Cultural Evolution and Persistence in Immigrant Societies: Lessons From Germany

• In Event: 20862 - Section on International Migration Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 17: Immigration Integration (2)

Abstract

International migration brings individuals with different cultural orientations and social origins into contact, creating opportunities for cultural interpenetration and evolution. It is thus surprising that immigrant-origin people have remained on the periphery of contemporary debates about the nature and magnitude of within-person changes in personal culture. On the one hand, immigrants actively seek out a new society and are often granted entry based on perceived assimilability. On the other hand, immigrants and their descendants commonly remain tethered to their origins—whether through explicit acts of transnationalism, more subtle forms of ethnic socialization, in response to bright sociocultural boundaries encountered during settlement, inter alia. As a result, immigrants and their descendants are both “primed” for cultural updating and exposed to forces that anchor them in their cultural roots. In this ongoing study, we scrutinize these disparate possibilities using two longitudinal surveys from Germany featuring large immigrant-origin samples and nearly 100 items on the personal culture of native- and immigrant-origin Germans. Analytically, we draw on variance decomposition to measure dynamics of cultural change or stasis across generational fault-lines. In addition, we fit mixed models featuring an interaction between generation and time to furnish additional insights into cultural variability on select items of interest, namely religious and national identity. Although preliminary, our analysis suggests that third-generation respondents and native Germans exhibit more within-person change, particularly with respect to belief-based items (e.g., religious identity) whereas change is less generationally patterned for items tapping taste (e.g., activity preferences).

Authors

• Sakeef M. Karim, Amherst College

• Jordan Katz