Once in a Blue Moon: Barriers to Intermarriage among Second-Generation Muslims in France

Abstract

Intermarriage between native- and immigrant-origin populations has traditionally been considered a tell-tale sign of assimilation among migration researchers. In Western Europe, a large and recent literature has identified the Muslim/non-Muslim boundary as a key relational and symbolic divide partially blocking assimilation - as exemplified in the low rates of intermarriage among the second generation documented in prior work and typically attributed to cultural constraints, such as the transmission of family norms and high levels of individual religiosity. In this paper, we content that past research does not sufficiently acknowledge and operationalize structural constraints (Blau, Blum and Schwartz 1982) as well as educational assortative mating in constraining intermarriage rates among the second generation above and beyond cultural factors. Furthermore, by looking at patterns of status exchange, we investigate whether barriers to intermarriage between natives and second generation Muslim immigrants emerge from hierarchical stratification or horizontal differentiation between these populations. Finally, we investigate whether barriers to intermarriage have a basis on ethnicity, religion or both. This paper does so in the case of France - the European countries with the highest share of self-identified Muslims - using log-linear models on high quality survey data featuring a large sample of natives and second-generation Muslim respondents.