Is multiculturalism compatible with immigrant integration? This question lies at the heart of “Does Cultural Recognition Obstruct Immigrant Integration? Evidence from Two Historic Case Studies”, a paper by Melanie Kolbe, Assistant Professor of International Relations/Political Science at the Graduate Institute since September 2015. Recently published in “International Migration Review“, the article affords an opportunity to meet Melanie Kolbe and better understand her research.

Why did you decide to write this paper?

As a native of Berlin, I have always been familiar with the story of the French Huguenots – a Calvinist religious minority – who fled an increasingly and openly hostile France in the late 1700s and came to Berlin and Brandenburg upon invitation of Frederick William, the Great Elector of Brandenburg. In Berlin memory, Huguenots are fondly remembered as a model minority – an ethnic group that integrated easily into its host society and contributed greatly to its economic and cultural development. As a matter of fact, if you travel to Berlin you can easily see the strong influence of the French in the architecture and street names (especially in the so-called “French” quarter).

But it was only when I became more interested in the factors that determine immigrant integration that I started reading more about the history of the French Huguenots in Berlin and discovered to my surprise that the integration process has been less than smooth and full of social, sometimes violent, tension. Yet, in recent German discourse on how to integrate immigrants, Germany’s former experience with immigration and immigrant integration is often only marginally mentioned. Moreover, in general European public discussion on how exactly we should define integration, there is a large disagreement as to the extent to which retaining and encouraging cultural identities and group belonging is obstructing successful immigrant integration. Officially recognising immigrants as special groups and granting them rights to cultural identities are deemed to be highly counterproductive to their integration.

However, historical experience does not support such a view at all and the French Huguenots are a good example of this. They enjoyed a variety of cultural privileges – ranging from freedom of self-governance and freedom of religious expression to receiving discounted loans, housing subsidies and tax exemptions. I thus wondered whether it really is a matter of cultural recognition that determines whether immigrant integration is successful or not. When examining other cases in which immigrants received cultural rights and privileges, such as the case of Germans who settled in the lower Volga region in imperial Russia during the mid-1800s, I found that their experience was very different. The Volga Germans had a hard time integrating in any meaningful way, and eventually either became forcibly displaced or emigrated to the Americas.

I then wanted to find out why cultural recognition is an obstacle to immigrant integration in some cases and not in others. In particular, I was interested in understanding how public policies can produce or weaken cultural identities.

How can your historical research help inform current debates?

Of course, it seems to make more sense to examine current immigrant groups rather than historical ones. Yet current research and politics argue that it is still too early to assess whether comparatively recently arrived immigrants living in Europe have become successfully integrated or not. Most immigrants came either as labour migrants, family dependents, or as citizens of former colonies since the 1950s and 1960s. Immigrant integration, however, takes several generations, and we are only observing the second generation, maybe the beginning of the third one.

Nonetheless, politicians are already proclaiming the failure of multiculturalism, i.e. the policy of allowing for cultural diversity and even supporting and recognising it, which has allegedly led to bad integration outcomes such as isolated immigrant communities out of touch with their host societies, and they do so regardless of whether multiculturalism has really been applied (as in the Netherlands) or not (as in Germany).

Historical cases have the advantage that integration processes are “done”. We can quite confidently discuss whether they have been successful or not. They may also offer a better picture of which policies (in their essence) help or undermine the management of diversity.

You write that “incorporation outcomes are driven by differing opportunity structures”. What do you mean by that?

What I find is that granting immigrants rights to cultural recognition and thus enabling them to keep their cultural identity is not what produces bad integration outcomes by itself. But if cultural recognition is granted while other social, economic and political avenues to participate in society (which I call “opportunity structures”) remain closed to them, then they start developing isolated communities. When immigrants are discriminated in educational opportunities, in their occupational choice or in the labour markets, when they have hardly any contact with natives, when they are excluded from political participation in decision-making structures, then their cultural identity becomes their one and only marker of existence. But when they are not so discriminated, they can start to identify themselves as belonging to the host society and cultural identity becomes less important then.

In my work, I show how cultural recognition does produce distinct cultural identities and hardens lines of identity in the short run, but that boundaries between immigrant and host society groups become more and more blurred in the long run, as long as opportunity structures allow immigrants to be part of the host society.

In what way does your paper “advocate a new approach to multiculturalism in Europe”?

The topic and public policy of multiculturalism is a very young one. In particular, since the late 1980s and early 1990s, multiculturalism has made its way into public discourse as a principle for managing diversity in modern states. So multiculturalism is tightly linked to ideas of human rights (everyone should have a right to preserve their culture) and liberal democracy. Through my historical research I actually look at a sort of pre-democratic form of multiculturalism, which has little to do with human rights discourse but is nonetheless based on granting groups specific rights to preserve their culture. To my knowledge, I am the first to link these two forms of cultural recognition and extrapolate the effect of granting cultural rights on immigrant integration outcomes.

Is immigrant integration your main current field of interest and research?

I am generally interested in how modern societies manage immigration. This leads me to two large research avenues: one about how immigrants actually integrate and how societies can help or hinder this through public policies, and the other about how societies influence who can enter a country in the first place and under what circumstances. Therefore I also examine immigration policies, especially those related to labour migration of highly skilled individuals. This extends my research field to political economy – how countries organise their economies and how economic considerations impact immigration policy.

Full citation: Kolbe, Melanie. “Does Cultural Recognition Obstruct Immigrant Integration? Evidence from Two Historic Case Studies”. International Migration Review, 2015.

Illustration: Pug50, 11 December 2010, CC BY_NC 2.0.