When individuals who have socialized in one specific culture face the prospect of moving to a new cultural community, they may resort to different strategies to adapt. Berry (1997) famously distinguished four different processes: assimilation, integration, segregation, and marginalization. The first two strategies, both of which are central to our paper, have in common the adoption of the host society’s culture by the newcomer. They differ, however, in that assimilation implies abandonment of the original culture, whereas integration refers to a reconciliation between original and host cultures.

These strategies are often discussed in connection to how immigrants adapt, but the same models have also given rise to distinct migration policies which place distinct demands on newcomers. Throughout much of the 20th century, assimilation was the predominant approach toward immigrants’ process of adaptation to the host society. Then, in the 1960s, integration progressively replaced it in official European guidelines on what policies states should implement for newcomers. It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that integration became the main paradigm in European immigration policy (Perchinig, 2012), after many Western democracies abandoned the multiculturalist approach (Joppke, 2004)—a trend that some scholars have attributed to its broad-based denial of value homophily (McPherson et al., 2001; Rauwolf et al., 2015) as a precursor of social trust. Since then, a fruitful literature has advocated a shift toward the so-called civic integration among European democracies (Joppke, 2017; Joppke, 2007). In practice, this has implied that a growing number of countries are implementing policies that require immigrants to prove their adaptation to national values and customs, beyond their mere capacity to speak the primary official language (Perchinig, 2012).

The idea of integration has evolved since Berry’s proposal, and now includes other sociomaterial aspects. In this paper, we understand integration as a holistic approach that goes beyond Berry’s concept of integration and focuses on immigrants’ acquisition of the appropriate resources and capacities in several different facets to prosper in the host community. Although policy advisors and academics now agree that integration is a multidimensional construct, they differ in their precise definition (Penninx and Garcés-Mascareñas, 2016; Spencer and Charsley, 2021), and only recently have efforts to create generalisable indexes gained traction (Harder et al., 2018).

On the institutional side, the EU has produced different documents that aim to identify and shape the integration strategies of its Member States. Although the EU recognises countries’ autonomy to design and implement their own integration policies, the guidelines published by EU bodies implicitly seek and promote harmony between different national models (Joppke, 2007). According to these documents, integration is defined as a “dynamic, two-way process of mutual accommodation by all immigrants and residents,” while also claiming that “integration implies respect for the basic values of the European Union” including “respect for the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law” (Council of the European Union, 2004). The fact that the Council of the European Union explicitly demands immigrants’ adherence to the fundamental values of the European Union represents a clear departure from the multiculturalist project that had previously prevailed (Larin, 2020; Orgad, 2019), with some authors even espousing a certain return to assimilationist perspectives (Brubaker, 2001). More recently, EU guidelines on integration have explicitly articulated civic integrationist ideals in its Action Plan for Integration and Inclusion. In this Action Plan, one of the key actions is to foster “an understanding of the laws, culture and values of the receiving society as early as possible, for example through civic orientation courses” (European Commission, 2020). This resonates with past assimilationist views, for which “cultural assimilation, or acculturation, is likely to be the first of the types of assimilation to occur when a minority group arrives on the scene” (Gordon, 1964), leaving unanswered the question of whether this process is either a facilitator or a byproduct of integration in other domains.

Thus, civic integration is considered part of a myriad of dimensions which together compose full integration. European states dictate their own integration demands in order to grant residency, citizenship, or even nationality to immigrants. The list varies across countries, ranging from the widely accepted and minimal requirement of compliance with the law to the more controversial expectation that immigrants know and have internalized national customs. Whether civic integration is compatible with liberal democratic ideals has been debated elsewhere (Joppke and Bauböck, 2010). In the present work, we will set aside this question and ask whether civic integration can be shown to predict improvements in immigrants’ lives in other domains—such as their occupational, social, or political integration.

Personal and moral values predict an individual’s performance in numerous areas of life (e.g., (Abdallah, 2023; Acemoglu, 2021; Anglim et al., 2022; Ismail et al., 2019; Kruse et al., 2019)), and are greatly influenced by how they perceive the values of others (Pronin et al., 2004; Zou et al., 2009). This predicts that immigrants’ values might flexibly adapt in order to help them succeed when settling into a new community. Relatedly, Abu-Rayya and colleagues (Abu-Rayya et al., 2023) found that immigrants’ own values predict their motivation to adopt various potential integration strategies. Past research suggests that immigrants naturally undergo integration as they spend time in the host country, developing social networks (Koelet and de Valk, 2016), entering the job market (Bowlus et al., 2016), and availing themselves of social services (Dias et al., 2011; Suárez, 2022), with similar integration rates for most ethnic groups and dimensions (Heath and Schneider, 2021).

