Quantifying immigrant diversity in Europe

Abstract

The notion of increasing immigrant diversity is prevalent in immigration literature. However, little empirical research has examined if immigrant populations have become more diverse during the past two decades. Using data from Pew Research Center's Global Religion and Migration Database and the World Bank's Global Bilateral Migration Database, origin and religious change in immigrant populations since 1990 is presented for six European countries. Findings demonstrate that immigrant origin and religious diversity has been relatively stable during the past ten years, with moderate increases during the 1990s. Further research can examine whether these patterns are true for other countries or what happens when alternative variables are considered.

Keywords:

• immigration
• diversity
• immigrant diversity
• super-diversity
• multiculturalism
• demography

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the editor, anonymous reviewers, and Brian Grim and Peter Kivisto for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. This research was funded by the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project.

Notes

1. These six European countries were selected because of the comparability of data across multiple time points. Although it would be beneficial to include large migrant destinations like France or Germany, the time series data for immigrant stocks in these countries was unavailable. See section ‘Measuring diversity’ for more information.

2. In taking a more elongated view of immigration history and demographic change, diversity in the context of migration cycles may not be a new phenomenon. As similarly stated in critiques of transnationalism that argue that migrants were equally as transnational a century ago as they are today (see e.g. Kivisto 2001), it is possible that immigrant diversity exists any time there are sharp spikes in immigration.

3. The religious affiliation of international migrants was available only for 2010; however, many of the religious distributions by origin country to each destination country are based on surveys shortly after the 2000 census round. Therefore, the religious distribution of immigrants by their origin country to each destination country was applied to the World Bank's origin-destination grid for 1990 and 2000. For those origin countries where an origin proxy for religious affiliation is employed, the religious composition of each origin country in 2000 as drawn from the World Religion Database was used.

4. Migrant origin countries are aggregated into five regions: the Americas (all of North America, South America and the Caribbean), Asia-Pacific (including Turkey and Central Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and Oceania), Europe (all of continental Europe including Russia and internal migration within Europe), Middle East and North Africa (countries along the Mediterranean, Arabic Peninsula, Israel, Iraq and Sudan), and finally sub-Saharan Africa. Regions generally follow the UN's regions, except for Middle East and North Africa, which seeks to set more Arab, and thus Muslim, immigrants apart from Asian and sub-Saharan African origins.

5. Although some countries have a very detailed list of source countries for their immigrant populations, some only list the top countries; therefore, an equal comparison is to limit country origins to those representing 1 per cent or more of the immigrant population.

6. Unlike analyses examining the number of origin countries, diversity indices use all available origin countries, regardless of their share of the immigrant population.

7. The actual point estimates for these distributions and counts, as well as later measures of diversity, are available from the author upon request.

8. Because of limitations of space and colour, a full visual representation of all origin countries to each European destination over the three time periods is not possible.

9. Although flow data permit a more dynamic view of change, this type of data (derived from a complete origin-destination grid) over time and across several destination countries is unavailable. Nonetheless, with such large increases of immigration in Europe, any noticeable shifts of migrant flows would appear in stock data.

10. Although not shown in Figure 5, Sweden has the same number of origin countries as Spain for each time period.

11. A ‘moderate’ increase is a subjective assessment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Phillip Connor

PHILIP CONNOR is a Researcher at the Pew Research Center.