Immigrant Political Incorporation: Comparing Success in the United States and Western Europe

UNCORRECTED PROOF

Immigrant political incorporation:
comparing success in the United States and
Western Europe
John Mollenkopf and Jennifer Hochschild
Abstract
Despite reasons to expect otherwise, immigrant political incorporation
occurs more rapidly in the United States than in many Western European
states. We provide evidence to support that contentious statement and
reasons to explain it.
Four features distinguish the United States in this context. First, both
in terms of state formation and population growth, it was predicated on
immigration, voluntary and otherwise, whereas European states came into
being and grew mainly through consolidation of and natural increase
among resident populations. That history shapes public attitudes toward
immigration policy and immigrants. Second, unlike European states, the
United States has a long history of domestic racial subordination and a
recent history of efforts to overcome it, and this provides a template for
incorporating new immigrant groups. Third, social welfare and school
systems differ in ways that slightly facilitate incorporation for immigrants
to the United States. Finally, the American electoral system is more open to
insurgent candidacies, less dominated by party control, and more rewarding
of geographically concentrated electoral groups, thus making election
of newcomers easier. In combination, these features make immigrant
political incorporation relatively successful in the United States.
Keywords: Immigrants; politics; electoral representation; anti-immigrant
sentiment; assimilation; political incorporation.
At least two reasons might suggest that immigrants and their children
might find more success in entering the political realm in manyWestern
European states than in the United States. Europe lacks the United
States’ tradition of deep and broad subordination of a domestic racial
group. Moreover, many European states provide social citizenship
rights independent of nationality, thus buffering immigrants and their
children from the worst economic outcomes. In fact, however, Europe
may be creating new forms of distinction and discrimination such that
the political incorporation of immigrants and their descendents may
prove harder, slower, and less complete than in the United States. That,
at any rate, is how we interpret the evidence and what we seek to
demonstrate in this article.
We note from the start that ‘Europe’, or even ‘Western Europe’, or
even ‘many Western European states’ are categories too broad to be
useful in many analytic contexts. Germany treats some people as foreign
even if their grandparents were the immigrants, whereas most firstgeneration
migrants to Belgium are eligible to become citizens after only
three years of residence (refugees are eligible after two years). Nor is any
one country consistent even within the political arena. A descendent of
a Turkish immigrant leads the Green party in the generally inhospitable
Germany, whereas the more immigrant-friendly European states lack
party leaders of foreign extraction.1
Nevertheless, it is appropriate to compare the United States and
Europe or at least ‘many Western European states’. An obvious but
important reason is that most Americans think of their country as
a nation of immigrants and themselves as descendents of immigrants
(voluntary or otherwise), while most Europeans do not. European
states were mainly comprised through disputes over borders or
consolidation of population groups who had lived in a particular
region for centuries, not by new arrivals who displaced and almost
wiped out a native-born population. While all European states have
experienced some international migration, it has not been a central
demographic force comparable to the waves of immigration to the US.
Other historical differences also distinguish the two continents in
ways that matter for immigrant incorporation. Unlike all European
countries, the United States had state-sanctioned internal raciallyencoded
slavery for most of its existence. Third, despite variation,
almost all European states have institutionalized amuch more generous
social welfare system than has the United States, along with a much less
expansive and more stratified system of public education. Finally, and
perhaps most importantly here, American political parties have much
less control over candidate selection and elevation than do European
parties. All American citizens can promote their candidacy in a political
party without needing endorsement from party leaders. Single member
winner-take-all districts provide relatively easy access to elected office.
In European states, in contrast, candidates generally rise through the
party ranks much more slowly, and with much more control by party
leaders a process which disadvantages immigrants or even secondgeneration
contenders for political office. Access to elected office often
comes through party lists, not victory in a local party primary.

In this article, we examine these features that distinguish the United
States from Europe immigration history, racial hierarchy, social
welfare and education systems, and political party dynamics. We show
how each helps to shape the different trajectories of immigrant and
second generation political incorporation. Some features favour
migrants to Europe, but most ultimately favour migrants to the
United States.
Consequences of immigration history
This is not the place to rehearse the long history of how immigration
helped to create and populate the United States, or why state formation
in Western Europe owed relatively little to migration. Our task instead
is to point to their consequences for immigrant political incorporation.
