Integration policy in education and immigrant students’ patriotic pride in host countries: A cross-national analysis of 24 European countries

ABSTRACT

This study aims to examine whether there exists a gap in patriotic pride in host countries between immigrant and native students and whether an integration policy in education would work to narrow the gap. This study assumes that immigrant students’ patriotic pride in host countries may not only result from immigrant status but also it may be a result of policy efforts to integrate them into society. With this aim, this study analyzed 72,371 students in grade 8 across 24 European countries based on the two datasets from the Migration Integration Policy Index and the International Civic and Citizenship Study by employing hierarchical linear modelling analyses. In doing so, this study found that there was a gap between immigrant and native students in terms of patriotic pride in host countries. In addition, there was a significantly positive association between integration policies in education and immigrant students’ patriotic pride. The findings suggest that immigrant students are likely to take pride in and be more attached to host countries where government institutionalizes well-developed integration policies in education. This study provides insight into the role of integration policies in promoting immigrant students’ socio-political integration in host countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Patriotic pride
• immigrant students
• social integration
• integration policy
• education policy

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to Dr. Moosung Lee, Dr. Mi-Kyung Ju, and Dr. Seung-Hwan Ham for their encouragement and support and to Ms. Laurel Boeman for proofreading the manuscript. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The reason why the ICCS dataset used for the outcome variable preceded the MIPEX dataset used for the main predictor was that the latest version of the ICCS dataset is still ongoing and the earlier version of the ICCS dataset is in 2009. This discrepancy in the order does not appear a critical problem as the education policy indicators from MIPEX dataset are highly stable (Huddleston et al. 2011). To demonstrate this, we additionally analyzed correlation between the 2010 and 2015 MIPEX in education (.96, p ≤. 001). This result suggests that the policy indicators in MIPEX do not fluctuate from year to year.

2 The ICCS data distinguishes first-generation immigrants with second-generation immigrants. First-generation immigrant students were born outside of the country of assessment and whose parents were born in another country. Second-generation immigrant students were born in the country of assessment but whose parents were born in another country.

3 The model in this study was constructed based on the previous research conducted by Ham, Yang, and Cha (2017) and Yang and Ham (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Soobin Choi

Soobin Choi is a Doctoral student in the Department of Education Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Missouri. He holds her masters’ degree in Sociology of Education from Hanyang University. His research focuses on how educational institutions and policies influence relations between native and immigrant students and citizenship education.

Yun-Kyung Cha

Yun-Kyung Cha is a Professor in the College of Education at Hanyang University. He earned his doctorate in Sociology of Education at Stanford University. He is an editor-in-chief of Multicultural Education Review. His research interests include sociology of education and multicultural education.