Migrants' assimilation is a major challenge for European societies, in part because of the sudden surge of refugees in recent years and in part because of long-term demographic trends. In this paper, we use Facebook's data for advertisers to study the levels of assimilation of Arabic-speaking migrants in Germany, as seen through the interests they express online. Our results indicate a gradient of assimilation along demographic lines, language spoken and country of origin. Given the difficulty to collect timely migration data, in particular for traits related to cultural assimilation, the methods that we develop and the results that we provide open new lines of research that computational social scientists are well-positioned to address.
Understanding migrant integration and the effectiveness of policy measures to favor assimilation is a longstanding challenge. A wide range of aspects such as civic integration policies' @cite_7 or multiculturalism @cite_5 have been analyzed. These studies developed evaluation metrics based on concepts such as political trust @cite_11 as well as lack of electoral participation or composite measures of civic integration @cite_5 . For a review of empirical and theoretical challenges see @cite_6 (2005).
@cite_5 @cite_6 @cite_7 @cite_11
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Several countries in Europe have recently adopted obligatory language and country-knowledge requirements for settlement, naturalisation and immigration. Integration tests, courses and contracts are only a few examples of the new ‘civic integration policies’ states are using to promote individual autonomy and common values for newcomers. Are these requirements in response to concrete problems of immigrant integration? Do they enable, or actually inhibit, integration? This paper examines the various pressures behind attaching mandatory integration requirements to status acquisition. To systematically examine these policies, I develop a civic integration index (CIVIX) to measure language, country-knowledge and value-commitment requirements across the EU-15. While there is a general shift toward civic requirements across Europe, evidence reveals important differences in the degree of policy change. Finally, I explore how new civic requirements complement or challenge existing citizenship practices, identifyin... This article engages debates about migrant integration by analyzing political trust and satisfaction in 24 European countries. The evidence suggests that first-generation migrants have the most positive attitudes, while native-origin and second-generation migrant-origin individuals have similar political trust and satisfaction scores. To explain these outcomes, I focus on the importance of subjective integration factors related to the stages of migration. I claim that first-generation migrants, who have gone through the disruptive process of changing countries, will have lower expectations and be more likely to have positive evaluations of the host society. In comparison, native-origin and second-generation migrant-origin individuals have been raised in the same society and are likely to share perspectives toward that society’s political institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] This review examines research on the assimilation of immigrant groups. We review research on four primary benchmarks of assimilation: socioeconomic status, spatial concentration, language assimilation, and intermarriage. The existing literature shows that today's immigrants are largely assimilating into American society along each of these dimensions. This review also considers directions for future research on the assimilation of immigrant groups in new southern and midwestern gateways and how sociologists measure immigrant assimilation. We document the changing geography of immigrant settlement and review the emerging body of research in this area. We argue that examining immigrant assimilation in these new immigrant gateways is crucial for the development of theories about immigrant assimilation. We also argue that we are likely to see a protracted period of immigrant replenishment that may change the nature of assimilation. Studying this change requires sociologists to use both birth cohort and genera... Moving to a new country can be difficult, but relationships made there can ease the integration into the new environment. The social ties can be formed with different groups: compatriots from their home country, people originally from their new country (locals), and also immigrants from other countries. Yet very little research on immigration has addressed this important aspect, primarily because large-scale studies of social networks are impractical using traditional methods such as surveys. In this study we provide the first comprehensive view into the composition of immigrants' social networks in the United States using data from the social networking site Facebook. We measure the integration of immigrant populations through the structure of friendship ties, and contrast it with the spatial density of immigrant communities. Beyond friendships with compatriots and locals, we look at friendships between immigrant groups, deriving a map of cultural friendship affinities.