A multidisciplinary debate for the ESRC Festival of Social Science held by Prof Arnaud Chevalier and Dr Mastoureh Fathi held at Senate House on Tuesday 6 November 2018.

We ran a multi-disciplinary event to get a more complete view of the integration of migrants, from the aggregate effect on their demand for welfare to the individual sense of belongings and the practice of what NGOs can do to help migrants integrate.

Comment from Dr Mastoureh Fathi

"Highly skilled migrants (refugees) in the UK use their class position as a method of integration and gaining recognition in British society through various performances in their everyday life, based on further education for their children, their own career progression and consumption habits. By doing so, they attempt to reconstruct their sense of belonging and claim to a new British identity."

Comment from Prof Arnaud Chevalier

"Using historical data on the migration of Germans to West Germany following world war II, we find that municipalities, where migrants represented a larger share of the population, adopted more generous redistributive policies paid for by the native owners of capital; but only when migrants and natives were sufficiently similar. We also find that inhabitants of municipalities that had a higher share of migrants had, 50 years later, a greater preference for redistribution."