• John Bowen, Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St-Louis

Why "European Islam" is a Useless Concept: The Argument for Tracing Contrastive Genealogies

Despite recent claims that Muslims are converging on a new European Islam', I argue that underneath superficial resemblances among statements and adaptationswhich one finds in other world regions as wellIslamic institutions and arguments have taken quite different directions in each of several major European countries. I focus on the cases of France and Britain to make the argument that Muslims' trajectories and host-country structures interact to generate specific, and indeed divergent, forms of Islam. I argue that despite the emergence of Europe-wide Islamic associations and the creation of somewhat similar national structuresIslamic Councils for examplethis finding supports arguments for path-dependency in the development of long-term European institutions.

• Gary Freeman, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin

Insights, Controversies, and Progress in the Comparative Analysis of Immigration

• Leo Lucassen, Department of History, Leiden University

Why Comparisons Through Time and Space Matter: Migration History as Social Science

Migration and settlement processes in the past are often considered (both by historians and social scientists) as interesting, but in the end not really relevant for understanding present-day developments. Partly this understanding of the role of historical analysis is due to the idea that the past is merely the first phase of the present: nice to know, but not essential. Another argument for regarding migration history as scholarly frippery or (nostalgic) folklore is that the circumstances in past periods (or other areas for that matter) are so different that comparisons are useless. Finally, the production of historical knowledge about migration in the past can give way to a simplistic politically correct legitimization of the present: migration is a structural phenomenon of human societies, leading to the conclusion that there is nothing new under the sun, so why worry?

• Patrick Simon, Research Unit « International Migrations and Minorities », INED

How to Think Race and Study Ethnic and Racial Divisions in a Color-blind Society: Sketches for a Transatlantic Comparison

In the European context, the role of race is rarely mentioned in mainstream studies of integration. The divide occurs in Europe between research on immigration and integration, on the one hand, and research on discrimination, on the other. The same can be said about ethnicity, which, for many years, was indirectly addressed through the concepts of citizenship until the emergence of a second generation issue. In western European societies, most of the descendents of the labor migrants who came in the 60s and 70s have reached adulthood and are formally citizens of their country. But the persistence of an ethnic penalty puts some of the second generations at a disadvantage compared to their native-of-natives counterparts in access to the labor market and housing and even in educational attainment. Discrimination has therefore become a major political issue in Europe. The logic behind this discrimination is still debated: should it be understood as the repetition of a classical cycle -unequal treatments will disappear with assimilation of the 3rd generation and their social invisibility- or are we facing a new dynamic of exclusion based on an emerging saliency of ethnicity and race?

• Richard Alba, Program in Sociology, Graduate Center of the City University of New York

The Integration Imperative:  The Children of Third-World Immigrants Encounter the Schools of the West.

An enormous challenge for the societies of North America and western Europe is to integrate the children of low-wage immigrants through educational institutions, so that these youngsters will be in a position to replace the huge baby-boom cohorts of native workers who will be retiring during the next quarter century.  This paper, based on a large-scale international project, begins the task of assessing how well these school systems are doing.

Articulating the Politics of Race and Immigration: New Reflections in the Transatlantic Mirror

Are race and immigration part of the same problem? It all depends on what Michel Foucault called problematization. In the 1990s, France seemed oblivious to race, while the issue was most visible in the United States. Conversely, at that time, immigration occupied center stage in France, not in the United States. In the years 2000, the ground has shifted: race has (re?)gained prominence in France, while immigration has become, yet again, a red-button issue in the United States. This transatlantic evolution makes it possible to reflect on the various articulations of race and immigration. On the one hand, the American collision course between affirmative action and immigration policies can translate on the French side into a tradeoff between so-called diversity and anti-immigrant politics. On the other hand, the French debate on statistics that are part ethnic and part racial, and the racialization of immigration in France (and beyond, in Europe), help reflect on the American debates about Latino migrants and Arab-Americans, as well as the xenophobic reformulations of racism in the allegedly postracial Obama presidency.