Contact with Whom? Childhood Ethnic Composition Affects Immigrant Naturalization

• In Event: Integration and Bias in Ethnically Diverse Societies

Abstract

In a globalized world with high levels of cross-country migration, members of different ethnic and racial groups increasingly encounter one another. Though the consequences of such interethnic encounter for social and political behavior is voluminous, the dominant focus remains on attitudes of the ethnic majority in the short term. In this article, I change the perspective to actual behavior of the ethnic minority and include the longer-term perspective. Specifically, I ask whether the ethnic composition of immigrants and descendants during childhood and adolescence affects their likelihood of acquiring citizenship; a key behavioral indicator of full membership into the social and political community that often provides a series of benefits to the individual naturalizing.

I present three competing ways in which the childhood ethnic composition of immigrant and descendants can affect the likelihood of acquiring citizenship. First, building on contact theory, contact with the ethnic majority could increase the probability of acquiring citizenship by leading to a sense of a shared, national identity and a stronger belonging in and attachment to society. Second, through the lens of intergroup conflict and ethnic competition, majority contact could reduce the likelihood of naturalizing because immigrants and descendants feel threatened by the national majority and seek to strengthen their own ethnic identity. Third, the likelihood of acquiring citizenship could increase as the share of ethnic enclave members – that is, ethnically similar peers – increases. The reason is that information dissemination about the benefits of and process to obtain citizenship is more efficient within ethnic networks.

To test whether the ethnic composition in childhood affects citizenship acquisition, I use Danish administrative data on immigrants and descendants who attended a Danish public elementary school from 1991 to 2018 (N_observations = 430,278). I calculate two measures of the ethnic composition in each grade in each school in each year – the concentration of ethnic majority students as well as the concentration of students with the same ethnic background – and link these grade-level measures to whether an individual acquires citizenship after the first school-year observation and no later than 2018. To identify the causal effect of childhood ethnic concentration, I compare siblings within the same family who attended the same school but entered different cohorts as a product of their year of birth. This approach isolates variation in the ethnic concentration that arises from idiosyncratic differences across adjacent within-school-within-family cohorts. The identifying assumption is the following: Once accounting for a series of time fixed effects, the variation in ethnic concentration arising across non-twin siblings who attended the same school is as-if-randomly assigned. In 23.60% of all the cases, some siblings had acquired citizenship by 2018 whereas other siblings in the same family had not.

I find that there is a statistically significant negative effect of ethnic majority contact on citizenship acquisition: The larger the share of ethnic majority peers during childhood and adolescence, the less likely immigrants and descendants are to acquire citizenship. This negative effect decreases in size and flattens as majority concentration reaches higher levels. Yet, this negative effect does not seem to be driven by majority contact per se but rather by (lack of) contact with ethnic enclave members. Indeed, more contact with co-ethnics during childhood and adolescence increases the likelihood of acquiring citizenship; it does so to a larger extent than majority contact decreases the likelihood; and once both measures – which correlate but remain statistically distinct (r = -0.56) – are included in the same model, the negative effect of majority contact disappears.

These results offer strong evidence against the contact theoretical predictions that majority contact increases the likelihood of acquiring citizenship. On the contrary, citizenship acquisition seems more likely to be advanced in ethnic enclaves, that is, in cases where the minority population has daily interactions with ethnically similar peers. These findings point to the non-negligible role that childhood ethnic compositions in the everyday life have for political behavior among the ethnic minority. Further, counter to much public rhetoric in Europe, they suggest that ethnic enclaves can foster integration into the national and political community.

Author

• Mathias Kruse, Aarhus University