Is It All About the Costs? Cultural Distance and Adjustment of Recent German Migrants

The cultural distance (CD) between migrants’ origin and destination countries has long been considered important for adjustment. Past research predominantly followed a cost perspective, emphasising rising adjustment costs with increasing CD and postulating a negative linear relationship. Previous studies, therefore, overlooked the potential benefits of CD for adjustment. We address this gap by testing an integrated theoretical framework and taking a more differentiated perspective on country-level CD and adjustment. Using probability-based survey data on recent German migrants worldwide ( N = 3,368), we examined their sociocultural and psychological adjustment at different country CD levels, whereby country-level CD refers to aggregated individual-level value differences. Employing multilevel regressions, we reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between country-level CD and both adjustment dimensions, and find similar patterns for two other frameworks of national culture. This result extends the cost perspective, indicating that the “optimal” country-level CD range for adjustment lies between minimum and maximum distances. While the study’s insights directly apply to German migrants, they also provide first empirical indication that the prevailing view on the negative consequences of country-level CD for adjustment may underestimate the challenges in culturally similar settings and overlook that certain levels of cultural dissimilarity can facilitate migrants’ adjustment.