“Reactive Ethnicity” or “Assimilation”? Statements, Arguments, and First Empirical Evidence for Labor Migrants in Germany

Abstract

In this article, we scrutinize the often stated assumption that labor migrants in Germany turn away from integration and reaffirm their ethnicity by examining their identificational, cognitive, and social assimilation processes. Using data from the German Socio‐economic Panel, we present trend analyses of different hostland‐ and homeland‐related indicators for the past fifteen years. Results are presented separately for first‐ and second‐generation migrants from Turkey, the EU, and the former Yugoslavia. While not all assimilation‐related indicators change a great deal over time, they show at least a substantial difference between the first and the second generation. With regard to the homeland‐related indicators, the results by no means suggest that Turkish migrants try to compensate for their comparatively disadvantaged social status by revitalizing ethnic cultural habits or homeland‐oriented identifications.

Patterns of minority and majority identification in a multicultural society

“…While Berry's framework is well-recognised and has been used in other work on ethnic identity and multiculturalism (see e.g. Diehl and Schnell 2006;Heath and Demireva 2013;Fischer-Neuman 2014), our approach extends existing research in two ways. First, for analysing minority group acculturation, we utilise comparable scaled measures of both national and ethnic identity that are collected independently and tap into affective but individualised dimensions of identity (Phinney 1992).…”

“…Lam and Smith 2010;Diehl and Schnell 2006;Fischer-Neuman 2013;Georgiadis and Manning 2013;Kesler and Schwartzman 2014). Much of the focus has been on the experience of minorities specifically and their in-group or out-group identification.…”

Relations between Second-Language Proficiency and National Identification: The Case of Immigrants in Germany

“…By way of contrast, contact with Germans and having German friends were found to be positively associated with stronger identification with the receiving society and second language proficiency (e.g., Oropesa, Landale and Grief, 2008;Simon, 2004;Van Tubergen and Kalmijn, 2005). Finally, it is expected that European immigrants in Germany will display a higher level of German identification and better proficiency in the German language than other immigrants (e.g., Diehl and Schnell, 2006). …”

“…Although they are often socialized into the same group their parents belong to, immigrant descendants are also exposed to the culture of the receiving society outside the home. Language and identification preferences among them may 7 Importantly, the SOEP does not represent the entire population of foreigners in Germany (Diehl and Schnell, 2006 9 The selection of these four waves derives from our effort to include data that covers several background variables and presents the most recent information. We are aware of the newest 2010 wave where ethnic identification was reintroduced into the SOEP; however, the method we apply requires the gaps between the years to be equal and hence we could not integrate the data from 2010 into the models presented here.…”

“…5 As is often the case, even though the German society is constantly concerned with the stagnation in the cultural integration of immigrants, studies suggest that it has improved over years and generations (Diehl and Schnell, 2006;Kristen and Dollmann, 2010) German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP; Wagner, Frick and Schupp, 2007) and an autoregressive cross-lagged (ARCL) structural equation model (Finkel, 1995;Schlüter, Schmidt and Wagner, 2008). In the next section we present the theoretical framework of this study.…”