At the same time, a large literature has documented the public perception that immigrants pose both economic and cultural threats to the host society. On the economic front, restrictive attitudes toward immigration often stress the economic impact of immigrants’ use of welfare services, such as free healthcare or unemployment subsidies, and their participation in the job market (Carens, 2005; Degen et al., 2019; Miller, 2009; Römer, 2017). On the cultural front, the diversity that waves of immigration bring is often perceived as destabilising the society’s traditions, as well as diluting its identity and uniqueness—an issue that has been critically discussed among proponents of cosmopolitanism (Appiah, 2007), multiculturalism (Banting and Kymlicka, 2009), open borders (Carens, 2013), and closed borders (Miller, 2014), among others.

Experimental research on this question has demonstrated that threats to national identity are considerably more likely to engender exclusionary attitudes than are economic threats (Burgoon, 2014; Sniderman et al., 2004). This literature has emphasized natives’ perceptions (Putnam, 2007; Sortheix and Schwartz, 2017) and attitudes (Albertson and Gadarian, 2012; Brader et al., 2008; Hainmueller and Hopkins, 2014) toward immigrants, while comparatively less work has examined how immigrants’ values bring to bear on their integration process. One exception is Alejandro Portes and colleagues’ research on segmented assimilation (Portes et al., 2005; Portes and Zhou, 1993), which focuses on how the children of immigrant parents reconcile host and parental cultures and its downstream impact on integration success. This neglect of immigrants’ experience may ultimately lead to a mismatch between what integration policies promote and demand from immigrants and what is ultimately conducive to their successful integration.

To contribute to the debate on whether civic integration policies are related to immigrants’ broader integration, in the present research we first ask (RQ1) whether immigrants’ values differ on average from those of natives in the European context and whether any such differences wane over time or not—providing a test of assimilation. Second, we examine (RQ2) whether and how values relate to occupational, social, and political integration outcomes for the whole population—for natives and immigrants as a whole. Third, we explore (RQ3) whether value assimilation is associated with a reduction in the integration gap between natives and immigrants—a question that brings to bear the current political demand for civic integration among European states.

To address these three research questions, we employ data from the European Social Survey (ESS). The ESS is a cross-national study carried out every two years, since 2002, in approximately 30 European countries. With the number of participants varying from 30,000 to over 50,000 in each round, the ESS collects nationally representative data on values and attitudes, as well as numerous sociodemographic measures. Thus, the present article presents a retrospective study of archived data. All data can be downloaded from the ESS website (www.europeansocialsurvey.org) and in this study it was last accessed and downloaded on the 13^th of November 2024. The ESS Research Ethics Board guarantees that all studies abide by the Declaration on Professional Ethics of the International Statistical Institute and that analysts have no access to participants’ identifying information. Prior to participation, informed consent was obtained from respondents.

We accessed rounds 1 to 10 [from 2002 (1st round) to 2020 (10th round)] of the ESS in the subset of 28 countries that belonged to the EU during this period—except Croatia, which joined in 2013 but was still included—with the absence of data from Malta. We included adult participants between the ages of 18 and 65 (both included). Underage participants were excluded due to difficulties in interpreting integration in adolescence stages, and adults over 65 years old were excluded due to peculiarities of this age group: (i) the so-called ‘salmon bias’, according to which the elderly immigrant population is underrepresented and partially selected (Di Napoli et al., 2021; Lu and Qin, 2014), and (ii) the fact that many European countries set the retirement age at around 65 years old, confounding the measurement of occupational integration. This resulted in a final data set (n = 261,830) comprising ten waves (k = 10) from 27 (j = 27) EU countries, although some of these countries did not offer data for all of the waves used, making the final database incomplete in some country-wave combinations. All analyses were carried out in R version 4.3.1 (R Core Team, 2023). It is worth mentioning that Rounds 1 through 9 (2002–2018) consistently collect responses using face-to-face interviews, while Round 10 (2020) changed to a hybrid mode of data collection in several countries where respondents self-administered the questionnaire. Additionally, Round 10 also lacks responses to Schwartz’s values scale in 10 countries. In Supplementary Analysis 1 we report the results of our analyses separately for each wave to justify the decision to merge all waves in a single aggregate analysis.

