Scientific article
OA Policy
English

Integration for whom? The migration bias in social norms

Published inEuropean societies, vol. 28, no. 3, p. 569-588
Publication date2026-07-07
First online date2025-06-18
Abstract

Integration has become a dominant framework in the governance of immigration, indicating what states and “host societies” expect immigrants to do and how to behave to become accepted members of the receiving country. Critical scholarship has argued that this creates an unequal normative burden: “immigrants” are subject to integration demands while “native citizens” are exempt. Despite this widely acknowledged “integration dispensation”, the asymmetry of expectations has not been empirically tested. In this article, we conceptualize immigrant integration in terms of social norms – expectations regarding the social, economic, cultural, and political participation – and develop a theory of a migration bias: the idea that these norms are stronger for immigrants than for society at large. We test this hypothesis using a population-based survey experiment in Switzerland. Our results provide evidence for a migration bias, particularly in the social dimension of integration and expectations concerning respect for laws and constitutional values. However, this bias is context-dependent, appearing in the German-speaking part of Switzerland but not in the French-speaking counterpart. These findings provide novel insights into the popular understanding of immigrant integration and the nature of social norms and citizenship in diverse societies.

Citation (ISO format)
MANSER-EGLI, Stefan, LUTZ, Philipp. Integration for whom? The migration bias in social norms. In: European societies, 2026, vol. 28, n° 3, p. 569–588. doi: 10.1162/euso.a.30
Main files (1)
Article (Accepted version)
accessLevelPublic
Identifiers
Journal ISSN1461-6696
35views
443downloads

Technical informations

Creation02/07/2025 09:08:25
First validation12/08/2025 06:49:56
Update14/07/2026 06:30:39
Status update14/07/2026 06:30:39
Last indexation14/07/2026 06:30:41
All rights reserved by Archive ouverte UNIGE and the University of GenevaunigeBlack