Under the Radar: An Examination of Norway's Mixed-Origin Population

Abstract

In the US and the UK, rapidly growing populations of mixed origins have constituted a key research site for decades. In most European countries, by contrast, the mixed-origin group has remained largely invisible within research on immigration-related inequality and especially so in its quantitative branch. Breaking this pattern, we zoom in on Norwegian-born individuals with one parent born outside of Western Europe and North America, a group constituting about a third of the country's overall mixed-origin population. Drawing on administrative register data and survey data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study in Norway, we assess their socioeconomic backgrounds, educational aspirations, and subjective experiences, and compare them to individuals with two Norwegian-born parents and two immigrant parents. Our analyses document a contradictory pattern that begs for future research: Mixed-origin individuals largely resemble their majority peers in terms of parental socioeconomic resources, but they lack the educational drive typical of the second generation, in terms of both subjective aspirations and actual educational attainments. In their social orientations and national identification, they are located somewhere in between the minority and the majority, but they experience similar levels of discrimination and non-recognition as those with two immigrant parents. We use these contradictory findings to discuss possible ways forward for a broader research agenda for mixed-origin populations beyond the US and the UK.