Thomas Soehl’s research while affiliated with McGill University and other places

How does context shapes religious practices and religious expression of immigrants? Existing work has focussed on changes over the long term and across generations. We argue that context can shape religious practice shortly after arrival. Using a nationally representative survey of Syrian refugees with children who arrived between late 2015 and 2018, we examine how often parents talk to their children about religion, a central mechanism in religious socialization. We compare Quebec, which has become increasingly restrictive about public religious expression to other Canadian provinces, which are often upheld as exemplars of multicultural accommodation. Syrian refugees in Quebec, especially mothers, report significantly less frequent religious discussions with their children than those in other provinces, regardless of whether they are Christian or Muslim. This pattern is not explained by pre‐migration religiosity or settlement selection, suggesting that Quebec's distinct socio‐political environment shapes religious expression soon after arrival.

Survey research on migrants is notoriously challenging, especially if the goal is to collect data across a range of countries. Social networking sites’ ability to micro-target advertisements to migrant communities combined with their near-global reach makes them an attractive option. Yet there is little rigorous evaluation of the quality of data thus collected—especially for populations from developing countries. We compare samples of Nigerian emigrants in Canada and Italy and Nigerians (at home) in Nigeria recruited through targeted advertising on Facebook and Instagram to population estimates. We find our samples contain varying degrees of bias in the case of age and gender and systematically miss those with little formal education. How much this affects our samples’ representativeness varies across contexts: discrepancies are much smaller for emigrant populations in Canada than in Italy and much larger in Nigeria, where a large share of the population has little formal education and limited literacy. Post-stratifying each sample on age, gender, and education does not ameliorate bias on other variables such as ethnicity, religion, period of migration, or political attitudes. We discuss the potential and limitations of social-media-driven sampling and highlight key considerations for implementing it to collect multi-sited data on migrants.

As is the case with the adoption of many other practices, social influence plays an important role in immigrants’ decision to apply for host-country citizenship. Existing work uses residential characteristics to proxy social network effects but does not directly analyze the hypothesized mechanisms – flow of information and signals about identity fit – nor does it specify the type of social network influence. We address this lacuna using data from in-depth interviews with immigrants about their decision whether or not to naturalize in the US. Our analysis of this data suggests that for migrants facing barriers naturalization diffuses through complex contagion. Rather than through the simple presence of naturalized co-ethnics, we show that social influence flows through strong ties to naturalized immigrants who share similar characteristics. When assessing information about the process and their chances of success, those who are on the fence look to others who have naturalized and who resemble them in attributes like education or migration trajectory. In addition, the promise of status equality that citizenship offers matters: comparing themselves to (social) peers that have citizenship can motivate respondents to naturalize as a way to claim equal status.

Social ties play a central role in migrant labor market integration. Whereas existing research focusses on the co-ethnic ties that also drive migration, this paper examines the effect of connections that reach beyond the co-ethnic community. Studying the effects of such ties is challenging as they are generally both a cause and consequence of integration. We examine a case where a quasi-random sub-set of migrants is provided ties that reach outside the co-ethnic community upon arrival in Canada through a refugee sponsor program where community groups support refugees with whom they have no pre-existing ties called the Blended Visa-Office Referred (BVOR) program. Although sponsorship has no effect on the probability of employment, we find that it improves skill utilization. Refugees with sponsors are more likely to obtain higher-skilled employment and less likely to be self-employed. We also present data on the characteristics of friendship networks to support our argument.

Whereas the literature asks whether immigrants and their descendants come to resemble the ‘mainstream’, this paper places the acquisition of a new national identity at the centre of attention, contending that the views of ethnic outsiders provide strategic leverage in identifying any underlying consensus regarding the bounds of the nation and the means by which those bounds should be implemented. We contend that becoming ‘American’ entails adopting American attitudes towards persons beyond the territorial divide, a population that includes nationals of one's country of origin or ancestry. The paper develops a conceptual framework to understand how attachment to the people of the state of emigration gets transformed into attachment to the people of the state of immigration. The paper provides a demonstration of that process, focusing on Mexican immigrants and their descendants and using a variety of data sources to highlight and unpack different dimensions of Americanisation.

Given the challenges in collecting up-to-date, comparable data on migrant populations the potential of digital trace data to study migration and migrants has sparked considerable interest among researchers and policy makers. In this paper we assess the reliability of one such data source that is heavily used within the research community: geolocated tweets. We assess strategies used in previous work to identify migrants based on their geolocation histories. We apply these approaches to infer the travel history of a set of Twitter users who regularly posted geolocated tweets between July 2012 and June 2015. In a second step we hand-code the entire tweet histories of a subset of the accounts identified as migrants by these methods. Upon close inspection very few of the accounts that are classified as migrants appear to be migrants in any conventional sense or international students. Rather we find these approaches identify other highly mobile populations such as frequent business or leisure travellers, or people who might best be described as “transnationals”. For demographic research that draws on this kind of data to generate estimates of migration flows this high mis-classification rate implies that findings are likely sensitive to the adjustment model used. For most research trying to use these data to study migrant populations, the data will be of limited utility. We suspect that increasing the correct classification rate substantially will not be easy and may introduce other biases.

Do discriminatory US immigration policies affect foreign public opinion about Americans? When examining negative reactions to US actions perceived as bullying on the world stage, existing research has focused either on US policies that involve direct foreign military intervention or seek to influence foreign countries’ domestic economic policy or policies advocating minority representation. We argue that US immigration policies – especially when they are perceived as discriminatory – can similarly generate anti-American sentiment. We use a conjoint experiment embedded in a unique survey of Nigerian expatriates in Ghana. Comparing respondents before and after President Trump surpisingly announced a ban on Nigerian immigration to the United States, we find a large drop (13 percentage points) in Nigerian’s favorability towards Americans.

Geopolitical competition and conflict play a central role in canonical accounts of the emergence of nation-states and national identities. Yet work in this tradition has paid little attention to variation in everyday, popular understandings of nationhood. We propose a macro-historical argument to explain cross-national variation in the types of popular nationalism expressed at the individual level. Our analysis builds on recent advances on the measurement of popular nationalism and a recently introduced geopolitical threat scale (Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer 2017). With the use of latent class analysis and a series of regression models, we show that a turbulent geopolitical past decreases the prevalence of liberal nationalism (pride in institutions, inclusive boundaries) while increasing the prevalence of restrictive nationalism (less pride in institutions, exclusive boundaries) across 43 countries around the world. Additional analyses suggest the long-term development of institutions is a key mediating variable: states with a less traumatic geopolitical history tend to have more established liberal democratic institutions, which in turn foster liberal forms of popular nationalism.