Results III: Feedback Effects and Cyclical Integration Processes

The conceptual framework developed in Chap. 3 posits that migrant integration is, to some extent, a cyclical process rather than an entirely linear one, with migrant integration outcomes feeding back into certain social determinants and psychological mechanisms. I also derived two hypotheses about such feedback effects, namely the impact of political participation on migrants’ motivation to integrate (H3) as well as the influence of host country identification on their transnational ties (H6). I now test these two hypotheses by estimating panel data models on a sample of migrants residing in four European countries provided by the SCIP Survey. Specifically, using both autoregressive models as well as change score models, I find strong evidence for Hypothesis 3 as well as partial support for Hypothesis 6. This chapter begins with the descriptive statistics, followed by the results of the main models, and concludes with a discussion of the implications of the results and their connections to the broader literature.