The SCIP project studies integration trajectories of new immigrants in four European countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and Great Britain. Its substantive focus will be on migrants socio-cultural integration. This aspect of migration has received increasing attention in public debate yet remains seriously under-researched. In particular, existing data cannot settle the question whether socio-cultural integration is a consequence or a prerequisite for migrants structural integration (e.g. in the labour market) and whether, how and why groups might differ in this regard. By focusing on recent arrivals, the SCIP project will study a particularly dynamic phase of the entire integration process, thus laying the ground for the creation of a European New Immigrant Panel that matches the existing new immigrant surveys in classical immigration countries such as the USA.
In the SCIP project, two cross-national waves of survey data will be collected among groups of new immigrants that vary along a number of dimensions, including religion (Catholics versus Muslims), social status (medium to high-skill versus low-skill migrants) and political identity (EU citizens versus non-EU-citizens).