Belonging over generations: Exploring the historical contexts of the cultural integration of migrants and their descendants

Jordan Klein
Athina Anastasiadou, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Migrants’ integration into host societies is a dynamic, multidimensional, and intergenerational process encompassing socioeconomic, social-relational, political, civic, and cultural dimensions. Crucially, integration is a two-way process: it involves not only the adaptation of migrants and their descendants, but also their acceptance by the host society, the subjective feeling of belonging, of being recognized as “one of us” without having to forgo their identities. Yet this crucial cultural dimension of integration has received comparatively little attention in quantitative cross-national research. This study investigates how long-term historical and institutional contexts shape migrants’ and their descendants’ sense of belonging across OECD countries. We compile a new dataset linking survey-based measures of national territorial identification from the Integrated Values Surveys to historical variables on political regimes, citizenship laws, linguistic and religious diversity, and key aspects of colonial and nation-state formation legacies from the nineteenth century to the present. Using elastic-net regularization, we identify the most salient structural and institutional predictors of subjective belonging. This exploratory, data-driven approach allows us to identify broad patterns and potential pathways of cultural integration across diverse national contexts. By tracing the long-term roots of belonging, this project contributes to a more comprehensive and empirically grounded understanding of integration as a reciprocal process embedded in national histories and evolving conceptions of membership, offering new insights into the enduring determinants of inclusion and cohesion in contemporary societies.

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 Presented in Session 111. Migrant Populations and Assimilation over Generations