Immigrants from more tolerant cultures integrate deeper into destination countries

Abstract

We highlight a new factor behind integration: tolerance in the immigrants’ background culture. We hypothesize that it is easier to partake of economic, civic-political and social life in a new country for a person stemming from a culture that embodies tolerance towards people who are different. We test this by applying the epidemiological method, using a tolerance index based on two indicators from the World Values Survey – the share that thinks it important to teach children tolerance and the share that considers homosexuality justified – as our main independent variable. Our outcomes are indices of individual-level economic, civic-political and cultural integration outcomes for immigrants of the second generation with data from the European Social Survey. The results indicate that tolerance in the background culture is a robust predictor of integration among children of immigrants in European societies.