Immigrant Incorporation in Western Europe

Immigrant incorporation (or integration) is a subfield of migration studies, and it constitutes a genuinely interdisciplinary undertaking of sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, and historians. In none of these disciplines, however, has it carved out an established niche for itself. In contrast to the United States, where the study of immigrant integration (or “assimilation” as US researchers prefer to say) is more firmly grounded in sociology than in political science, a characteristic of the European scene is a larger prominence of political scientists, macro comparativists, and legal-institutional scholars. This reflects the fact that immigrant integration in Europe is, to a much larger degree than in the United States, framed by public policies, and it often goes along with major transformations of state institutions (most importantly citizenship) and national identities. European states (even France) are ethnic nation-states, where sedentariness and not moving is the norm, and they stand for countries that are much less attuned to, and constituted by, international migration than the classic immigrant nations of North America and Oceania. Overall, European scholarship is marked, on one side, by single-country studies by national experts, which are often solicited by their respective governments interested in policy advice (but increasingly also supported by supranational research bodies). On the other side, most agenda-setting work has grown out of qualitative single-person studies (often dissertations) by macro sociologists and political comparativists not (or only incidentally) rooted in national university systems and disconnected from policy contexts. The field is in need of further conceptual development and of theoretically reflected, genuinely comparative work of the second type, which is mostly off the public funding radar.

Archaeology in Switzerland between lakes and mountains.

Switzerland has an extraordinarily rich archaeological heritage from the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, dating back nearly 7000 years. Since the mid-19th century, the first pile dwellings were discovered in the lakes of the Central Plateau. Since 2011 these sites are part of the UNESCO world heritage „Prehistoric pile-dwellings around the Alps“. Not only lakes, but also Swiss mountains preserve extraordinary archaeological remains: from an alpine pass in the Bernese Alps prehistoric objects are melting out from the ice. Perfect preservation conditions and modern archaeological methods allow exploring the development of early agrarian societies in this part of the world. We can reconstruct their settlements and follow their exchange with other communities. Archaeology under water and in alpine environments allows fascinating insights into the beginnings of our history.