Bridges and Barriers: Religion and Immigrant Occupational Attainment across Integration Contexts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article advances knowledge about context-dependent impacts of religion on immigrant structural integration. Drawing on theories of inter-generational immigrant integration, it identifies and spells out two context-dependent mechanisms through which religion impinges upon structural integration — as ethnic marker prompting exclusion and discrimination, or as social organization providing access to tangible resources. The propositions are empirically tested with nationally representative data on occupational attainment in three different integration contexts which vary in religious boundary configurations and religious field characteristics — the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Using data from the US General Social Survey, the Canadian Ethnic Diversity Survey, and the European Social Survey, the article analyzes indirect and direct effects of religious affiliation and participation on occupational attainment among first and second generation immigrants. The analyses find only limited evidence for the assumption that in contexts with strong religious boundaries (such as Western Europe and, to a lesser extent, Canada), immigrants face religious penalties in structural integration. By contrast, the analyses support the assumption that in contexts with a thriving religious field (such as the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada), religious attendance tends to be positively related to occupational attainment, especially for the second generation. For the first time, the article empirically tests arguments about transatlantic differences in the role of religion for immigrant structural integration, and it suggests ways of better integrating micro-oriented survey research with macro-oriented institutional analysis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".