In this study, respondents were coded as natives if their current country of residence matched their country of birth, and as immigrants otherwise. This results in a dichotomous grouping variable that distinguishes autochthonous from foreign-born respondents. Although this coding is analytically useful to capture a large share of immigrants, it obscures different migration backgrounds like second-generations or the so-called ‘decimal generations’ (Oropesa and Landale, 1997), that can be relevant to further analyses.

To examine how immigrants’ integration processes are influenced by their values, we searched for indicators of integration (which we treat as dependent variables), moral values (which we treat as explanatory variables), and sociodemographic information in the ESS database.

We also include the respondent’s age, gender, and educational attainment—which is harmonized between countries in the ESS as a 7-level ordinal variable following ES-ISCED categories—as control variables to mitigate the impact of sociodemographic confounds and identify the independent effect of immigrant versus native backgrounds.

By dividing the years each respondent has lived in the host country by their age, we calculated the proportion of life spent in the host country, which enabled the representation of immigrants’ share of life in the host country—a brief description and justification of this measure can be found in Supplementary Analysis 4. Table 1 provides summary statistics of the measures in this study, separating the subset of natives (n = 241,034) and immigrants (n = 20,796).

The analyses presented here seek to determine whether immigrants’ assimilation of host societal values is positively associated with successful integration in other domains. First, we investigate whether there are group differences (i.e., between immigrants and natives) on the three integration outcomes, and in self-reports of Schwartz’s human values. Drawing on the proportion of life measure, we also ask—as part of Research Question 1—whether any such differences diminish the longer immigrants spend in the host country, as implied by value assimilation. Next, in Research Question 2, we examine the relationship between Schwartz’s human values and integration outcomes, applying conditioning methods to rule out potential confounding effects of the proportion of life in the host country. Our analytic approach to Research Questions 1 and 2 employs logistic (for occupational status) and linear (for social life and political participation) mixed-effects regression models with a random intercept of country of residence. In every statistical model, we enter the respondent’s age, gender, and level of educational attainment—treated as continuous in the models due to its monotonic effects on all dependent variables—as covariates (i.e., fixed effects)—to adjust for differences in integration and human values attributable to these sociodemographic characteristics. We apply analysis weights in the models to account for deviations from the stratified sampling procedure due to nonresponse and sampling error and to account for population differences between countries.

Lastly, to answer Research Question 3, we evaluate whether group differences in human values account for the integration gap between immigrants and natives, by comparing the average direct and indirect effects in parallel mediation models. The mediation models evaluate whether the observed relation between being foreign-born and integration outcomes is better explained via human values, i.e., whether—at least a fraction of—this relation is due to the effects that being foreign-born has on acquiring certain values and, through such values, on integration. In these analyses, we report the indirect effects of foreign-born status on all three measures of integration via each of the four human values, as well as its direct effects, using the lavaan package in R (Rosseel, 2012).

The three main research questions and a summary of the present findings are reported in Table 2.

Having replicated previous evidence of integration gaps, and shown that these gaps diminish as immigrants spend a larger portion of their lives in the host country, we then tested whether immigrants and natives differ in their endorsement of human values while controlling for gender, age, and educational attainment. As shown in Table 4, the effect of being foreign-born was significant in all four models: Relative to natives, immigrants reported greater self-transcendence [β = 0.05, 95% CI (0.03, 0.06)], and especially self-enhancement [β = 0.24, 95% CI (0.22, 0.25)] and conservation [β = 0.33, 95% CI (0.31, 0.34)], all ps < 0.001, while reporting slightly lower levels of openness [β = −0.02, 95% CI (−0.03, −0.00), p = 0.026]; thus reproducing previous results (Czymara and Eisentraut, 2020). Figure 4 displays subgroup analyses by region of birth: the effects of being foreign-born on self-transcendence, self-enhancement and conservation values are present across most regions of origin. By contrast, the corresponding effect on openness values was heterogeneous across regions of origin–going from negative for immigrants of Asian origin to positive for those of American origin. Supplementary Analysis 5 reports the pattern of variation in values across countries of residence.