Many peoples migrated into and across Western Europe in the early
twentieth century, and indeed before states such as Germany and Italy
consolidated their borders, but these flows were relatively small and
their incorporation was not part of the myth of nation-building. Setting
aside the nomadic Roma, a greater level of immigration to European
states occurred in the three decades afterWorldWar II, as people moved
from less developed countries to perform jobs unattractive to the native
born. In this period, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands
recruited ‘guest workers’ from poor states of Southern Europe, North
Africa, and the Middle East. At first considered a temporary presence
by themselves and their hosts, guest workers settled down, brought their
families from home, or formed families in the receiving countries. Their
oldest children have now entered adulthood and have children of their
own. To paraphrase Max Frisch, these countries wanted workers, but
got people and families instead (Hansen 2003; Garson 2004;
European Commission 2006). Decolonization also led North and Sub-
Saharan Africans to move to France, Indonesians and Surinamese to
the Netherlands, and West Indians, Pakistanis, and Indians to the
United Kingdom.
In the 1970s, however, as deindustrialization and rising global
competition reduced the demand for factory workers in the West and
as the global economy encountered oil crises and instability, West
European countries tried to restrict further immigration. Nevertheless,
provision for family reunification, acceptance of refugees and asylum
seekers, increasing numbers of undocumented workers, the demise of
the Soviet Union, and expansion of the European Union into Eastern
Europe have all generated additional population flows into Western
and Southern Europe since the 1980s.
Immigrants’ entry to the United States has had a different rhythm.
All white Americans are descendents of immigrants, who mostly
arrived between the 1840s and 1920s. So are most black Americans,
whose ancestors were brought to the country by the early nineteenth
century. Apart from the few with ancestors who lived in territories
conquered or purchased by the United States, Mexican Americans
also descend from people who entered the United States sometime
between the mid-nineteenth century and the recent past. Ironically,
although migration of western hemispheric residents was not subject
to numerical limits until adoption of the 1965 HartCeller Act,
movement to the United States from Latin America and the Caribbean
surged after that act was passed. Immigration from Asian states also
grew tremendously after the 1965 Act, after decades of restriction and
prohibition. The volume of net new legal residence permits issued by
the United States has remained high since the 1970s in many years
reaching a million or more and flows of legal and undocumented
migrants have declined only slightly in the past few years as economic
growth slowed and went into reverse. Thus, migration to the United
States, a continuous feature of American history at varying levels,
surged just as Europe adopted greater restriction.
These different patterns of movement affect immigrant political
incorporation. To begin with, the foreign-born proportion of the
population surpasses ten per cent only in a few European states
Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands (Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development c. 2007, table
A.1.4).2 In most ofWestern Europe the UK, France, the Scandinavian
states, Spain, and Italy the proportion of foreign-born ranges from not
quite three to under ten per cent. Meanwhile, immigrants and their
children made up about a quarter of the US population in 2007.
While political voice or power does not follow directly from
population share, over the long run politicians are likely to channel
more benefits to a larger group than to a smaller one. That is
particularly the case if the group contains citizens who can vote, run
for office, advocate policy change, and importune office-holders. For
generations, naturalization laws for legal immigrants have been less
stringent and complicated in the United States than in most European
states, with the crucial exception of Asian exclusion till the early 1950s
(Favell 2001; Klusmeyer and Aleinikoff 2002; Minkenberg 2003;
Koopmans et al. 2005; Howard 2006; Baubock et al. 2006; Baubo¨ ck,
2006; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,
2008b, p. 114 ff; Hansen 2008). As a result, as of roughly 2000, only
one-tenth of foreign born residents of Switzerland and about threetenths
in Germany had become citizens of their host countries. The
number is higher in France about half but still lower than in the
United States, where about sixty per cent of long-term legal permanent
residents have acquired citizenship, and rates have recently risen to
almost half even among the most recently arrived cohorts.3 In the
United States, all children of immigrants who are born within the
boundaries of the country are full citizens from birth, even if their
parents were not legal residents (Niessen et al. 2007). Ireland, the only
EU nation to grant similarly unqualified birthright citizenship, voted
to partially revoke it in 2004. Full citizens, to repeat, are much more
likely to be full and influential political actors.
