Immigrant Religion

Author(s):  
Richard Alba ◽  
Nancy Foner

This chapter describes how immigrant religion generally has become a more significant social divide, a greater challenge to integration, and a more common source of conflict with mainstream institutions and practices in Western Europe than in the United States. There are three main reasons for this. Of paramount importance are basic demographic facts. The religious backgrounds of immigrants in Western Europe and the United States are different, mostly Christian in the United States as compared to Western Europe, where a large proportion is Muslim. Muslims of immigrant origin in Western Europe also have a lower socioeconomic profile than those in the United States. Moreover, Western European native majorities have more trouble recognizing claims based on religion because they are more secular than religiously involved Americans.

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-744 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Story

The lack of autonomy of Western European states, that is, the limitations which they confront in terms of translating their policy preferences into authoritative actions, cannot be considered solely in terms of idiosyncratic domestic political institutions and cultures, or as the result of greater sensibility and vulnerability to interdependence through the flow of goods, capital and technology. The argument develops around the generalisation that during the period of "détente" from 1965 to 1979, the United States, as the world central bank, inflated the world political economy ; thereafter, the questioning of détente accompanied a United States-led policy of world deflation. European politics, in a variety of intricate ways, followed the rythm set by the United States, with a period of state policy activism in the late 1960s to mid-1970s followed by more sceptical attitudes by public officials, supported by conservative or liberal parties, on the limitations of state action. But while it could be argued that the autonomy of OECD European states was strictly limited in economic policy by the integration of national into European and world markets, it is also demonstratable that the most sensitive of these markets - the world financial markets - are most susceptible to state policy, particularly that of the United States. In turn, the influence exerted on government preferences by world financial markets has grown to such an extent that by 1983, Western European governments are all aligning priorities on what are taken to be market criteria. If fact, they are aligning their priorities on the preferences of the great powers in a period of heightened international tension. Thus, the lack of autonomy of Western European states is of political origin: their subordination through lack of continued regional autonomy in defense and finance. Implicitly, this article suggests a move in Western Europe to a confederal armed force and a European Reserve Bank, as the precondition for a revitalised Atlantic alliance.


2016 ◽  
Vol 669 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elyakim Kislev

This study explores the latest changes in Western European immigration to the United States by integrating several large databases: the U.S. census, the American Community Surveys, the European Social Survey, as well as the Human Development Index and Gini index. Findings show that the number of individuals born in Western Europe but with family origins elsewhere who have been immigrating to and settling in the United States is increasing. I divide the Western European population that immigrates to the United States into seven different subpopulations by their ancestries and explore the characteristics of these populations before and after immigrating to the United States. I also examine their relative success in terms of economic and labor outcomes in America, finding, for example, that some of the least advantaged immigrant groups have some of the best economic outcomes in the United States. The different self-selection and assimilation patterns among these immigrants have implications for U.S. public policy, which we identify and begin to explore.


2021 ◽  
pp. 154-177
Author(s):  
B. Guy Peters

The four traditions constituting the bulk of this book are from Western Europe. This chapter expands the analysis to look at four other administrative traditions. One is Central and Eastern Europe. Some countries in this region have been heavily influenced by Western European traditions, especially those of the former Hapsburg Empire, but they also display a number of distinctive features. A second tradition is Islamic administration, which has been influenced both by religion and by national cultures. Third, there is Asian public administration, and the question of the importance of the Confucian model is a central question when dealing with this tradition. Finally, there is administration in Latin America, still influenced by its Iberian past but which has been influenced also by the Napoleonic tradition and to a lesser extent by the United States. The same elements of administrative traditions used in reference to Western European countries are applied to these four traditions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 54-62
Author(s):  
VADIM ZUBOV ◽  

The article strives to conceptualize the basic ideas of liberalism, free from political sensitivities, emotional judgments and naive simplifications based on different methods and techniques of political and historical science, as well as general scientific approaches - a comparative historical method, a normative approach, an institutional approach, and analytical and synthetic methods. Defects of the interpretation of liberalism in Russia - opposition of “liberals” and “patriots”, domestic perceptions of liberalism as freedom in family, sexual and gender life, reduction of liberalism to the specific historical direction of post-Soviet liberalism are revealed in the paper. Furthermore, the author draws attention to the misunderstanding of liberalism in the United States: one of them refers liberalism to the social democracy, the other equates liberalism with the totalitarian teachings. In the light of the incorrect perception of liberalism in the world, the author formulates the purpose of the work as overcoming the misjudgement of liberalism by overcoming the false appreciation of liberalism by forming a concentrated view of the fundamentals of liberal socio-political teachings based on the views of leading thinkers in Western Europe, the United States of America and Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Which contributed significantly to the development of the fundamentals of liberalism. Predicated on the analysis of the ideas of Western European, American, and Russian liberal thinkers of the past, the author identifies common and special features of the interpretation of liberalism in different parts of the world over two centuries. Finally, the author concludes that the main features of the original liberalism are the basic points of the classical liberalism of the past centuries are the following points: 1) intelligent people should have unconditional personal, political and economic rights independent of the state; 2) there must be a system in the state that promotes justice and limits the state itself; 3) all people have the right to form a state and influences it.


Author(s):  
Leslie Woodcock Tentler

For roughly two decades after 1945, Catholicism in the United States did indeed look exceptional when compared with most of Western Europe. Rates of mass attendance were high and an increasingly well-educated Catholic population gave strong voluntary support to institutional separatism. But by 1965, signs of what soon became an inexorable decline in religious observance and communal loyalty were evident. If American Catholics can no longer be regarded as ‘exceptional’ when compared with their Western European counterparts, however, they live in a national culture where religion still functions in ways not found in other developed nations. Why Catholic decline occurred in the United States and why, despite that decline, the religious contours of American life are still markedly distinctive are the twin subjects of this chapter.


Worldview ◽  
1962 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 2-5
Author(s):  
Edwin H. Fedder

The current debate concerning the role to be played by the United States with respect to the expanding Common Market is in many ways as unreal as the proverbial angels and pinheads. The unreality stems from the fact that the United States has no choice—we are irrevocably committed to our identification with Western Europe.Despite the level of integration already achieved by the Western European nations, it can still be fashionable in informed circles to minimize the developments which have been leading toward the creation of a United Europe, to say that current plans for unification will come to naught. While it is true that earlier plans failed, there are sound reasons to say that those on the boards now will not.


Author(s):  
Richard Alba ◽  
Nancy Foner

This book compares immigrant integration across key Western countries. Focusing on low-status newcomers and their children, it examines how they are making their way in four critical European countries—France, Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands—and, across the Atlantic, in the United States and Canada. This comparison reveals their progress and the barriers they face in an array of institutions—from labor markets and neighborhoods to educational and political systems—and considers the controversial questions of religion, race, identity, and intermarriage. The book sheds new light on questions at the heart of concerns about immigration. They analyze why immigrant religion is a more significant divide in Western Europe than in the United States, where race is a more severe obstacle. They look at why, despite fears in Europe about the rise of immigrant ghettoes, residential segregation is much less of a problem for immigrant minorities there than in the United States. They explore why everywhere, growing economic inequality and the proliferation of precarious, low-wage jobs pose dilemmas for the second generation. They also evaluate perspectives often proposed to explain the success of immigrant integration in certain countries, including nationally specific models, the political economy, and the histories of Canada and the United States as settler societies. This book delves into issues of pivotal importance for the present and future of Western societies, where immigrants and their children form ever-larger shares of the population.


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