Immigrant Participation - Why do we care?

Abstract

Intuitively, the political participation of immigrants seems to be a salient research topic for scholarship on migration, citizenship, and politics. This panel aims to explore this salience as a research subject in a more explicit fashion: Why should we be studying the participation of this particular population? In particular, it aims to examine conceptual questions that arise from honing in on immigrant participation. For example: • Should we be concerned with immigrant participation as an issue of equality, integration, the functioning of democratic institutions, or some other cause? • What specific aspects of immigrant participation are of interest for our field, and why? • What is the role of non-immigrants and political institutions with regard to the political participation of immigrants, and how do we make these an intrinsic part of our research? • Why and how does the study of immigrant participation differ from studying political participation in a polity in general? • Is non-participation a specific problem when it comes to immigrant communities? Is it different from non-participation in the polity in general? The panel invites both theoretical and empirical papers that provide insights on our conceptual understanding of immigrant political participation as an empirical phenomenon, as well as on the ways that we, scholars of migration and politics, are studying it.

Title	Details
Why should refugees have political rights?	View Paper Details
The Importance of Immigrant Political Participation in New York City	View Paper Details
“Local Context, Immigrant Organizations, and the Politics of Immigrant Rights in San Francisco and Houston”	View Paper Details
Why do Immigrants Support an Anti-immigrant Party? Russian-Germans, their Integration, and the Alternative for Germany	View Paper Details
Theorizing the link between political participation and political integration	View Paper Details