Public opinion and political practice with regard to immigration
and immigrants is not as favourable in the United States as one might
predict, given that virtually all Americans are descended from
immigrants. In fact, many Americans demonstrate deep anxiety about
or hostility to ‘too much’ immigration, immigrants from the ‘wrong’
countries (Buchanan 2006), or immigrants without legal papers
(Huntington 2004; Buchanan 2006; Fraga 2009 ). States and local
governments have recently passed dozens of laws and ordinances to
exclude undocumented immigrants or to make English the official
state language; the federal government conducted highly publicized
raids on factories during President GeorgeW. Bush’s administration in
order to find and deport workers without papers. Members of
Congress have campaigned on the platform of deporting illegal
immigrants and drastically hardening the border; none are explicitly
hostile to all immigrants, but their language easily slides from concern
about legality into nativism.
Nevertheless, the American public and political practice are not
quite as hostile to immigration, immigrants, and immigrant political
incorporation as in most European states. Some new state and local
ordinances are intended to foster incorporation, help children and
young adults, and protect undocumented migrants from interference
by the federal government. President Barack Obama, of course, is the
son of a foreign student and the Obama administration has appointed
officials who combine commitment to enforcing quota laws with
concern about the status of migrants already in the United States.
While a senator, Obama (along with thirty-three other senators)
supported a 2007 bill that would have provided a pathway toward legal
residency and eventually citizenship for the undocumented. His
administration is currently seeking to work out a reform that would
also provide a path to legal residence. In recent years, no mainstream
American political party has campaigned as heavily on opposition to
immigration or immigrants as have Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National
Front in France, Jo¨ rg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria, and
Christoph Blocher’s Swiss People’s Party. The recent strong performance
of such parties in the European Parliament elections suggests
continued widespread support.
Tables 1a and 1b show opinions about immigration policy and
immigrants in fifteen countries (see also Fetzer [2000]; Citrin and Sides
[2006]; Bail [2008]). The results are from the most recent survey that
includes the United States along with other states, and we report

Table 1a. Attitudes toward immigration and immigrants views on immigration policy
Number of
immigrants to [country]
should be reduced ‘a lot’
(% agree)
Children born in [country]
of non-citizen parents
should have right to
become [nationality]
citizens (% disagree)
Children born abroad
should have right to
become [nationality]
citizens if at least one
parent is a citizen
(% disagree)
Government spends
too much helping
immigrants
(% agree)
[Country] should take
stronger measures to
exclude illegal
immigrants
(% agree strongly)
Austria* 33.4 18.1 13.6 60.6 53.3
Denmark 28.0 22.8 9.7 47.8 56.5
Finland* 17.4 31.0 10.4 53.7 42.1
France 41.1 19.6 12.9 49.7 44.8
W. Germany 43.8 10.4 7.8 68.0 43.5
E. Germany 54.5 15.2 13.1 78.4 53.4
Great Britain 53.7 19.2 11.7 67.0 53.8
Ireland 28.5 33.7 13.8 63.3 31.7
Netherlands 40.5 17.1 17.1 47.6 46.3
Norway 38.9 23.2 8.8 60.4 54.6
Portugal 19.8 7.1 2.6 30.9 30.6
Spain 14.1 13.2 8.2 35.8 10.9
Sweden 27.9 9.2 4.6 40.7 34.7
Switzerland* 17.0 11.3 8.4 47.0 32.5
USA 25.4 9.3 4.1 47.3 33.2
*The sample was designed to be representative of citizens only
Source: International Social Science Programme 2003

Table 1b. Attitudes toward immigration and immigrants anti-immigrant attitudes: ‘Immigrants . . .’
increase crime rates
(% agree)
take jobs from native-borns
(% agree)
are good for economy
(% disagree)
improve society with new ideas and
cultures (% disagree)
Austria* 68.8 40.0 32.6 29.4
Denmark 72.6 15.8 45.9 23.2
Finland* 48.5 27.5 45.6 24.1
France 43.6 25.6 35.9 34.0
W. Germany 62.6 38.7 32.0 18.6
E. Germany 67.5 58.1 44.3 23.9
Great Britain 39.8 44.8 41.6 30.8
Ireland 38.3 44.5 39.2 27.4
Netherlands 47.8 24.7 35.1 20.8
Norway 79.0 14.9 31.2 27.0
Portugal 59.5 55.4 21.0 22.4
Spain 57.6 40.6 16.6 12.7
Sweden 57.2 7.8 20.3 14.5
Switzerland* 57.7 17.3 23.9 9.7
USA 26.8 43.0 24.5 18.2
*The sample was designed to be representative of citizens only
Source: International Social Science Programme 2003

results for all countries in the survey that can plausibly be included in
the category ‘West Europe’:
These simple percentages illuminate national profiles with regard to
immigration and immigrants. For all but one of the nine survey items,
American respondents showed less hostility to immigration or to
immigrants than did those in most or all European countries (values are
in bold where respondents in European countries have more positive
views of immigration or immigrants than Americans do.) The exception
is the perception that immigrants take jobs away from the native-born;
on that item, citizens of fully eleven European states show less concern
than do residents of the United States. That exception accords with the
facts, as we discuss below.
