The Integration of the European Second Generation

Immigration and the subsquent integration of newcomers is now one of the foremost challenges for Europe`s increasingly heterogeneous cities. The integration of the second generation - the children born of immigrant parentage in the country of immigration - is crucial to this process, as they constitute a large and growing share of metropolitan youth today. Though it is clear by now that their participation in various aspects of society is evolving differently in each country, cross-national comparisons of second-generation young people so far did not manage to produce an adequate data-base for sophisticated analyses. The oldest group of children born to postwar migrants to West-Central Europe have finished their educational careers already 20 years ago. For large scale quantitative comparison though, only now sufficiently high numbers of these groups have entered the labour-market. Therefore, it only recently became possible to produce an adequate data-base to investigate how the integration of the second generation is proceeding in several different domains, including education, labour market, social relations, identity formation, etc. We will examine the situation of Turkish, Moroccan and ex-Yugoslavian young adults (aged 18 to 35) born in the country of immigration as well as natives living in fourteen cities in seven major immigration countries: Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain and Austria. In Austria the survey will be conducted in Vienna and Linz, covering 250 young adults of Turkish, Ex-Yugoslavian and native origin in each city. Native youth is in the TIES research not only thought of as a control group, their attitudes are also seen as particularly important, constituting as they do a highly relevant part of the majority society for the second generation youth. In every country 1500 interviews will be conducted, so that in the end a sufficiently large information base is available for reliable analyses. These populations had in some aspects roughly similar starting positions. This creates a unique opportunity to uncover any differential effects of specific city and national contexts. To make truly reliable comparisons, however, we develop a common research design and test the contextual hypothesis across countries. Key questions to answer in terms of policy relevance are: In what ways do national or regional school systems promote or hamper the educational and occupational integration of migrant children? Which are the decisive transitional steps for educational success in these systems? We will use available data from the OECD PISA 2000 and 2003 project to supplement and cross-check our findings.

The TIES research project has managed to build the first systematic international comparative database on the topic of integration of the second generation with a life-course perspective. Around 10,000 young adults in 15 cities in eight countries participated in the survey. The parents of the respondents were immigrants from Turkey, ex- Yugoslavia and Morocco. In Austria only the first two groups were covered. As a comparative group, same-age respondents from the immediate neighbourhood with non-immigrant parents were surveyed. Most important results are the disproving of general assumptions about the Turkish or ex-Yugoslavian second generation and the higher level of differentiation concerning explanations for the situation of the second generation in different European cities and countries: 1. The situation of the descendants of Turkish and ex-Yugoslavian immigrants in the different countries is not the same. Consequently their behaviour is not predetermined by the country of origin of their parents and the cultural patterns ascribed to it. Their situation can be explained by the interplay with the society of immigration. 2. Their situation in the different countries of immigration is different in terms of belonging, educational success, employment, positioning, entrance and advancement in the labour-market as well as pertaining to their religious beliefs, civic and political participation and linguistic abilities. 3. Analyses at the country level are too rough and the usual `integration models` assigned to the particular countries - the republican in France, the ethnic in Germany and the multicultural in the Netherlands - are of a degree of generalisation that obscures strengths and weaknesses. 4. There is no clear ranking of countries according to the `integration of the second generation`, but in some aspects certain tendencies can be observed. 5. Meaningful explanations have to deconstruct complexity. Horizontally they have to scrutinise different societal sub-systems and vertically different socio-spatial levels. 6. Societal subsystems such as education, the economy and culture each display their own mechanisms and logics, which in a situation of growing diversity in each of the countries offer different opportunity-structures for weak social groups such as the children of former guest-workers. Different mechanisms of selection and social reproduction play a crucial role. 7. Equally important, also vertically at the local, regional, national and supranational level different patterns of belonging and participation can be observed in each country.