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Migrant mobilisation and political opportunities: variation among German cities and a comparison with the United Kingdom and the Netherlands

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13691830410001682034

1469-9451

Ruud Koopmans,

Migration, Refugees, and Integration

Abstract This paper offers a comparative, cross‐local and cross‐national analysis of the involvement of migrants and ethnic minorities in public debates and mobilisation (claims‐making) in their countries of residence. Local and national integration and citizenship regimes are seen as political opportunity structures that may stimulate, constrain, or channel the degrees and types of migrants' political involvement. Empirically, the paper draws on media content data for Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, as well as on extra‐medial indicators of opportunity structures such as naturalisation rates and the relative strength of conservative parties. In a first round of analysis, 16 German regions and cities are compared. This analysis reveals important intra‐local differences that are in line with the expectations drawn from the opportunity structure model. The results show a strong and consistent positive relation between the inclusiveness of local incorporation regimes and the degree to which immigrants participate proactively in public debates on issues concerning them. By contrast, we find political orientations on the countries of origin of immigrants to be most prevalent in localities that offer immigrants few channels of access to the decision‐making process and grant them little legitimacy in the public domain. In a second step, this analysis is extended to the Netherlands and the UK, showing that the magnitude of cross‐national differences is much more important than that of local variation within each of the countries. Thus, the results contradict recently popular views that the nation‐state has become largely irrelevant for the incorporation of immigrants and that postnational and local contexts have become decisive. Keywords: Ethnic MobilisationPolitical ParticipationPolitical Opportunity StructureCitizenship; Integration PoliticsTransnational Communities Notes Since the data for Germany in this paper refer to the period 1990–99, we are dealing with the period before the overhaul of naturalisation legislation that went into force in 2000, and which among other things introduced a conditional form of jus soli for children of migrants born in Germany. In the future, we may expect the patterns of claims‐making of migrants in Germany to move in the direction of their counterparts in countries such as France, the Netherlands, or Britain. Where Germany will end up will depend, to an important extent, on how it will deal with the issue of cultural difference—an issue which is only beginning to enter the German political debate. The relative positioning of these countries on the two dimensions of citizenship is confirmed by a comparative study of empirical indicators of rights, entitlements, and duties of migrants in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Indicators for the individual dimension include, e.g. the criteria for naturalisation, social and residence rights, and anti‐discrimination legislation (see Cinar et al. 1995 Cinar D Hofinger C Waldrauch H (1995) Integrationsindex. Zur rechtlichen Integration von AusländerInnen in ausgewählten europäischen Ländern Vienna: Institute for Advanced Studies [Google Scholar]; Davy 2001 Davy U (2001) Die Integration von Einwanderern. Rechtliche Regelungen im europäischen Vergleich Frankfurt: Campus [Google Scholar]). The cultural group rights dimension includes, e.g. rights to state‐funded Islamic schools or religious education, exemptions from dress codes on religious grounds, or positive action schemes for ethnic and racial groups. The coding manual is available from the author on request. For a more extensive discussion of the method, see Koopmans and Statham (1999 Koopmans, R and Statham, P. (1999b). ‘Political claims analysis: integrating protest event and public discourse approaches’. Mobilization, 4(2): 203–22. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]b). The data for the other two countries were gathered by Paul Statham and Thom Duyvené de Wit. For more detail on migrant mobilisation in these countries, see Statham (1999 Statham, P. (1999). ‘Political mobilisation by minorities in Britain: a negative feedback of race relations?’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 25(4): 597–626. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) and Duyvené de Wit and Koopmans (2001 Duyvené de Wit, T and Koopmans, R. (2001). ‘Die politisch‐kulturelle Integration ethnischer Minderheiten in den Niederlanden und Deutschland’. Forschungsjournal Neue Soziale Bewegungen, 14(1): 10–25. [Google Scholar]). The data for the Netherlands refer to a somewhat shorter time period, namely 1992–99. The comparison of the left‐liberal quality newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau and the right‐wing tabloid Bild is a case in point. The number of reported claims in the domain of immigration and ethnic relations turns out to be 4.6 times higher in the Rundschau than in Bild. However, distributions across different issues hardly differ between the two papers, and neither does the representation of different actors in the coverage. In a similar vein, we find that the national newspapers actually report more events of regional scope than the regional newspapers, which tend to report much about their own region, but virtually nothing about what happens in other regions and localities. This definition is close to the one used by Charles Tilly in his recent work (e.g. 1995: 16). This does not have to occur by way of an opportunistic or fatalistic adaptation of migrant organisations to the limits of the possible and the legitimate, but probably more often occurs through competition between different migrant organisations. Imagine for instance the fate of two migrant organisations in France, one—of the type SOS Racisme—mobilising universalist collective identities on behalf of migrants as a general category and against the making of differences on the basis of ethnicity by the extreme right, and another mobilising for cultural group rights for a specific ethnic group. In the French context, the former group is likely to receive much media attention and broad support from political elites, including perhaps direct financial support from the state or political parties. The latter group is likely to be either ignored, or to encounter very negative reactions in the French public sphere. As a result, the former group will flourish, will be able to strengthen its position in the public debate, and its strategies and demands are likely to be copied by other migrant organisations. The latter group, on the contrary, will remain marginal, its failure makes it unlikely that other groups will see it as an example to follow, and in the longer run the organisation may even disappear altogether. Next to homeland‐oriented claims and claims for rights, integration, and participation, two other categories of claims concern questions of entry and exit (e.g. family reunification, expulsions, asylum recognition), and anti‐racism. These categories are not analysed separately here because their relation to migrants' opportunities is ambiguous. On the one hand, compared to homeland‐oriented claims, entry and exit and anti‐racism claims may indicate a stronger orientation toward the country of residence. On the other hand, these are also primarily reactive claims, which reflect the precarious status of many migrants, both in terms of residence rights, and in terms of acceptance by the majority population. This excludes claims against racism and the extreme right. Because the rejection of xenophobic violence—to which most of these claims pertain—is consensual within the German public discourse, such claims hardly discriminate, neither among actors nor among regions. Theoretically, it would have been good to also have a measure of the second, cultural group rights dimension of citizenship. Unfortunately, there was so little debate about cultural issues in Germany that it was not possible to separate these out and construct a valence measure of public discourse with regard to cultural rights. Kriesi et al. (1995 Kriesi H Koopmans R Duyvendak J‐W Giugni M (1995) New Social Movements in Western Europe. A Comparative Analysis Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press [Google Scholar]) make a similar argument for the mobilisation of ‘new social movements’ such as the ecology and peace movements. Note that these two measures are logically independent from one another. The share of homeland claims among all migrant claims bears no intrinsic relation to the share of migrants in public debates on immigration and ethnic relations issues. Additional informationNotes on contributorsRuud Koopmans Ruud Koopmans is Professor of Sociology at the Free University in Amsterdam. Correspondence to: Faculty of Social Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081c, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E‐mail: r.koopmans@fsw.vu.nl Ruud Koopmans is Professor of Sociology at the Free University in Amsterdam. Correspondence to: Faculty of Social Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081c, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E‐mail: r.koopmans@fsw.vu.nl