INTERMAR · INTEGRATION OF INTERNATIONAL MARRIAGES: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA

Increased international migration had brought the integration of immigrants to the forefront of sociopolitical topics. Although the economic and political aspects of immigrant integration have been scrutinized, little is known about immigrants’ social interactions with the native population. Interethnic marriages have been posited as a factor that undermines racial barriers and, thus, contribute to the integration between immigrants and natives. The scant studies of divorced couples comprised of immigrants and natives found that mixed couples are more likely to divorce that homogeneous couples and explained this gap by individual and mainly cultural factors. Nevertheless, these studies were conducted in single countries and thus, they did not investigate the effect of environmental factors such as national integration models and immigration policies. This study aims to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing factors affecting the survival of international marriages (i.e., couples in which the spouses come from different countries) in Europe and North America. I will employ the concept of the ‘liability of foreignness’ to build a model in which micro (individual), meso (cultural) and macro (immigration policies) level factors interact to predict the differential rates of international marriage survival across immigrant groups and host countries of the Old and New Worlds. A set of empirical studies will be conducted in selected European and North American countries - such as Spain, Greece, Germany, Sweeden, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Canada and the United States - to test this model. The comparison between European and North American countries will allow me to analyze the potential effect of different immigration histories and policies on the integration between newcomers and local people. The selection of countries depends on data availability and differences in immigration policies and integration models in the Old and the New Worlds.