Incorporation of children of immigrants: the case of descendants of immigrants from Turkey in Sweden

Abstract

This paper investigates how children of immigrants from Turkey are integrated into Swedish society. The educational achievements and labour market outcomes of this group are compared with the performance of the offspring of native-born parents. The aim of the study is to explore whether we can observe a tendency towards ‘downward mobility’ among young people of immigrant background in Sweden and thereby provide reflections on the existing formulation of the ‘segmented assimilation’ theory. Findings show that descendants of immigrants seem not to be in the process of downward assimilation, that is, social exclusion and therefore formation of a distinct ‘underclass’ in Sweden. The concept of ‘subordinate inclusion’ is a more appropriate description of the experiences of children of immigrants.

Keywords:

• children of immigrants
• segmented assimilation
• education
• labour market

Notes

1. According to Stepick and Stepick (2010, p. 1150) ‘the concept of segmented assimilation could apply to the children of immigrants in any country, but it was developed specifically in reference to the US children of immigrants who arrived after 1965.’

2. According to data for this study, about 98 per cent of children of immigrants from Turkey had become Swedish citizens by 2008. Almost 92 per cent of their mothers and 84 per cent of their fathers are also Swedish citizens.

3. The case of immigrants from Turkey demonstrates that national origin is not always a good proxy for mode of integration. Immigrants from Turkey, just like many other immigrant groups, in spite of the same national origin do not inevitably belong to the same ‘ethnic’ communities in their new country of residence (Sweden) and have formed diverse communities and are divided between many different ones (Kurdish, Syriani-Assyrian, Armenian and Turkish). In other words, the same ‘ethnic’ label can denote different content in different places.

4. Stockholm has the largest community of immigrants from Turkey in Sweden. Almost 60 per cent of the DIT group live in Stockholm, according to LISA.

5. The definition of social capital here is close to Bourdieu's (2001) definition, which underlines that in our hierarchically ordered society some individuals are connected to resource-rich networks, while others, due to the tribal stigma of race/ethnicity or their lower socio-economic position, have no such connections. See later in the paper, Loury's (2002) notion of discrimination in contact (the unequal treatment of persons on the basis of race/ethnicity in the more informal private spheres of life such as friendship and partnership) as explanation for why racially/ethnically stigmatized groups have less access to social capital.

6. Concerning the binary contrast between formal and informal, Jenkins (1994), p. 210) stresses that there is no clear-cut distinction between formal and informal interactions; rather, there is a continuum of emphasis: ‘the formal is simultaneously an absence and a presence within the informal and vice versa.’

7. Individuals born of parents from Somalia in Sweden have not yet reached adulthood to enter the labour market.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alireza Behtoui

ALIREZA BEHTOUI is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Welfare Studies (ISV), Institute for Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) at Linköping University and The Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University.