Embeddedness and Identity: How Immigrants Turn Grievances into Action

Abstract

The social and political integration of Muslim immigrants into Western societies is among the most pressing problems of today. Research documents how immigrant communities are increasingly under pressure to assimilate to their “host” societies in the face of significant discrimination. In this article, we bring together two literatures—that on immigrants and that on social movement participation—to explore whether Muslim immigrants respond to their societal situation by engaging in collective political action. Although neither literature has given much attention to immigrant collective action, they do provide predictive leverage relative to the influence of grievances, efficacy, identity, emotions, and embeddedness in civil society networks. Our analyses are comprised of three separate but identical studies: a study of Turkish (N = 126) and Moroccan immigrants (N = 80) in the Netherlands and a study of Turkish immigrants (N = 100) in New York. Results suggest that social psychological mechanisms known to affect native citizens' collective action function similarly for immigrants to a great extent, although certain immigrant patterns are indeed unique.

Predicting Protests by Disadvantaged Skilled Immigrants: A Test of an Integrated Social Identity, Relative Deprivation, Collective Efficacy (SIRDE) Model

“…This is because the more strongly immigrants identify with Canada, the more they will consider themselves to be part of a superordinate national ingroup. Their growing sense of national identity would imply that they are less likely to take part in protest actions because such actions could potentially be construed as unpatriotic and as an expression of disloyalty and disrespect towards their new country (Klandermans, 2014;Klandermans, van der Toorn, & van Stekelenburg, 2008). We, therefore, tested hypothesis 2c: the more that skilled immigrants with credentialing problems identify with their new country, Canada, the less likely they are to take part in protest actions and hypothesis 2d: the more immigrants identify with their new country, Canada, the less likely they are to believe that their cultural group is being treated unfairly (discriminated against) and to react emotionally with anger, resentment, and frustration.…”

Blame and contention: how perceptions of the government’s role in the economic crisis shape patterns of political action

“…Particularly in the collective behaviour tradition, relative deprivation theory has typically stressed the role of individual grievances and hardship for political behaviour (Davies 1962;Geschwender 1968;Gurr 1970). Subjective perceptions of relative deprivation have been shown to be important in particular for mobilisation to contentious political action (Klandermans et al 2008), but they are also likely to matter for other forms of expression of political dissatisfaction (Thomassen 1989). The recent economic crisis has revamped this research tradition and led to a number of studies testing the hypothesis that feelings of relative deprivation lead to an increase in protest activities (Grasso and Giugni 2016b;Rüdig and Karyotis 2013;Bernburg 2015).…”

Comparing protests and demonstrators in times of austerity: regular and occasional protesters in universalistic and particularistic mobilisations

“…Embeddedness in networks increases the chance of being targeted by mobilisation efforts (Klandermans, van der Toorn, & van Stekelenburg, 2008;Schussman & Soule, 2005). Membership of social movement organisations provides such networks.…”