Religion and integration: does immigrant generation matter?: the case of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands

Abstract

Public debates on Muslim migration to Europe often describe religiosity as a barrier to immigrant integration. Among the first generation, negative correlations between Muslims’ religiosity and integration were indeed found, but among the second generation, religion and integration are more often decoupled. To examine whether the relation between religion and integration differs across immigrant generations, this study compares foreign-born with local-born Turkish and Moroccan minorities in the Netherlands based on the NELLS data (N = 1,776). We analyse how religiosity (religious identification and practices) relates to eight indicators of immigrant integration and find it to be unrelated to socio-economic participation, Dutch contacts, national identification and gender egalitarianism, but negatively related to Dutch friendships, language skills and sexual liberalism in both generations. Only the association between religiosity and educational attainment in the Netherlands differs across generations, and changes from negative in the first to non-significant in the second generation.