When is migrants’ socio-economic attainment associated with enhanced national belonging to their residence country? Drawing on a large-scale survey, we compare migrants from the same 10 origin countries across Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. We exploit this double comparison across origin groups and residence countries to contextualize mixed findings of positive, negative, and null associations between migrants’ socio-economic attainment and national belonging in earlier research. We introduce the notion of ethnic boundaries to situate when migrants’ socio-economic attainment and belonging are positively or negatively associated. We examine how migrants’ socio-economic attainment interacts with contextual variation in ethnic boundaries and with individual-level variation in perceptions of ethnic boundaries based on perceived group discrimination. Multi-group structural equation models show that migrants’ socio-economic attainment is often decoupled from national belonging. However, they also reveal crucial contextual variation as same-origin migrants can succeed socio-economically with or without feeling belonging in different residence countries. At the individual level, perceived group discrimination conditions this association, so that socio-economic attainment translates into more national belonging only when perceptions of discrimination are low. Our comparative findings of contingent national belonging thereby challenge existing assumptions that associations between socio-economic attainment and national belonging are linear and that ethnic boundaries in European migration contexts are rigid.

中文翻译：

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没有归属感就能成功吗？原籍国和居住国移民社会经济成就和民族归属感的双重比较

移民的社会经济成就何时与其居住国的国民归属感增强相关？根据一项大规模调查，我们对来自丹麦、德国和荷兰等 10 个原籍国的移民进行了比较。我们利用这种对原籍群体和居住国的双重比较，将早期研究中移民的社会经济成就与国家归属感之间的积极、消极和无效关联的混合结果结合起来。我们引入种族边界的概念来确定移民的社会经济成就和归属感呈正相关或负相关的情况。我们研究了移民的社会经济成就如何与种族边界的背景差异以及基于群体歧视的个人层面的种族边界认知差异相互作用。多群体结构方程模型表明，移民的社会经济成就往往与国家归属感脱钩。然而，它们也揭示了重要的背景差异，因为同源移民无论是否在不同居住国感到归属感都可以在社会经济上取得成功。在个人层面上，感知到的群体歧视决定了这种关联，因此只有当歧视观念较低时，社会经济成就才能转化为更多的国家归属感。因此，我们对偶然民族归属感的比较发现挑战了现有的假设，即社会经济成就与民族归属感之间的关联是线性的，并且欧洲移民背景下的种族界限是严格的。