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Review
| The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe Since 1850, by Leo Lucassen. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 277 pages. $55.00, cloth; $25.00, paper.
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| As the grandson of Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1910 from Russia, I found The Immigrant Threat an original, highly enjoyable, and truly comparative study of past and current immigrant patterns and reactions to them in Western Europe from the late 1800s to the early 2000s. Lucassen, author of numerous books and articles in Dutch, German, and English, interweaves history, political science, and sociology to determine fundamental similarities and differences between the integration process of immigrant groups to Western Europe from the 1880s to about 1920 and of new immigrants after 1945. He notes the widespread popular belief that the newer immigrants will have greater difficulty in integrating into mainstream society than those of the older waves. This question has significant importance for Western Europe (and the United States) today because of growing anti-immigrant discussions since the 1980s that have shifted from the "color" of immigrants to their religion and culture. Increasingly, such discussions have focused on immigrants from Muslim countries whom many Western Europeans (and Americans) fear as terrorists or the products of tribal societies with values fundamentally different from, even opposed to, those of "western civilization." |
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The book has essentially four parts. The first part introduces the general thesis of the book with a discussion of old and new immigrants to the United States, which gives American readers a basis for understanding immigration to Western European countries. In part two Lucassen focuses on "large and problematic groups" from Western Europe's past (the Irish in the United Kingdom, the Poles in Germany, and the Italians in France) through an examination of a number of structural similarities in the way they and their descendants integrated into their new homes. Part Three examines the same factors for new immigrants to Western Europe (Caribbean migrants to the United Kingdom, Turks to Germany, and Algerians to France) after 1945. |
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Lucassen arrives at a number of excellent conclusions about the immigrants to Western Europe. First, for one reason or another (socioeconomic class, ethnicity, and/or religion) the native populations generally viewed the new immigrants as a "threat" to their way of life and, thus, the new immigrants were relegated to mainly unskilled jobs. Second, over time the children and grandchildren of the original immigrants gradually integrated into their adopted cultures, mainly because education gave them access to better jobs, social status and "outside" contacts. Interestingly, Lucassen points out that females generally integrated better and faster than males. Nevertheless, although they integrated and became less visible to the natives, the native people still tended to view each successive wave of immigrants as a new threat Lucassen carefully points out the differences between the generations, the places of origins, the cultures, and the integration process of the two waves of immigrants in his study. |
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The author admits the limitations of his discussion, generalizations and conclusions: the lack of primary source data on specific demographic areas and the lack of scholarly secondary works on significant subject areas that would have made his discussion more conclusive. He specifically states that his discussion of the current wave of immigrants is limited since it will take at least thirty years—one generation—to obtain significant statistical data on their integration process. Thus only time will tell whether his view that there are no significant differences between the integration process of the newer immigrants and those of the pre-World War II period. Overall the book is a good scholarly study of a topic that has not received a great deal of attention, especially in Western Europe. It bridges the void between the history of immigration and sociological and political science studies that deal with the "current" status of immigrants. Lucassen's work informs both historians and social scientists working on immigration about the overlooked virtues of each other's studies. This book could be used effectively in relevant courses in history, sociology, and political science. |
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| Troy University, Montgomery Alabama |
Robert B. Kane |
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