Young People in Transition: The National Identity of Minority Youth

This chapter uses CIL4EU data to investigate strength of identification with the nation and with the ethnic group. It explores how these vary across ethnic and religious groups, generations, and destination countries and how far these differences can be explained by processes of social integration on the one hand or perceptions of being excluded on the other hand. The key findings are that young people with a migration background are less likely than those without a migration background to identify strongly with their country of residence. This holds true more or less irrespective of their ethnic group or religion. Differences between European and non-European minority groups, and between Muslims and members of other non-Christian religions were generally modest in size, rarely reached statistical significance and were dwarfed by the overall gap between minorities and the majority.

Keeping or Losing Faith? Comparing Religion across Majority and Minority Youth in Europe

In this chapter we explore how religious minority and majority youth are in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. We find that minority youth are on average more often affiliated to a religion than majority youth, and mostly affiliated as Christians. We also study religious salience, praying and service attendance. The share of minority and majority youth who expresses that religion is important in their lives is higher than the share of youth who engages in daily prayer or weekly service attendance. Specifically, Muslim youth stand out as the most religious on all accounts. Our further comparison of the religious salience of youth with that of their parents reveals that intergenerational religious change has a declining tendency, though also quite some stability exists, especially among Muslim immigrants. Together, these findings suggest overall low levels of religious salience and practice among majority youth, in contrast to minority youth—in particular Muslims—and a general pattern of intergenerational decline in the importance of religion.

Ethnic Differences in Language Skills: How Individual and Family Characteristics Aid and Prohibit the Linguistic Integration of Children of Immigrants

Proficiency in the language of a new country is perhaps the most important precondition for the successful integration of immigrants in various other integration aspects, like educational and vocational success, interethnic relations and ethnic identify formation. Explaining ethnic disparities in linguistic integration therefore has the potential to aid our understanding of ethnic differences along various other integration dimensions. In the present contribution, we first demonstrate substantial heterogeneity of adolescents’ language proficiency in four European countries depending on their ethnic origin and their migration history. In order to further understanding these differences we examine very different individual and family factors that can be hypothesised to influence language learning processes. Besides an influence of social background on language learning, we show that ethnic specific factors such as language use in the family are at least partly relevant for the language acquisition process.

Keeping Up with the Joneses, Müllers, De Jongs and Svenssons: The Economic Situation of Minority and Majority Youth

This chapter studies how economic conditions differ between youth of immigrant background and majority youth in England, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden, with economic resources defined both in terms of family resources and the resources that children command themselves. We find that while immigrant parents tend to have lower incomes and more often suffer from non-employment and economic deprivation, their economic disadvantage does not carry over strongly to their children’s economic and material conditions: Children of immigrants have a similar situation to majority youth in terms of cash margin and material possessions, and they even tend to receive more money from their parents. Youth with immigrant background do however lack an own room more often and are less likely to earn own money from work, and those belonging to the first generation are somewhat more at risk of missing out on activities with friends, due to a lack of money. In general, poorer parents (immigrant as well as majority) tend to give equal amounts of money to their children as other parents, which suggests that they seek to shield their children from the consequences of a worse economy.

Social Contact and Inter-Ethnic Attitudes: The Importance of Contact Experiences in Schools

Despite six decades of research in the field of intergroup contact, the special role of the school setting as a key context for mixing has, after an initial focus on studies of school desegregation in the U.S., received relatively little attention, especially in Europe. In this chapter, we will explain why the school setting can provide particularly effective intergroup contact experiences for improving intergroup attitudes, before we report empirical evidence using the CILS4EU dataset. Our findings demonstrate that the school provides more intergroup contact opportunities than other contexts, and these opportunities are consistently associated with more favorable intergroup attitudes for the majority as well as different minority groups. The present findings highlight the usefulness of early intergroup contact interventions within the school setting due to the specific structure of the school as a setting, as well as the efficacy of outgroup experiences in childhood and adolescence.

