SCIP: Causes and consequences of early socio-cultural integration processes among new immigrants in Europe

The SCIP project studies integration trajectories of new immigrants in four European countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and Great Britain. Its substantive focus will be on migrants’ socio-cultural integration. This aspect of migration has received increasing attention in public debate yet remains seriously under-researched. In particular, existing data cannot settle the question whether socio-cultural integration is a consequence or a prerequisite for migrants’ structural integration (e.g. in the labour market) – and whether, how and why groups might differ in this regard. By focusing on recent arrivals, the SCIP project will study a particularly dynamic phase of the entire integration process, thus laying the ground for the creation of a “European New Immigrant Panel” that matches the existing new immigrant surveys in classical immigration countries such as the USA.

In the SCIP project, two cross-national waves of survey data will be collected among groups of new immigrants that vary along a number of dimensions, including religion (Catholics versus Muslims), social status (medium to high-skill versus low-skill migrants) and po