how they maintain existing friendships. Ethnic majorities update their ties in more homophilous ways when numbers of majorities and minorities are relatively equal, whereas ethnic minorities are more homophilous when there are relatively few minorities.