Original Articles

Mike Hough and Sebastian Roche, editors of Minority Youth and Social Integration: The ISRD-3 Study in Europe and the US

In three words, our answer is, “Not very well”. And the groups that are least well integrated are those from visible ethnic minorities. With colleagues from the US and several European countries we have been analysing the third International Self-Report Delinquency Study. This is a survey of teenagers in over thirty countries, but we focussed on the experiences of migrants in five developed industrialised countries: France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.

To offer a generalised interpretation of our results, first-generation migrant teenagers bring to their new host countries many welcome characteristics: optimistic expectations of their futures, trust in the institutions that they encounter, and levels of involvement in delinquency that is in line with non-migrants.

Thereafter the picture for second and third generation migrants becomes progressively less positive. Many migrant groups encounter social and economic obstacles to integration, and in particular find themselves relegated to live in poor neighbourhoods. Our analysis found that neighbourhood disadvantage was one of the strongest predictors of adverse outcomes for our respondents, and this was especially true for two groups: those from visible ethnic minorities, and those with minority religious affiliations (notably Muslims). In other words –  and again, we are generalising from a complex set of findings – some non-white migrant groups encounter forms of economic and social discrimination that push them into the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods, and their teenage children then suffer from all the difficulties that affect anyone – regardless of ethnicity or religious affiliation – who grows up in deprived areas with limited social capital: involvement in crime (both as victims and offenders) and engagement in other risky behaviour such as drug and alcohol use.

There are serious ramifications of these processes of marginalisation when it comes to policing. Overall, migrant teenagers report less trust in the police and confer less legitimacy on the police than others. But this must be understood as a process of deterioration in relations with the police from a starting point where there is little difference between first generation migrants and everyone else, regardless of ethnicity. It is the second generation migrants from ethnic minorities, and those with more distant histories of migration, who score much lower on measures of trust and legitimacy. This gap in trust cannot be explained entirely by socio-economic and neighbourhood factors, and an obvious additional explanatory factor is the discriminatory styles of policing that so often emerge in difficult neighbourhoods.

One set of findings have less pessimistic implications. Our analysis of variations in school structure suggests that schools with high concentrations of groups from ethnic minorities and from religious minorities did not seem to have adverse effects on pupils’ level of attachment to their school. Schools may thus offer a promising intervention point for improving processes of integration.