National Identity Development Among Recent Immigrants: The Role of Perceived Incompatibility

Abstract

This study longitudinally investigates the development of host-national identification among recently arrived immigrants and how it relates to origin-national and religious identification. We examine how implicit and explicit measures of identity incompatibility are related by including a measure of perceived value incompatibility into cross-lagged panel models of identification. We exploit three waves of panel data from the New Immigrant Survey Netherlands, targeting recent arrivals from Bulgaria (N = 151), Poland (N = 358), Spain (N = 298), and Turkey (N = 221). We found immigrants’ host-national identification to be relatively stable over time, whereas origin-national and religious identification underwent more changes, in group-specific ways. This suggests immigrants’ strategies to (re-)define their origin and religious identification may differ from strategies driving identification with their host country. Immigrants who perceive their identities to be incompatible do not necessarily reject the host-national identity, but might turn to the higher-status group to sustain a positive and distinct social identity.