Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Theories of immigrant incorporation posit that interpersonal ties between natives and immigrants transform attitudes and identities on both sides of an increasingly blurry boundary. Yet existing studies typically focus on how immigrants’ personal (individual-level) ties to natives encourage their incorporation, while paying less attention to how broader (network-level) properties could shape natives’ attitudes towards immigrants. Furthermore, existing theories do little to specify the network properties that are most meaningful for promoting positive attitudes. Using an analogy to boundary blurring and crossing, this study suggests a network property called uneven mixing based on variation in intergroup ties across individuals in a context. This study then shows, using the case of classroom friendships in Western European countries, that native students embedded in more unevenly mixed networks are more closed off to immigrant cultures and view immigrants less favorably (even after accounting for their own personal ties to immigrant classmates and overall numbers of native-immigrant ties in the classroom). These findings demonstrate how greater attention to network-level properties improves our understanding of immigrant integration. Moreover, this approach is likely to advance knowledge on any kind of social integration that requires widespread mixing.