From Generation to Generation: Changing Family Relations, Citizenship and Belonging

Abstract

The process of integration in the context of migration is closely linked to the duration of the stay in the host country and to the passing of the generations. American sociological migration research has long been interested in changes from one generation to the other, with regard to assimilation and integration processes, as exemplified in the early twentieth century by Hansen’s law: the first generation migrates, the second generation escapes to assimilation, and the third comes back to the origins. Although this so called law can be (and has been) criticised, the debate that it raises reveals the deep interconnections of migrants’ generational transmissions and processes of belonging and citizenship. Since the middle of the twentieth century, migratory flows have substantively developed and been acutely shaped by the social, political, cultural and economic characteristics of globalisation. As has been widely documented, the movement of people around the world in various numbers and for different lengths of times is an important constituent part of these sets of global flows and processes (King, 1995; Vertovec, 2009).