All the Same? Essentialism and the Relative Importance of Population Heterogeneity for Immigrant Incorporation

• In Event: 2276 - Innovative Methods in Immigration Research

Abstract

An important theoretical concern among contemporary migration scholars is to avoid essentialising minority groups as homogeneous entities with static traits and cultures. Due to dominant analytical practices however, quantitative scholars routinely rely on ethnic and religious categories to study immigrant incorporation as a group-level process, and the extent to which population heterogeneity matters in the incorporation process remains understudied. Taking the example of Muslims in France, this paper mines for and test the implications of heterogeneity for the study of typical incorporation outcomes. It documents substantial heterogeneity along specific configurations of variable forming cohesive subgroups, and shows that such variation is consequential for some outcomes - religious behaviour, national identification - and negligible for others - intermarriage, friendship homophily. By showing that the importance of population heterogeneity strongly varies across outcomes, the paper proposes an empirical resolution to theoretical cautions about essentialism circumscribed, until then, to the politics of migration research.

Author

• Lucas Germain Drouhot, Cornell University