Ethnic diversity fosters the social integration of refugee students

Abstract

Forced migration has become a global megatrend, and many refugees are school aged. As social integration is key to their wellbeing and success, it is pivotal to determine factors that promote the social integration of refugee youth within schools. Here, using a large, nationally representative social network dataset from Germany, we examine the relationships of refugee adolescents with their peers (304 classrooms, 6,390 adolescents and 487 refugees). We find that refugee adolescents have fewer friends and are more often rejected as desk mates than their classmates. Crucially, however, they are less rejected in more diverse classrooms. This results from two basic processes: (1) more opportunities to meet other ethnic minority peers, who are more accepting of refugees in general and (2) higher acceptance of refugee adolescents by ethnic majority peers in more diverse settings. Our results can help promote the social adjustment of young refugees in school and mitigate the negative consequences of prejudice.

Fig. 1. Friendships and rejections among refugee adolescents based on their peers’ immigrant status.

a,b, Density plots showing friendship (a) and desk mate rejection (b) nominations towards refugee adolescents received by native, first-generation immigrant, second-generation immigrant and refugee classmates. N_students = 39,154; N_classrooms = 1,807.

Fig. 2. Typical friendship and rejection ego networks of refugee students.

a–f, Bar plots showing the rounded average number of friendship (a–c) and desk mate rejection (d–f) nominations of refugee students by each immigrant status group. The network plots map the average number of nominations (for example, the total number of friends). In addition, the network plots are a proportionate representation of the ethnic composition of nominations of refugee students (for example, the number of native friends). Note that not every bar can be represented in the network plots by the value of the closest integer to its actual mean due to our primary goal to represent the total number of nominations accurately. N_students = 5,328; N_classrooms = 237.

Fig. 3. Friendships and rejections among refugee students by classroom ethnic diversity.

a,b, Results from MRQAPs showing the probabilities of friendships with (a) and desk mate rejections of (b) refugee students (for details, see the ‘Statistical analysis’ section). The model controls for whether the tie sender and receiver have the same country of origin, the same gender, a similar age, a similar length of stay in Germany, similar language skills and similar academic achievement. Additionally, ego and alter effects of these control variables are controlled (for details, see ‘Measurement’). The histograms above the plots represent the distribution of ethnic diversity across the classrooms. Supplementary Table 2 in Supplementary Appendix A presents the full results from the corresponding MRQAPs. N_students = 6,390; N_classrooms = 304.