Decline, Revival, Change? Religious Adaptations among Muslim and Non-Muslim Immigrant Origin Youth in Norway

This article explores religious adaptation among immigrant-origin youth in Norway, using the first wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study in Norway (CILS-NOR). To capture different dimensions of religious change, we distinguish between 1) level of religiosity, measured by religious salience and religious practices, and 2) social forms of religious belief, measured as the level of rule orientation and theological exclusivism. We compare immigrant-origin youth in Norway with young people in their parents’ origin countries, using the World Value Survey. We then compare immigrant-origin youth who were born in Norway to those who were born abroad and according to their parents’ length of residence in Norway. As expected, immigrant-origin youth from outside Western Europe—and those originating in Muslim countries in particular—were more religious than native and western-origin youth and more rule oriented and exclusivist in their religious beliefs. However, our results suggest that a process of both religious decline and religious individualization is underway among immigrant origin youth in Norway, although this process appears to unfold slower for Muslims than for non-Muslims. The level and social forms of religiosity among immigrant-origin youth are partially linked to their integration in other fields, particularly inter-ethnic friendships. We argue that comparative studies on how national contexts of reception shape religious adaptations, as well as studies aiming to disentangle the complex relationship between religious adaptation and integration in other fields, are needed.

Contexts of Exit and Reception

Chapter 3 lays the groundwork for the comparative analysis by describing the specific contexts of exit and reception for migrants from Turkey, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and the Philippines. For contexts of exit, it pays particular attention to how political regimes and economic development policies have contributed to migration since each country’s first migratory wave. For contexts of reception, it identifies the relevant host countries for each case and then shows how their immigration laws, labor markets, and public opinion have affected the composition and experiences of migrants living within their borders. The chapter concludes with a picture of the legal, socioeconomic, and geographical profiles of migrants from each of the four countries.

How National Institutions Shape Skilled Immigrants’ Chances of Getting Hired: Evidence from Harmonised Factorial Surveys with Employers in Germany and England

This study provides novel insights into the institutional conditions under which skilled immigrants get hired for skilled jobs in different countries. We argue that immigrants’ hiring chances depend on the interplay between institutions in sending countries, which determine the type of education that immigrants bring, and institutions in receiving countries, which shape employers’ preferences for certain types of education. We develop a research design that considers this interplay and allows us to directly compare how education from sending countries with different institutional arrangements is rated by employers in two countries with widely divergent institutional contexts of reception, Germany and England. Using harmonised factorial surveys, we simulate hiring processes and evaluate the chances of German and English employers inviting foreign-educated immigrants to interviews for jobs commensurate with their education. The survey design makes it possible to experimentally vary the institutional settings in which immigrants acquired their education in the sending country, and isolate their effect on employers’ ratings. Our key finding is that immigrants from sending countries with highly standardised occupation-orientated education systems prevail in the hiring competition, irrespective of the education system in the receiving country.

Making Noncitizens’ Rights Real: Evidence from Legal Services Fraud Complaints

Noncitizens seeking to make sense of U.S. immigration systems encounter a labyrinth of information and deception. This paper is the first national study of scams targeting noncitizens seeking immigration legal services. Although the universe of all scams remains unknown, we can examine whether FTC scam reports more common in welcoming counties, even after accounting for restrictionist immigration contexts. I construct a county-year database (N = 3,135 over a four-year time period, 2011-2014) across secondary data sources to analyze the correlates of immigration scam complaints submitted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The data capture instances where individuals were willing to report scams. Results indicate welcoming contexts of reception are over-represented among counties where individuals willingly reported scams. I also find fewer-than-expected reports are filed where immigration restrictionist policies are most common, but restrictionism does not offset the role of welcoming contexts. A robust safety net proved the most reliable predictor of immigration scams reported to the FTC. Immigration attorneys, legal aid services, and language access were also positively associated with the number of FTC scam reports. In this national study, welcoming contexts of reception are also more closely related to the number of immigration scam reports than immigration restrictionism.

Introduction

Certain problems link the study of Chaucer and the Italian Trecento with the study of literary form: What is the relation between diachronic formation and synchronic form? How do we make sense of texts that do not seem to be in sync with their original contexts of reception? Is there an ideal context of reception in which a work’s formation might be fully realized? Similar questions emerge in Italian Trecento literature, where new relations between the time of composition and the time of reading were developing. The introduction to this text brings these literary historical developments to bear upon an overarching methodological argument. It proposes that, rather than form transcending time, or emerging in an ideal context of reception then beginning to crumble, readers gradually disclose literary form over the course of a text’s reception. The history of form and the history of readers are therefore intertwined.