We also calculated the difference in moral values between each immigrant and the mean value in their native reference group, which we defined by grouping natives by 5-year age brackets, gender, and host country. Figure 5 displays the trajectory of foreign-born individuals’ values relative to the reference group, revealing a negative effect of proportion of life in the host country (i.e., toward assimilation) for self-enhancement [β = −0.082, 95% CI (−0.098, −0.067), t = −10.37] and conservation values [β = −0.105, 95% CI (−0.121, −0.090), t = −13.43], both ps < 0.001, and an opposite but considerably smaller effect on openness values [β = 0.027, 95% CI (0.011, 0.042), t = 3.40, p = 0.001] and self-transcendence values [β = 0.020, 95% CI (0.004, 0.036), t = 2.51, p = 0.012].

Taking into consideration the mean differences in human values between natives and immigrants, and the evolution of these differences among immigrants as a function of the proportion of their lives spent in the host country (suggesting partial assimilation), our next analysis focuses on the relationship between human values and indicators of integration. The analysis reported in this section draws on the entire sample (i.e., both natives and immigrants), and therefore ought to be interpreted as describing the relationship between citizens’ values and life outcomes in the occupational, social, and political domains. We ran a logistic regression for the dichotomous occupational status measure, and linear regressions for the measures of social and political integration (see Table 5).

Occupational status was unrelated to openness values (p = 0.38), positively associated with self-enhancement [OR = 1.10, 95% CI (1.09, 1.12)], and negatively related to self-transcendence [OR = 0.96, 95% CI (0.95, 0.98)] and conservationism values [OR = 0.98, 95% CI (0.96, 0.99); all ps < 0.001]. Meanwhile, social integration was positively related to self-transcendence [β = 0.008, 95% CI (0.003, 0.014), p = 0.002] and openness [β = 0.146, 95% CI (0.141, 0.152), p < 0.001], unrelated to self-enhancement [β = −0.001, 95% CI (−0.007, 0.004), p = 0.58] and negatively related to conservationism [β = −0.053, 95% CI (−0.058, −0.048), p < 0.001]. Lastly, political participation was associated positively with self-transcendence [β = 0.160, 95% CI (0.155, 0.165)] and openness [β = 0.078, 95% CI (0.073, 0.083)], and negatively with self-enhancement [β = −0.050, 95% CI (−0.055, −0.045)] and conservationism [β = −0.168, 95% CI (−0.173, −0.163)]; all ps < 0.001. These results support the idea that an individual’s values are associated with various life outcomes, such as the likelihood of employment, and their degree of social and political engagement.

The previous analyses showed that immigrants and natives differ in their values and that values are related to positive life outcomes among both natives and immigrants. We have also shown that immigrants tend to assimilate as they spend a larger fraction of their lives in the host society. This raises the possibility that the relationship between value assimilation and integration is confounded by the proportion of immigrants’ lives spent in the host society. Specifically, one model would predict that as immigrants acquire a host society’s values over time, doing so in turn positively impacts integration—as predicted by assimilationist perspectives (see Figure 6B). Alternatively, integration and assimilation may be associated via their common cause, i.e., time spent in the host society (see Figure 6A). A third alternative, i.e., that integration mediates the effects of a foreign-born background on value assimilation, is examined in Supplementary Analysis 3.

To arbitrate between these competing models of integration and value assimilation, we stratified by the potential confound (i.e., time spent in the host society) in the subset of foreign-born participants (Tripepi et al., 2010). We created deciles of proportion of life in the host society and re-ran the above analyses (regressing integration outcomes on human values) separately in each stratum. The reasoning behind this deconfounding approach is the following: By drastically reducing the variance in the potential confounder (proportion of life in host society) within deciles, the relation between assimilation and integration should be substantially attenuated or even absent according to model A (in which the third variable is a common predictor). Yet according to model B (in which value assimilation mediates the relationship between time spent in the host society and integration), the independent relation between value assimilation and integration ought to persist—when holding constant time spent in the host society.

