Immigration and Integration in Cross-National Comparison

Organizers: Nate Breznau, Tobias Roth, and Jing Shen.

Conference Theme:

This conference brings together research on immigration and integration. Although integration is a core topic in immigration research, scholarship diverges regarding how it shapes the well-being of both immigrant and native-born populations in a host country. Structural integration alone, as measured by one’s socioeconomic status, has been shown to have limited impacts on immigrants’ subjective well-being, since it contributes little to the formation of immigrant self-identity and their sense of belonging to the host society. Besides structural integration, sociocultural integration and civic (or political) integration has also received increasing attention in public and academic arenas. Despite various arguments, consensuses have been shared about the active roles that the characteristics of the immigrants themselves, and institutional contexts of both the sending and hosting countries play in shaping integration patterns of immigrants across countries. As immigrants, as well as the host societies in which they reside, vary in terms of structural, institutional, geographical, political and demographic characteristics, a cross-national comparative perspective becomes crucial to deepen scholarly understanding on the patterns of immigration and their subsequent consequences on both the immigrant and native-born populations’ well-being in the receiving countries. Therefore, we hope that this conference provides a platform for diverse definitions, applications, and implications of the concept “integration” to meet one another. We aim to stimulate intellectual exchanges about ongoing issues on immigration and integration, particularly regarding the associations between migration motivations, the extent of integration, and the well-being outcomes of both the immigrant and native-born populations measured in multiple dimensions.

Conference Programme:

Please see link below (PDF).