Considering comparisons across countries rather than across survey
items, the tables show that in 2003, residents of Portugal, Spain,
Sweden, and Switzerland held more favourable views on immigration
or immigrants than did Americans on five or six of the nine survey
items. These four countries vary a great deal from each other and from
the United States in the proportion and origins of immigrants,
political parties’ treatment of the immigration issue, social welfare
systems, and assimilation policies; a closer comparison to understand
their populations’ relative openness toward foreigners could be highly
illuminating.
Finally, averaging across these European states, fifty-eight per cent
of respondents agreed or agreed strongly that ‘people who do not
share [country’s] customs and traditions’ cannot ‘become fully
[country’s nationality].’ Three-fifths or more of residents of the former
East Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Denmark,
and Finland agreed, compared with about half in the former West
Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, and Switzerland.
Only a third of Americans made the same demand.
Despite some visible and volatile politics, then, these data, together
with American laws that have permitted high levels of immigration
over the past four decades, suggest that the United States’ history of
nation-building through immigration (voluntary and otherwise) has
made it easier for Americans to tolerate or even welcome newcomers
compared with Europeans, whose states were created through very
different political dynamics.
Racial hierarchy and immigration
The obvious counter-argument to that claim is that many American
immigrants were indeed involuntary captured and enslaved, or
conquered and subordinated and that this sorry history of racial and
ethnic hierarchy persists in the United States’ treatment of darkskinned
migrants. That is undeniable; it is all too easy to find evidence
of discrimination against individual migrants from developing countries
or against particular ethnic groups. Asians can be treated as
perennial foreigners (Kim 1999;Wu 2003), and Latinos as second-class
citizens (Acuna 1988; Haney Lo’pez 1997). Nevertheless, Americans’
long history of racial discrimination may, ironically, now make it easier
to incorporate immigrants than it is for people in states innocent of
domestic slavery and Jim Crow segregation.
That surprising observation rests on several arguments. Socially,
while most immigrants to the United States are considered only
marginally white, the white majority has nevertheless granted them
higher status than the still disvalued native population of ‘blacks.’ The
second generation in particular is frequently positioned somewhere in
between black and white, with South Asians, some Pacific Rim
nationalities, and Middle Easterners being more successful than
(darker skinned) Latinos, Caribbeans, and a few Asian nationalities
(Alba and Nee 2003; Bonilla-Silva 2004). But even immigrants with
considerable African ancestry, such as West Indians or Dominicans,
enjoy some preference from the larger society over their native
minority counterparts (Kasinitz 1992; Waters 1999; Foner 2001;
Kasinitz et al. 2008). Immigrants from Africa who are not refugees
have high socioeconomic status and considerable success in the United
States (Logan and Deane 2003).
Immigrants and their children may themselves take steps to assert
their ambiguous status by seeking to show that they are not black and
do not identify with the attitudes, behaviours, or commitments of
African-Americans (Waters 1999; Rogers 2006). Thus. the presence of
a highly visible native born minority that has been subordinated for
centuries provides even disfavoured migrant groups with a more
favourable role than their European counterparts, who can only be
judged against the white majority. As a result, immigrants and their
sons and daughters in Europe are too often being constructed as that
disfavoured minority group.
Institutional practices reinforce these social dynamics. American
immigrants’ children have found ways to benefit from affirmative
action mechanisms set up decades ago to help native born minorities
attain higher education or training for some public service jobs. Many
unions and advocacy groups that developed political and organizational
strength during the black-led civil rights movement of the 1960s
have been able to shift into engagement with immigrants and their
children, as many blacks have moved out of inner cities or blue collar
jobs (Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, and Waters 2004; Milkman 2006; Kasinitz
et al. 2008). In 1975, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act,
originally designed to enfranchise blacks who had been deprived of
political power, to protect Spanish- and various Asian-language
minorities from voting discrimination.
