Foreigners, Minorities and Integration: The Muslim Immigrant Experience in Britain and Germany.

• Author: Dikici, Erdem
• Position: Book review

Foreigners, Minorities and Integration: The Muslim Immigrant Experience in Britain and Germany

By Sarah Hackett

New York: Manchester University Press, 2014, 286 pages, 67.52 [pounds sterling] (Hardcover), ISBN: 9780719083174.

In Foreigners, Minorities and Integration: The Muslim immigrant experience in Britain and Germany, Sarah Hackett focuses on Muslim immigrants' experiences of migration and integration with an exclusive focus on employment, housing, and education at a local level. She focuses on Muslims of Newcastle and Bremen, yet she also examines the patterns of national histories of migration and integration of Germany and Britain in detail based on government archives and reports.

One of the main claims of the book is that despite the historical particularities "Newcastle and Bremen's Muslim ethnic minority populations demonstrated a growing similarity in behaviour, performance and attitude in employment, housing and education." (p. 9) In other words, even though Britain and Germany have different historical patterns of migration and policies of integration, these particularities did not create a vital impact on Muslims' integration, at least, at levels of employment, housing and education. Hackett, additionally, claims that her findings suggest that "Islam had little impact on the conduct and levels of integration of Muslim immigrants in Newcastle and Bremen." (p. 10)

According to Hackett, although relatively liberal immigration policies of Britain had played an important role in the emergence of self-employed businesses among the Muslim immigrants, and the guest-worker system of Germany, to a large extent, slowed down the emergence of self-employed businesses among its Muslim immigrants, in fact, in Newcastle and Bremen it is observed that Muslims' long-term labor market activities (e.g concentration on self-employed businesses) are very similar. Furthermore, Hackett argues that emergence of ethnic enclaves or spread of self-employed businesses among Muslim immigrants "should not automatically be equated with discrimination, disadvantage and lack of integration" (pp. 82-3); on the contrary, the businesses founded and run by Muslim immigrants are "the consequences of migrants' hard work and sacrifice, but also economic success and, most importantly, integration and commitment to their local surroundings."(p. 86)

As with the employment, as well as the housing patterns of Muslim immigrants of Newcastle and Bremen, Hackett concludes...