Integrating Immigrants in Today's Globalised Society

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2006 in the subject Pedagogy - Intercultural Pedagogy, grade: 1, University of Hamburg (Institut fuer Allgemeine erziehungswissenschaft), language: English, abstract: Since the end of the Second World War, migratory movements have increased within Europe, while trans-oceanic mobility has decreased. Almost forty years have passed since then and the question arises of how Portuguese immigrants and the host community co-exist in Germany. This is going to be the subject investigated in this paper. To answer this question, social-psychological theories, dealing with in- and outgroups, self-regard, social identity, stereotypes and prejudice, will be mobilised alongside certain governmental trends on immigration issues. An ideological typology will be suggested and later discussed in relation to Germany and its Portuguese immigrants. The relationship between these two ethnic groups will also be subjected to empirical research by means of a questionnaire consisting of two different scales. The first was developed on the basis of work carried out first by Berry and later by Bourhis during the eighties and nineties in Canada and comprises four different acculturation orientations, specified into several items. In cross-cultural psychology, the focus on the phenomena resulting from the contact between groups of individuals from different cultural backgrounds and the subsequent adaptations of their original culture patterns is a relative recent trend. Nevertheless, it has been used intensely in the last two decades and several models have been suggested for the study of the acculturation strategies of both immigrants and host communities in multicultural societies. The most frequent is the bi-dimensional model extended by Bourhis and his co-workers from Berry's original research, which will here be applied to Portuguese immigrants and their relation to the German host community. The second part of the questionnaire contains an experimental scale designed to highlight some of the pragmatic manifestations of the acculturation process between these two groups. What exactly happens, where and how often, are questions that we will try to answer through examination of the answers given by the participants. A statistical analysis will lead us to the discussion of results and will hopefully help to define the acculturation tendencies of these two groups towards each other and provide some sort of framework to enable us to understand the choices made by Portuguese immigrants and their host community in their co-existence in Germany.