In contrast, European countries have little experience with robust
affirmative action laws, voting right laws, minority advocacy groups,
litigation against job discrimination, minority business set-asides, and
all the other policies and organizational strategies intended to help
mitigate the consequences of centuries of racial hierarchy. These policies
have not always worked in the United States, they are not always
appropriate for immigrants, and they may even have been detrimental or
unfair at times but at least they have provided a scaffolding uponwhich
migrants and their supporters have been able to hang some policy
innovations. Migrants to European countries have lacked such scaffolding
and find it difficult to construct one from scratch.
Third, public policies reinforce institutions and social dynamics. In
response to the horrors of Nazism, and based on their commitment to
civic republicanism, officials in many European states have been
reluctant to permit censuses or other systematic data-gathering efforts
to record racial or ethnic categorizations. Such reluctance, along with
the absence of a visible native ‘minority’ category with some political
clout, has made it difficult for European authorities to measure racial
or ethnic disparities or even to recognize them. So without much
official realization, immigrants settled in (or were confined to) old
inner city working class neighbourhoods and suburban post-war social
housing, creating a degree of ethnic segregation which has in turn led
to low levels of language acquisition and cultural change. Some of
these neighbourhoods have become problematic as purported sites of
crime or ‘no go’ areas for natives.
Immigrants to the United States are following a slightly different
trajectory. Many indeed settled in gateway communities that resemble
poor, segregated European immigrant neighbourhoods. But in part
because they are largely excluded from public housing, many others
did not, and the first generation has in any case diffused away from the
initial zones of settlement into more predominantly white suburban or
rural communities throughout the US (Frey 2006; Singer, Hardwick,
and Brettell 2008; Massey 2008). As a consequence, while many
second generation American children go to low-performing, segregated,
inner city schools (along with native minorities) and have little
opportunity to advance, a large proportion do not.
Finally, African-Americans and their allies have fought and, to a
considerable degree, won a long series of battles for rights, respect,
resources, and political influence. The civil rights movement of the
1960s has canonical status as a model for combining vigorous protest
with political mobilization and electoral success. And although
relations between African-Americans and immigrant groups can
sometimes be tense and difficult, some black leaders seek to ally
with immigrants and to work with them to promote their civil rights.
Two-thirds of Latinos and almost as high a proportion of Asian
Americans voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election,
and the Democratic Party expends considerable resources to maintain
those alliances. Even absent explicit coalitions, American immigrants
constantly have a vivid model of how to mobilize politically and attain
at least some power, often locally. Europeans, of course, also know
how to protest and pursue power, but European immigrants lack a
well-trodden path and established allies along the way in their efforts
to move from the status of outsiders to that of organizational insiders.
Social welfare and educational systems
As we noted earlier, one might expect migrants to do better in Europe
than in the United States because many Western European states
provide social citizenship rights independent of nationality, thus
buffering newcomers and their children from the worst outcomes of
an unforgiving labour market. Nevertheless, the United States appears
to be doing better than most Western European countries in affording
opportunities for upward mobility and political incorporation, at least
to the children of immigrants (Smith 2003; Alba 2005; Silberman,
Alba, and Fournier 2007; Waters and Alba, 2008). One can see this
disparity in various arenas; here we consider only two.
Education may be the key to all other forms of social, cultural, and
economic incorporation. Some second generation Europeans enter
universities and find professional jobs, but most still leave school
without university qualifications and are shunted into low-skilled jobs
or unemployment. OECD’s 2006 Programme for International Student
Assessment [PISA] tests show large gaps in reading, science, and
maths scores between the children of immigrants and host country
nationals in most states. In Germany, second generation students
actually had lower test scores than did first generation immigrants
their age. And, except in the UK, the scores of both immigrants and
immigrants’ children were several hundred points lower than the
scores of native-born peers, which translates into dramatic differences
in achievement. Discrepancies between host country nationals and
immigrants or the second generation were even greater in the 2000 and
2003 iterations of PISA, that is, among the students who are now
young adults seeking jobs and mobility (Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development, 2001; 2006a; 2006b; Hochschild and
Cropper Forthcoming).
Second-generation immigrants have on average progressed further
in the more loosely structured educational system of the United States.
In the three iterations of PISA, Americans’ overall test scores were
comparatively low, but immigrants and second-generation students
lagged by roughly 100 points rather than by 250 as in Germany or 300
as in Belgium (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
2006a; Hochschild and Cropper Forthcoming).