Results of the stratified analyses are displayed in Figure 7A, and overall estimates of the deconfounded effects of human values are shown in Figure 7B. Self-transcendence positively relates to political [β = 0.16, 95% CI (0.15, 0.18), p < 0.001], social [β = 0.03, 95% CI (0.01, 0.05), p = 0.001], and also occupational integration to a lesser extent [OR = 1.04, 95% CI (1.00, 1.08), p = 0.031]. Openness values had positive effects on occupational [OR = 1.12, 95% CI (1.07, 1.16)], social [β = 0.14, 95% CI (0.12, 0.16)] and political integration [β = 0.08, 95% CI (0.07, 0.10)], all ps < 0.001. Self-enhancement values had no effect on social integration (p = 0.96), a small positive effect on occupation [OR = 1.07, 95% CI (1.03, 1.11), p = 0.001], and a small negative effect on political participation [β = −0.06, 95% CI (−0.08, −0.05), p < 0.001]. Meanwhile, conservation values had consistently negative effects on integration [occupation: OR = 0.90, 95% CI (0.87, 0.94); social: β = −0.07, 95% CI (−0.09, −0.06)], which were strongest for political integration [β = −0.20, 95% CI (−0.22, −0.19)], all ps < 0.001.

These results provide evidence of multiple associations between value assimilation and integration in other domains. Specifically, self-transcendence and openness values predict improved integration to some degree, self-enhancement values reveal mixed effects across domains of integration, and conservation values predict a worse integration, especially in the political plain. Although these results provide support for model B in Figure 6, and the stratification method ruled out the confounding effects of a common predictor—i.e., time spent in host society—, they should not be interpreted as providing causal evidence of an influence of value assimilation on integration. Strictly speaking, they provide evidence of significant associations between value assimilation and broader integration that are independent from the effects of time residing in the host country.

The previous sections established that (i) natives and immigrants differ in their moral values, and that (ii) moral values appear to predict integration success in at least some aspects. In this section, we will ask whether and how the observed differences between natives’ and immigrants’ moral values explain the integration gap. To this end, we conducted a parallel mediation analysis in the lavaan R package (Rosseel, 2012), with respondents nested within host countries in a hierarchical model, allowing intercept variance across countries. As shown in Table 6, these analyses revealed that the negative effect of being foreign-born on integration outcomes was primarily direct (with direct/total effect proportions in the range between 58 and 105%), although several indirect paths were statistically significant as well. Most importantly, the indirect effects via conservation values appeared to account for 15.5% (for social integration) and 53.8% (for political participation) of the integration gap between immigrants and natives, though only 4% of the integration gap in occupational status. Subgroup analyses for each region of origin can be found in Supplementary Analysis 2.

First, although occupational status, social activity, and political participation are central indicators of successful integration for immigrants, further dimensions, such as linguistic, psychological, and navigational integration can also play an important role (Harder et al., 2018). Our data source, however, did not allow us to establish how immigrants’ fare on these additional dimensions—leaving open whether future research will extend our present findings beyond the dimensions we examined here. Additionally, the decision to code immigrants as foreign-born disregards subtleties within migrant communities—including second generation immigrants, who qualify as natives in our coding system—(see Portes et al. (2005) and Portes and Zhou (1993) for differences between natives and second generation immigrants)—and the so-called ‘decimal generations’ (Oropesa and Landale, 1997), who are coded as immigrants even though they have socialized in the host country during most of their childhood. Furthermore, although the construction of our variables was validated by previous research, we acknowledge that they lack the nuance to capture the complexity of immigrants’ integration processes. For instance, occupation does not capture whether respondents’ primary occupation accords with their expertise and training, or even if they have freely decided not to work for personal reasons; social integration indicators only capture whether immigrants have a social network in their host country, but does not distinguish social networks composed of other immigrants (implying segregation) vs. natives (implying integration); and political participation indicators only refer to behavioral manifestations of it, while neglecting other relevant aspects of political integration such as attitudes toward national politics, electoral participation (when possible), or the importance given to citizenship acquisition.

Second, and in line with the previously expressed limitation, although all models statistically controlled for the country of residence and some also consider regions of origin (including further analyses in Supplementary Analyses 2, 5), there are other relevant aspects of immigration, such as legal status or reasons to migrate, that are beyond the scope of the present work, yet may crucially influence integration.

Third, analyses of cross-sectional data are limited in their ability to draw causal conclusions, even with recent developments in causal inference methods (Pearl, 2010). In light of the possibility of unobserved confounds, our analyses to deconfound the relationship between the adoption of moral values and successful integration should be interpreted with caution. Confirmation of a causal relationship between value assimilation and integration a waits convergent evidence from longitudinal and/or quasi-experimental studies that may provide more decisive evidence of causation.