ABSTRACT
In all Western countries which have been the destination for large-scale migration over the past decades, integration and assimilation issues are heavily debated. This has certainly helped making Migration Studies one of the fastest growing fields in the social sciences, but it also created a certain pressure to produce fast and ‘digestible’ results. In that sense, the methodological and theoretical advancement of Migration Studies has not quite followed the rapid growth in the number of disciplines, researchers and projects involved. Some research ignores the complexities of the phenomena studied (or oversimplifies them in order to make results more ‘palpable’ for policy-making and the general public), in others the ‘explanatory reach’ of research findings remains unclear. To find about the actual ‘state of knowledge’ in integration/assimilation research is difficult, because of the increasing amount of studies on specific cases, groups or problems, but also because there is a lack of agreed-upon theoretical and methodological concepts and indicators.