These differences seldom result from American immigrants’ greater
preparation to take advantage of schooling. On the contrary, many
newcomers to the United States start with substantial educational and
social disadvantages. A higher proportion of migrants to Great Britain
have tertiary education than do British natives, and the proportions
are equal in Switzerland and similar in France; that is not the case for
the United States (or Belgium and Germany). Conversely, a much
greater proportion of migrants to the United States (as to Switzerland
and Germany), compared with native-born populations, have only a
primary education (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development 2007a; Hochschild and Cropper Forthcoming). In some
European states Switzerland, Belgium, Great Britain, France up to
a third of immigrants speak the host country’s language before arrival.
That is not the case for migrants to the United States.
As these parenthetical additions suggest, the situation of adults in
the guest worker generation of Northern Europe is particularly
distressing. Many have little or no formal education, producing a
huge gap with the native born population their age. In the United
States, even poorly schooled Mexican immigrants are at least literate,
while many Chinese and Indians have more education than do native
born Americans. The children of the guest worker generation in
Northern Europe thus have a large initial schooling gap to overcome
added to which is the fact that many grow up not speaking the national
language at home.
Even more than parental levels of education or language fluency,
institutional structures and schooling policies help to explain why the
children of immigrants have better educational outcomes in the United
States. Like the US, many European school systems experience
considerable ‘white flight’ from immigrant-rich neighbourhood elementary
schools. But in the latter case, the school’s loss of middle class
families is often reinforced by intractable and consequential school
selection tests or channelling processes at an early age. Tracking in
secondary school is reinforced by unforgiving selection mechanisms
for higher education, with few opportunities for ‘second chances’ or
for entering universities in a round-about way. Immigrants and their
descendents have had a great deal of difficulty in passing through the
European filters (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development 2007b; 2007c; Alba and Silberman Forthcoming). As a
result, often immigrants’ children are systematically channelled away
from university educations into vocational tracks.
These filters are much more porous in the United States. Public
institutions such as GED programmes (for attaining a high school
diploma despite dropping out of school), community colleges, branch
state universities, and the City University of New York make higher
education relatively accessible even to students who lack financial
resources or did poorly in high school. The United States also spends
more per student relative to GDP, especially in pre-primary and
primary schooling, than do most European states (Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development 2008a, chapter B). At the
end of the day, a higher proportion of young adults gain postsecondary
degrees in the United States than become university
graduates in Europe, at least outside of Scandinavia.4
Once migrants leave school, or if they arrive in a host country as
adults, they must sustain themselves economically. Probably unintentionally,
the highly regulated labour markets and strong social
welfare states of Northern Europe have meant that migrants faced
restrictions on their job opportunities. In many cases, refugees or
asylum seekers were prohibited from taking jobs that native-born
people could fill. Thus pushed or kept out of the labour market,
jobless migrants could be constructed into a dependent class.
In contrast, the United States’ weakly regulated, open labour
markets and thin social welfare state have meant that immigrants
had to work to survive, and could not rely on public assistance as an
alternative to even exploitative low-wage jobs. Ironically, given
stringent American laws the 1996 welfare reform law denied noncitizen
immigrants’ eligibility for social welfare benefits lack of
citizenship has also made it harder to construct the first generation as
a dependent class. This strategy has costs broader than just the impact
on immigrants themselves; as Tables 1a an 1b show, many more
Americans than Europeans see immigrants as a threat to native-born
people seeking a job, a view which increases suspicion and hostility.
Still, across Europe (with the exception of Spain), foreign-born men
and women have consistently had higher unemployment rates than
native-born populations since the mid-1990s (in some cases twice as
high or worse), whereas in the United States, immigrants had a lower
unemployment rate in 2005 (British Council Brussels 2005; Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development c. 2007, Annex
Table I.A1.4) and the same rate a year earlier.5
American schools have deep, possibly intractable, problems, and the
American social welfare system and lack of labour market regulation
can have harsh results, especially for undocumented immigrants. On
balance, however, they seem to foster immigrant and second generation
incorporation somewhat better than European counterparts do.
Political and electoral structures
Probably the most dramatic difference in the capacity for immigrant
incorporation between the United States and Western Europe is
political. Americans are familiar with the ideas that immigrants can
vote and hold office and immigrant groups can mobilize and agitate.
Moreover, the US has substantial networks of non-profit organizations
seeking to foster immigrant incorporation. Most native born
residents of the US seem comfortable with this state of affairs, even if
they oppose particular candidates or policy demands.
