The Immigrant Integration Process in France: Inequalities and Segmentation

This article focuses on the integration of immigrants in France as a demographic, economic, social and political process. It uses data from the 1992 INSEE-INED “Mobilité Géographique et Insertion Sociale” survey (MGIS). Taking off from literature emphasizing the multidimensional, segmented character of the process, an empirical typology is developed with which to test the relevance of various models. The classic assimilation hypothesis, which assumes the existence of a uniform convergence process, is shown to be validated only in the case of immigrants from Spain. Other, more complex, segmented models seem to characterize the various communities represented in the survey