The impact of Integration Policies on national and religious identification of first and second-generation Muslim Immigrants in Europe

This paper focuses on the question of how different citizenship policies and state-religion regulation structures effect the national and religious identification of the non-Muslim receiving society and Muslim migrants. This paper compares the ethnic integration of Turkish Muslim immigrants who arrived before 1980 with the receiving society in three different states: Germany, France and the United Kingdom. To answer the causal mechanisms linking policies to outcomes the study will combine different methods: First, data on the independent variable of different integration policies and state-religion regulation structures will be collected through the collection of a systematic set of cross- national indicators using secondary sources such as policy documents and jurisprudence. This data will be finalized through expert interviews with key informants from politics and religious institutions, to fill information gaps, where necessary. Next a multivariate analyses of survey data will be used to determine the extent of cross-national differences on the national and religious identification variable persist when controlling for socio-demographic and other variables. Finally, focus group analysis with members of transnational immigrant families, whose members live in more than one of the studied receiving countries, will supply a more detailed analysis of the causal mechanisms and provide possible explanations of these mechanisms in addition to the results gained through the survey analysis.