Abstract
Integration is a key issue in the literature about migration. It refers to a set of public policies aiming at integrating foreign populations in a given society. This paper aims at investigating the relationships between the integration of four communities installed in France (Algerian, Portuguese, Turkish and Vietnamese) and the presence of associations. The methodology is rooted on two approaches, quantitative economics and geography. It uses a new database, extracted from the Official Journal and several surveys, noticeably TeO. In a first step, we ask whether the regional distribution and the density of associations explain the degree of integration of the migrants stemming from the four communities. In a second step, we test whether memberships into an association increase or decrease the adoption of oppositional identities and if the latter influences the integration via the access to employment.
This paper has been written with the financial support of the labEx DynamiTe.
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Notes
- 1.
The June 2009 issue of the journal Sciences Humaines includes a chart of European pathways to integration.
- 2.
It should be noted that D. Schnapper offered this perspective in the context of writing “public policies can only aim to integrate all populations through citizenship and participation in economic activity, complemented by the protection of the welfare state. No democratic government would contemplate an exclusionary policy. It is therefore the terms of these policies that should be analysed” (2007, p. 203).
- 3.
These notions echo the problematic of nationality defined by Benedict Anderson. As Antoine Dumont notes, “rather than abandon the idea of associational ethnicity, it should be rebuilt on what is the foundation of many migrant associations, that is, their attachment to their national origin and their feeling of national belonging. This is the feeling that Benedict Anderson calls “nationness”, in contrast to nationality: the latter grants access to political rights, while the former describes the feeling of belonging to a “national community” defined by a history, a culture, a religion and a language” (Anderson 1991). “This distinction makes it easier to understand that possession of the nationality of a state is not always accompanied by a feeling of belonging to the nation represented by this state” (2010, p. 128). Still according to Antoine Dumont, to be grasped, associational nationness requires “not only combining theories of nationality and of ethnicity, but also taking into account the fact that this nationness is expressed from a distance, from a state other than that to which this nationness is tied” (2010, p. 128).
- 4.
Quote extracted from the High Council on Integration’s opinion (p. 13) called “investing in associations to succeed with integration” (2012, p. 82).
- 5.
“L’insertion professionnelle des immigrés et de leurs descendants en 2010”, Inf. Migrations n° 31, DSED, Jan. 2012.
- 6.
In this part, the considered populations are composed of people born abroad.
- 7.
The results are not published here due to space constraints but are available.
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Richard, Y., Maurel, M., Berthomière, W. (2016). The Integration of Immigrants in France: Economic and Geographical Approach. In: Domínguez-Mujica, J. (eds) Global Change and Human Mobility. Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0050-8_7
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