How effective are integration policy reforms? The case of asylum-related migrants.

The marked increase of asylum seekers arriving in Western Europe after 2014 has renewed debates on policy measures that countries should put into place to support their integration. Although implemented by many countries in recent years, research has neglected the effect of integration policy reform packages combining economic and social policy measures on asylum-related immigrants' adjustment processes. Exploiting a comprehensive integration policy reform in Switzerland, using survey data from the Health Monitoring of the Swiss Migrant Population, and registering data on the whole asylum-related population, our difference-in-differences analyses reveal that provisionally admitted individuals benefiting from the reform have higher employment probability, increased income levels, better language skills, and feel less lonely or without a homeland relative to comparable asylum seekers who did not benefit from the reform. Robustness checks assessing common pre-reform trends support our findings, which highlight the importance of evaluating entire reform packages when assessing integration policies' effectiveness.

Policies and prejudice: Integration policies moderate the link between immigrant presence and anti-immigrant prejudice.

More people than ever migrate across the world, thereby more people than ever live, study, and work in countries, regions, and institutions with high immigrant presence. Conflict and threat theories have argued that increasing immigration inevitably heightens native citizens' anti-immigrant prejudice. Drawing on alternate strands of social psychological literature such as contact theory, the present study challenges this argument. We highlight the role of the sociopolitical context of prejudice focusing on socioeconomic and legal integration policies. We reason that such integration policies shape intergroup relations by reducing structural (socioeconomic and legal) inequalities. Thus, inclusive policies will effectively reduce prejudice especially at high levels of immigrant presence through empowering immigrants and reducing immigrant disadvantage. Indeed our findings identify inclusive integration policies as a key condition for low anti-immigrant prejudice in high-immigration contexts. We analyze surveys of 143,752 participants across 66 different countries, 20 subnational regions, and 64 institutions as sociopolitical contexts using six different data sets in eight studies. Our multilevel analyses consistently demonstrate that anti-immigrant prejudice is lower among natives when higher levels of immigrant presence are coupled with inclusive, rather than exclusive, integration policies. Inclusive policies that render immigrants more equal to natives are the path to improved intergroup relations and social cohesion in diverse societies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The integrative force of political institutions? Direct democracy and voter turnout across ethnic and nativity groups.

Much has been written on the positive effect of direct democracy (initiatives, referendums) on voter turnout. However, we have limited knowledge about potential differential effects on voters belonging to various ethnic groups. The paper argues that depending on a group's responsiveness to the political context, direct democracy can (dis-)integrate voters (from) into the electorate. Empirical analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) voting supplement survey data, together with data on the absolute use of direct democracy across US states, corroborates this theoretical expectation, however lending more support for the disintegrating assumption. Frequent direct democratic elections further widen the negative voting gap between first-generation Asian voters and voters living in the US for three generations or longer, whereas they tend to diminish this voting gap for first-generation Hispanic voters. The disintegrative pattern for first-generation Asian voters remains even significant when excluding California from the state sample, yet not the integrative tendency for first-generation Hispanics. Additional analyses using alternative measures of direct democracy and voting, and applying statistical adjustments to address causality concerns, confirm the robustness of these findings, which shed light on the so-far underexplored (dis-)integrative potential of political institutions.