How can we live in big cities together with people who are clearly different from each other?
In the last 50 years, researchers in the field of migration and ethnic studies have primarily focussed on immigrants and their descendants, seeking to answer questions on how they integrate into the receiving society.
Many claimed that this is actually a two-way process, also involving the people without migration background.
There is, however, still very little research on how people without migration background react to the people with migration background they encounter in ethnically diverse settings in their neighbourhoods, the schools their children attend, or in their workplaces. Do they appreciate to live in an ethnically diverse context? How do they act in practice during their day-to-day interactions with people with migration background? And how do they use a potential position of power to include or exclude people with migration background? In most integration or assimilation research, at the most, people without migration background have been included as the norm group or comparison group to which other ethnic groups are compared. This has put the focus in research heavily on the attitudes and practices of the members of ethnic minority groups, resulting in what has been referred to as the “ethnic lens” or “ethnicization” (Crul Citation2016; Dahinden Citation2016; Emirbayer and Desmond Citation2012; Favell Citation2016; Glick Schiller, Çağlar, and Guldbrandsen Citation2006; Wimmer Citation2013). It almost seems that the people without migration background are not part of societal processes in ethnically diverse contexts (Schinkel and Schinkel Citation2018). This is remarkable given their dominance in positions of power. There is little research into their attitudes and practices in relation to people of migrant background and how this impacts societal outcomes. With this article, we want to fill that void.
Our field even lacks a precise and widely accepted definition for the group without migration background used across different country contexts. Researchers use terms like natives, mainstream population, majority population, people of native white descent, people without migration background, “Anglo-Saxon Whites”, or “Non-Hispanic Whites”. In this article, we will address our target category as people without migration background. We use the term category, to assert there is no such thing as a homogeneous group of people without migration background. As we will also show empirically, the category internally is strongly divided in terms of their attitudes and practices towards issues of ethnic diversity. It is especially this internal diversity which we will explore and implement in our theoretical model. We define the category as people who are born in the country and whose both parents are born in the country. For this article, we analyse new data on people without migration background living in majority minority neighbourhoods in Rotterdam. The term majority minority, initially used in the American context, refers to a context where all groups, also the old majority group, form a numerical minority.
The central research question we want to answer in this article is: what is the impact is of the attitudes and practices of people without migration background on inclusion and exclusion in an ethnically diverse context. We will formulate a new theoretical framework and a methodological approach to answer this question.
Assimilation and integration processes have been studied widely and for many years, mainly by looking at the attitudes and practices of people with migration background. This article focusses on the mirror group: the people without migration background. Based on a literature review we propose a new model, the Diversity Attitudes and Practices Impact (DAPI) scales, to assess the impact they have on inclusion and exclusion in ethnically diverse contexts. We test the model using new data on Rotterdam, a superdiverse majority minority city with a large share of voters for anti-immigrant parties. Though the attention, both in research and in the public debate, is focussed on the rise of anti-immigrant sentiments in Europe and the United States, the outcomes of our DAPI-scales model demonstrate that, counter to what is expected, the most probable trend in Rotterdam is towards more socio-economic inclusion and more openness to cultural diversity.
Articles published on the similar subject:
Maurice Crul & Frans Lelie (2021) Measuring the impact of diversity attitudes and practices of people without migration background on inclusion and exclusion in ethnically diverse contexts. Introducing the diversity attitudes and practices impact scales, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44:13, 2350-2379, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1906925
Crul, Maurice, and John Mollenkopf, eds. The Changing Face of World Cities: Young Adult Children of Immigrants in Europe and the United States. Russell Sage Foundation, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7758/9781610447911
Crul, MRJ & Mollenkopf, J (eds) 2012, The Changing Face of World Cities. Young Adult Children of Immigrants in Europe and the United States. Russell Sage, New York. https://www.russellsage.org/publications/changing-face-world-cities
Prof. Dr. Maurice Crul
Frans Lelie