Integration for whom? The migration bias in social norms

Abstract Integration has become a dominant framework in the governance of immigration, indicating what states and ‘host societies’ expect immigrants to do and how to behave to become accepted members of the receiving country. Critical scholarship has argued that this creates an unequal normative burden: ‘immigrants’ are subject to integration demands, while ‘native citizens’ are exempt. Despite this widely acknowledged ‘integration dispensation’, the asymmetry of expectations has not been empirically tested. In this article, we conceptualize immigrant integration in terms of social norms—expectations regarding the social, economic, cultural, and political participation—and develop a theory of a migration bias: the idea that these norms are stronger for immigrants than for society at large. We test this hypothesis using a population-based survey experiment in Switzerland. Our results provide evidence for a migration bias, particularly in the social dimension of integration and expectations concerning respect for laws and constitutional values. However, this bias is context dependent, appearing in the German-speaking part of Switzerland but not in the French-speaking counterpart. These findings provide novel insights into the popular understanding of immigrant integration and the nature of social norms and citizenship in diverse societies.