Immigrant politicians’ visibility presumably reinforces Americans’
acceptance of their legitimacy. At the local level, newcomers or people
of recent immigrant ancestry serve as mayor of Los Angeles,
comptroller of the City of New York, and governors of California,
Louisiana, Michigan, and New Mexico. As of 2008, immigrants or
children of immigrants held five of the fifty-one seats on the New York
City Council. Mexican Americans also held three of Los Angeles’s
fifteen council seats. A few European cities approach these proportions:
the forty-nine member city council of Amsterdam has about seven
members from immigrant backgrounds, in part because, unlike in the
United States, legally resident immigrants can vote in local elections.
And Brussels has by far the most representation of people descended
from non-Europeans twenty (22.5 per cent) out of eighty-nine total
seats in the Brussels Parliament. But these cities are exceptions. The
twenty-five member London Assembly has only three members of non-
UK origin. The 163 member Conseil de Paris has only a few members
who appear to be from immigrant backgrounds. An analysis of ninety
French municipal elections in 2001 found that 173 (5.6 per cent) of the
3,062 elected officials were of foreign origins, judging by their names
(Geisser and Oriol 2002). The 149 person Berlin Parliament includes
nine non-European members (of whom eight were born in Turkey).
At the national level, the United States is even more distinctive.
Twelve members of the 435-person US House of Representatives and
two of the 100 senators were born outside the United States, a higher
proportion of foreign-born representation than in any European
national legislature. More broadly, eleven Asian or Pacific Islander
and thirty Hispanic members serve in the House of Representatives,
along with forty-two African-Americans. And, of course, the son of an
African, the grandson of a Muslim, is president. In contrast, as of 2008,
the UK’s 635-member House of Commons included four Afro-
Caribbean members, ten South Asian members, and one of African
ancestry, for a total of just over two per cent. While the UK has a
slightly smaller foreign-origin population than the US, this rate of
representation is still well below that of the United States Congress.
Only six of the 577 members of the French National Assembly are from
non-European backgrounds (one of whom was appointed rather than
elected); the 331-seat French Senate has three elected members from
non-European backgrounds. Of forty elected senators in Belgium, two
are of non-European descent; of the 150 members of the Chamber of
Representatives, only six are descended from non-Europeans, of whom
two were appointed. Similarly, the 614 member German Bundestag has
seven members from outside Western Europe (see Klausen [2005];
Maxwell [Forthcoming] on Muslim electoral participation in Europe).
The Netherlands has more representation, proportionally, of nonnationals.
Its 150 member parliament had fifteen non-European origin
members in 2003, and in the Dutch Senate, three of the seventy-five
members in 2007 were of non-European origin. Overall, despite
variation in location, year, and level of government, immigrants and
their children hold a more visible and presumably more influential place
in American electoral politics than in European politics.
The fact that the United States is comprised almost entirely of people
with immigrant backgrounds may partly explain the greater visibility
and influence of immigrant political actors. But, as with all of the
societal features that we are considering, institutional structures are
a central explanation. Here, the crucial element is the process of
nominations and elections. For most American local, state, and national
elections, would-be politicians can easily run for office, generally by
meeting only a few procedural rules (such as obtaining a certain number
of citizens’ signatures on a legal document) to place their name on a
primary ballot. No party leader or organization must approve a selfnomination.
Candidates become a party’s nominee by winning its
primary, through the usual mechanisms for obtaining the most votes of
campaigning, mobilizing supporters, getting endorsements, paying for
ads, and so on. Candidates can and frequently do obtain the nomination
of one of the major parties even if party leaders have endorsed another
candidate. Parties themselves gain power by mobilizing geographically
concentrated ethnic and other interest groups to support candidates
allied with the party. The situation is typically quite different in Europe:
most nations have some form of proportional representation only
loosely linked to specific places, parties have far stronger control over
who appears on party lists, and even in the UK, which more closely
resembles the US system, parties make appeals more in terms of class
and ideology than group membership.
