Integration Gaps Persist Despite Immigrants' Value Assimilation: Evidence from the European Social Survey

Jorge Suárez ^* Ivar R. Hannikainen

• University of Granada, Granada, Spain

Integration of the immigrant population is understood as a multidimensional challenge in many liberal democracies. In the European context, although the precise dimensions of integration have varied considerably throughout the past decades and between nations, most states nowadays have adopted ‘civic integration’ programmes to some extent, thereby placing weight on the acquisition of ‘national moral values’. In other words, they consider that successful integration implies the assimilation of certain core values and implement various strategies to instil these in immigrants. This view, however, has been disputed by some scholars who raise doubts about the legitimacy of such claims. To an important extent, this disagreement turns on the extent to which the adoption of a host society’s normative values benefits immigrants’ own path towards integration. To answer this question, we leverage data from the European Social Survey, collected between 2002 and 2020 (N = 261,830) to compare immigrants’ and natives’ self-reported values in 27 countries within the European Union. Our analyses ask whether value assimilation predicts improvements in immigrants’ occupational status, socialisation, and political participation. We find that differences in moral values account, at most, for a fraction of the integration gap between natives and immigrants. These results therefore call into question the assimilationist principle that adopting a host society’s values is conducive to immigrants’ integration.