Making Friends across Ethnic Boundaries: Are Personal Networks of Adolescents Diverse?

How ethnically diverse are the social networks of adolescents in Europe? The present study finds that ethnic majority youth in England, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden have very few ties to ethnic minority peers, either in the neighbourhood or at school. The networks of ethnic minorities are more mixed, because the groups to which they belong are smaller in size. Such structural opportunities for meeting members of other groups also plays a key role in understanding why some ethnic minority groups—being smaller in size—are more ‘open’ than other groups. Next to opportunities, also in-group preferences appear important. Both majority and minority groups exhibit a preference to befriend peers from their own ethnic group. Possibly, parents play a role in overcoming these ethnic boundaries. Findings suggest that having more ethnically mixed personal networks and more-positive attitudes towards other ethnic groups is transmitted from parents to their children.

Immigration and Integration: Key Characteristics of Host Countries and their Immigrants

This chapter provides a context to the integration of children of immigrants and their families by outlining key characteristics of our four survey countries, England, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. For many immigrants, these countries are arguably very similar: affluent, safe, modern, democratic and predominantly secular. There are however differences: For example, the Netherlands and Sweden appear to be more ‘child friendly’, and Sweden has more ‘immigrant-friendly’ policies and shows less immigrant-sceptic popular attitudes, while England hosts more highly qualified immigrants. A substantial difference between our four countries lies in the composition of the immigrant population, with large heterogeneity in arriving groups (for example, in their human capital and host country language skills) and their reasons for migrating (labour migrants or refugees). In perspective of such differences, it is a challenge to assign inter-country differences in immigrant integration to receiving countries' differences in policy or other characteristics.

Learning Together or Apart? Ethnic Segregation in Lower Secondary Schools

Whether, or to what degree, minority students are able to learn together with majority peers in schools is among the important context factors for their integration paths. In this chapter we investigate the extent of ethnic segregation in lower secondary schools in the four CILS4EU countries. We demonstrate that there are vast differences in majority exposure at school, both across the four countries as well as across ethnic groups within each country. Further analyses suggest that these group differences may be due to at least three reasons: ethnic differences in residential segregation, in the allocation across different ability tracks as well as ethnically specific school choice preferences. Finally, we show that low levels of majority exposure at school may not always come with a disadvantaged learning environment: in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden schools with low majority shares tend to hold fewer learning-related resources; the opposite seems to apply for schools in England.

Dealing with Diverse Diversities: Defining and Comparing Minority Groups

In this chapter we use the CILS4EU data to investigate the precise generational status and the origin countries of the adolescent population in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. We describe the ethnic diversity in the study’s samples in more detail and show that it is very large in each of these countries. In addition, the composition of origin groups varies greatly across the four. This is a challenge for straight-forward comparisons between the countries, which is further complicated by the fact that generational status and origin countries are confounded. The chapter discusses the opportunities and limitations for the empirical analyses in the rest of the book. Basically, we argue for a strategy that regards country and group differences as phenomena of interest rather than of nuisance. They should be seen as descriptive facts and starting points of a search for explaining mechanisms.

Reconsidering the Immigration–Crime Nexus in Europe: Ethnic Differences in Juvenile Delinquency

This chapter examines inter-ethnic differences in juvenile delinquency in the four CILS4EU countries. I employ a finer-grained and more comparable breakdown by generational status and ethnic origin than previous research. Although in some countries certain generations and groups exhibit greater prevalence rates, there is no general pattern of intergenerational differences and most group differences are statistically insignificant. The most consistent finding is the greater prevalence of high offending among minority boys in all four countries. With the exception of England, this pattern is largely due to differences in students’ self-control, moral beliefs and routine activities. Finally, I examine how language use and majority-group friendships relate to delinquency among minority students. Results show that in all countries having more majority-group friends tends to be associated with lower rates of delinquency. This casts into doubt the idea that minority students’ integration into native peer cultures puts them at risk.