Moving into multiculturalism. Multicultural attitudes of socially mobile individuals without a migration background

ABSTRACT

In various Western European cities, international migration has transformed the former ethnic majority into a numerical ethnic minority. We study people without a migration background to shed light on the former majority’s attitudes towards multiculturalism in these majority-minority contexts. Among those without a migration background, we specifically focus on socially mobile individuals in order to disentangle the influence of primary and secondary socialization on attitudes towards multiculturalism. Using survey data on Amsterdam, Antwerp, Malmo, Rotterdam and Vienna (n = 2,457), we found that, whilst controlling for the effects of primary and secondary socialization, both upward and downward mobility associates to more optimistic multicultural attitudes. We argue that the experience of social mobility equips people with a reflexivity which allows them to have a more optimistic perspective on the multi-ethnic city. In this way, this article improves our understanding of why some people are more willing than others to adapt to multi-ethnic contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• European cities
• majority-minority
• migration
• reflexive habitus
• social mobility
• socialization

Acknowledgements

We thank Elif Keskiner, Ismintha Waldring, Lore van Praag and Maurice Crul for their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. We also very much appreciated Lise Woensdregt’s title idea.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here understood as people who were born in the country of residence with both parents born in the same country.

2 When migration background is defined as born in the Netherlands with both parents born in the Netherlands (cf. CBS 2018)

3 Based on Statistics Netherlands (CBS 2018) for Amsterdam and Rotterdam; Stad Antwerpen (2019) for Antwerp; Statistics Sweden (2018) for Malmo; Stadt Wien MA 17 (2017) for Vienna and when ‘migration background’ is defined as born in the country of residence with both parents born in the same country. When the sources use a different definition of ‘migration background’, the figures were calculated manually so that they fit the definition of ‘migration background’ for this research as closely as possible.

4 We performed an exploratory principal component analysis to test whether we could find more distinct, underlying concepts. The analysis did not yield a clean multi-factor structure and therefore, following van de Vijver et al. (2008), we proceeded with a unifactorial multiculturalism scale.

5 Because some studies suggest that fathers have more impact on the attitudes of sons and mothers on the attitudes of daughters (e.g. Nieuwbeerta and Wittebrood 1995), we conducted sensitivity analyses in which we measured social mobility as the difference in highest educational degree between father and son and mother and daughter. These sensitivity analyses yielded the same substantive conclusions as the analyses reported here.

6 We also fitted the following model: $Y_{ijk}=\left(p+m{x}_{ijm}\right){\mu }_{ii}+\left(1-\left(p+m{x}_{ijm}\right)\right){\mu }_{jj}+\sum {\text{β}}_b{x}_{ijb}+{ϵ}_{ijk}$ to test what is often referred to in the literature as the maximization/maximalization hypothesis. The maximization hypothesis tests whether the socialization context associated with the highest social status guides attitudes: in other words, the upwardly mobile adapt to the attitudes characteristic of their social destination, while the downwardly mobile retain the attitudes characteristic of their social origin. The model, however, does not improve the model fit.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council [grant agreement ID: 741532].

Notes on contributors

Lisa-Marie Kraus

Lisa-Marie Kraus is a PhD candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. As part of the Becoming a Minority (BaM) project, which is funded by the European Research Council with Maurice Crul as the Principal Investigator, her research interests concern the experiences of people without a migration background in European majority-minority cities. For more information on the BaM project see www.bamproject.eu.

Stijn Daenekindt

Stijn Daenekindt holds an MSc in Statistics (2012, KU Leuven) and a PhD in Sociology (2015, Ghent University). In his research, he mainly focusses on (aspects of) social inequality.