Stigma and Belonging Among the Rising Immigrant Elite in France

• In Event: 3251 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 1. Anti-Immigrant Discourses

Abstract

The rise of an immigrant elite in France, as most readily visible in the realm of sports and politics, reflects a broader pattern of social mobility despite modest social origins among many immigrant families. While scholars have sought to understand the determinants of mobility among immigrants, not much is known of the lives of the upwardly mobile, new immigrant elite. In this study, I look at the subjective experience of stigma and belonging among thirty-eight immigrant professionals from North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Do they experience stigma, and if so, how do they claim belonging in the national community? Respondents generally report perceiving only moderate level of racial stigma in their daily lives, and I find that the respondents’ upper-middle class background empowers them to use cultural elitism (Bourdieu 1984, Lamont1992) to deflect racism as a backwards political attitude. Yet, I find that self-identified Muslim respondents face a more intense and widespread type of religious stigma casting them as cultural outsiders despite their high level of socioeconomic attainment. For Muslim respondents, handling stigma primarily involves distinguishing oneself from undesirable Muslims (e.g. perpetrators of terror attacks) rather than dismissing hostility against Islam as illegitimate. The subjective experience of Muslim respondents underscores the absence of a cultural repertoire making religion a credible way to claim belonging in secularized France.Substantively, this study documents the importance of cultural repertoires like scripts, norms and narratives in enabling or disabling specific claims to belonging and responses to stigma from natives. Contrary to the implicit assumptions of neoassimilation theory - equating social mobility with assimilation - it suggests that symbolic inclusion remains actively negotiated among those experiencing high degree of socioeconomic attainment. Social mobility, therefore, should be conceived as a necessary but insufficient for the symbolic inclusion of immigrant newcomers

Author

• Lucas Germain Drouhot, Cornell University