Turkish immigrants and their descendants have become the main target of antiimmigrant political mobilization in Austria since the 1990s. They have come to epitomize the image of the Oriental enemy and the Muslim other. Based on these discursive constructions, Muslims in general, and Turks in particular, have often been described as unwilling to integrate into Austrian society. The articles in this special issue show not only that these discourses and exclusionary attitudes may result in discriminatory practices towards Turkish immigrants and their descendants in Austria, but also that the alleged unwillingness to integrate may be explained by the lack of effort made by the Austrian government and Austrian institutions to integrate this group.

The most recent Austrian Integration Report indicates that a substantial proportion of Turkish immigrants do not feel at home in Austria. Whether these lower levels of social well-being also apply to the Turkish first, second or follow-up generations in Austria is uncertain. This article aims to fill this gap by asking how the Turkish second generation perceives their social inclusion into Austrian society. Results based on the TIES survey reveal that social well-being is largely determined by immigrants’ socioeconomic achievements as well as by experiences of discrimination in their educational and occupational trajectories and daily life. Intergenerational progress is also found to be positively related with social well-being but at a much lower level.

By drawing on comparative analyses of successful second-generation Turks from disadvantaged family backgrounds in France and the Netherlands, this article examines pathways and mechanisms that lead to educational success against the backdrop of structural and familial disadvantages. We foreground the experiences and practices of successful second-generation Turks in both countries and demonstrate the importance of institutional arrangements and their interactions with individual resources to account for their success. We use data from the “The Integration of the European Second Generation” (TIES) survey to reconstruct school careers and to inventory opportunities and constraints presented to them in the most important selection processes. We illustrate our findings with life stories drawn from qualitative interviews with TIES respondents in both settings. Combining the results of both quantitative and qualitative data analysis allows us to unravel the mechanisms of the educational success of second-generation Turks from disadvantaged backgrounds.

This paper analyses neighbourhood embeddedness of immigrant and non-immigrant populations in six European cities. We define neighbourhood embeddedness as an individual level concept and distinguish two main dimensions: place and network embeddedness. The neighbourhood embeddedness concept provides us with the possibility to study attitudinal and behavioural aspects of individuals related to the place of living. Using data from the ‘Generating Interethnic Tolerance and Neighbourhood Integration in European Urban Spaces’ (GEITONIES) project, we explore communalities and differences in the degree of embeddedness and its underlyingmechanisms for immigrant and non-immigrant residents across a set of different neighbourhood types. Our findings suggest that neighbourhoods are still important focal points of social life. But immigrants are characterized by higher levels of neighbourhood embeddedness than native residents which are mostly related to the strong link between perceived feelings of attachment to the people in the neighbourhood and the place as such.

The authors use 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data to determine how immigrant children in Italy and Spain compare with native students in reading and mathematics skills. Drawing on the vast empirical literature in countries with traditionally high rates of immigration, the authors test the extent to which the most well-established patterns and hypotheses of immigrant/native educational achievement gaps also apply to these comparatively “new” immigration countries. The authors find that both first- and second-generation immigrant students underperform natives in both countries. Although socioeconomic background and language skills contribute to the explanation of achievement gaps, significant differences remain within the countries even after controlling for those variables. While modeling socioeconomic background reduces the observed gaps to a very similar extent in both countries, language spoken at home is more strongly associated with achievement gaps in Italy. School-type differentiation, such as tracking in Italy and school ownership in Spain, do not reduce immigrant/native gaps, although in Italy tracking is strongly associated with immigrant students’ test scores.