With this relatively open US system, insurgents find it relatively easy
to break into the electoral arena, at least easier than in the past, when
parties had more control over American elections, and easier than in
proportional representation systems, with electoral lists drawn up by
party leaders (on candidate-centred elections, see Aldrich [1995];
Wattenberg [1996]; Pastor, Stone, and Rapoport [1999]). Thus the
Caribbean-born Una Clarke could run for and win a New York City
council seat in 1991 despite ‘staunch opposition’ from the African-
American Democratic party leader of Brooklyn county (Rogers 2004,
p. 296). Or the insurgent Barack Obama could run in the 2000 Illinois
Democratic primary in a (failing) effort to unseat incumbent
Representative Bobby Rush, and he could run again as an insurgent in
the 2008 national Democratic presidential primarieswith a different
outcome. In European electoral politics, in contrast, leaders generally
slate a person at the bottom of a party list and he or she must rise up
the list over many years. It is difficult for an insurgent, or an
immigrant from a disfavoured population, to make rapid headway in
this system unless sponsored by a party leader. European parties do
slate immigrant origin candidates in order to win votes from
immigrant or second-generation constituencies, but the candidates
are generally placed so far down the list that they do not attain office.
As with all of our arguments, we must enter caveats. Obama was
only the third African-American to join the US Senate since
Reconstruction good evidence if we needed it that disfavoured
minorities face a steep climb. Nativist or group-protective sentiment
can lead to the defeat of an insurgent immigrant candidate or squelch
even an effort to run for office. And Europeans have elected some
immigrants or their descendents. So the difference between the United
States and the European systems of nomination and election is
relative. Nevertheless, the fact that any citizen can decide to run for
virtually any office (one must be native-born to be president) makes it
much easier for newcomers to the United States to be fully electorally
incorporated. Whether election to office produces desirable policy
outcomes is a question that we leave for another day.
Conclusion
The counterpoise between assimilation and exclusion deeply challenges
liberal democracies. Their electoral systems generally deny foreign born
non-citizen residents the right to participate in mainstream politics;
their cosmopolitan political cultures have difficulty dealing with
illiberal minorities; their national ideals and party systems may be
predicated on refusing to recognize even harmful racial and ethnic
differences; the very presence of illegal immigrants seems an implicit
threat to the rule of law; their avenues for economic mobility may be
constrained by labour market regulations designed to protect native
workers; and native-born citizens may not be happy about sustaining
immigrants in generous social welfare systems. Immigrant political
actors usually find local politics to be more vibrant, varied, and
responsive than national politics, but local arenas are contentious, often
fractured, unable to deal with basic problems, and resource-poor. In
coming decades, the United States and Western Europe countries will
all have to work out these tensions if they are to reach the goal
consistent with their underlying political values enabling new
immigrants to become integral parts of their national political
communities. At the same time, scholars will have to figure out how
to make better sense of these multiple and intersecting dimensions
assimilative and exclusionary trajectories, socioeconomic and political
arenas, liberal democratic and nativist values, local and national
venues, immigrants’ agency and established structures, immigrants
with extensive resources, and immigrants with almost none.
This article provides one starting point. We find that despite strong
reasons to think the opposite, American history, the attitudes of the
American public, the American social and educational structures, the
American electoral system, and even the United States’ history and
possible continuance of racial hierarchy all tend, on balance, toward
greater incorporative capacity than is presently the case in most
European states. Whether this will continue remains open. The
trajectory of assimilation will depend on whether the second and later
generations can close their parents’ achievement and participatory gaps
and fully join their host societies, adding their own flavours or whether
blocked opportunities will turn them into angry, alienated, troublesome
ethnic, religious, or racial minorities. A full answer to this question
awaits more research, political activity by host country residents and
migrants alike and time.
Notes
1. Countries may also be internally inconsistent across arenas of possible incorporation
(Freeman 2004; Kurthen and Heisler 2009).
2. That is not quite true, since a third of the residents of Luxembourg and twelve per cent of
the residents of Belgium are foreign-born. In both cases, however, many ‘immigrants’ are
short-term migrants from nearby European states who are employees of the EU or other
European institutions. They are not immigrants as the term is conventionally used.
3. Germany: Organisation For Economic Co-Operation And Development (2006b,
p. 176); Switzerland and France: (http://stats.oecd.org/WBOS/index.aspx); US: US Department
of Homeland Security (2007; 2009); see also Bergeron and Batalova (2008).
4. A higher proportion of American second generation immigrants (thirty-two per cent)
than of immigrants (twenty-seven per cent) or of third or later generation Americans
(twenty-eight per cent) have a bachelor’s or higher degree (http://www.census.gov/population/
www/socdemo/foreign/ppl-176.html#gen, table 5.5).
5. http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/foreign/ppl-176.html#gen, table 5.7.
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JOHN MOLLENKOPF is Distinguished Professor of Political Science
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Street, Cambridge MA 02138. Email: hochschild@gov.harvard.edu

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