Since the beginning of the 90’s, West European countries have all become countries of

immigration. Started by the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the Breakup of the former Yugoslavia
(1991), continued 20 years later with the War in Syria (2011) and in Ukraine (2013), the
phenomenon of migration has then continually grown. Problems of integration raised by different
waves of immigration have widely been studied by occidental sociologists. As distinguished from
the American “classic” works, who have been focused on the Community dimension, the story of
the migrant groups and their inner dynamics (Thomas and Znaniecki), the European works of Crul
and Tucci took an interest in the variability of conditions for migrants’ inclusion, determined by the
national framework of each country and policies. These two international comparative studies
extend older research, into which these authors have sometimes taken part (Crul took part in
studies in 2003, 2006, 2009). Although Tucci and Crul have chosen to analyze inequalities between
the children of immigrants and students of native parentage, and to highlight the effects of
national pattern of integration on the path of migrants’ descendants, we notice their methods and
their results are not analog on every point.
First of all, it’s in the choice of the location of the study we can observe a significant difference.
The Tucci’s research, published in 2010, is about two European countries: France and Germany.
The writer analyzes the means of participating for the migrants’ descendants (the second
generation), North Africans in France and Turks in Germany, and compares them with the native
ones. To achieve it, Tucci studies two socializing institutions: School (student graduation) and Work
(access to the job market). In 2013, Crul compares in six European countries (Sweden, Germany,
Netherlands, Belgium, France and Austria), the school trajectories of the second-generation young
Turks (born in Europe, with parents born in Turkey having a low socio-economic status) with the
native ones. Crul focuses more his research on the national school institutions. He measures,
between the two groups: Migrants’ descendants and natives, the differences of access to
qualifications in higher education.
The two writers seem to deal with the same object of study, namely the specific national
institutional context influence on second-generation migrants’ integration. However, the way to
achieve it is very different, the questions and hypotheses raised by the latter are equally so. For
Tucci, the question is to know in which segment of today’s society the immigrants and their
descendants are incorporated, and which objective and subjective forms take their participation.
He supposes the means of participating for these two groups refer to two social safe-distancing
processes being the result of a mix of structural, institutional and symbolic mechanisms. On other
hand, Crul wonder why the national school institutions don’t reach to integrate these populations.
According to this writer, the integration is formed and pre-structured by a specific national
institutional context.
Other observed differences, the used methodology and the temporality of the successful surveys.
Tucci has performed a quantitative analysis and has mobilized statistical tools. His analysis is based
on some representative data stemming from two big national surveys: The SOEP’s (German
Socio-Economic Panel) survey, established in 1984 and renewed every year, and the survey “​Etude
​ de l’histoire familiale” (“Study of the familial history” in French), conducted in 1999, by the INSEE.
Conversely, Crul has favored a qualitative method (interviews, questionnaires) and has relied on
the TIES’ (specially created for this study) international survey. This survey took place between
April, 2006 and December, 2008 in eight countries. However, we notice that the chosen population
for making those two analyses is restricted to adults aged from 18 to 40 (from 18 to 40: INSEE;
from 16 to 40: SOEP; from 18 to 35: TIES).
Besides these few identified differences, mainly of a methodological nature, it is important to
notice the similarities between these two articles, also numerous. The most important, because it
minimizes the range of these works, is the poor sample chosen for doing these analyses. Indeed,
TIES’ survey represents only 9771 respondents (6145 second-generation migrants and 3626
natives). The SOEP’s survey counts just more respondents with only 15 741 chosen households
(sample from A to F). A sample extremely poor, in front of the 800 000 estimated Turks living in
Germany, whom doesn’t allow to go into specifics, in particular when it comes to study gender
​ the contrary, the survey “​Etude de l’histoire familiale” gives a clearly more
differences. On
important sample of people. All in all, a little more of 380 000 men and women participated in this
study.
Crul identifies three angles to the TIES’ survey: the natives with few or not qualified parents
represent less than 15% of the full sample; performing a survey a posteriori is risky because the
respondents have a selective memory of the past; the replies are partially determined by the
national context and the needs of the school system. For his part, Tucci also points out elements,
between Germany and France, not inconsiderable differences that can bias his own results: the
recent German legislative evolution and the historical French-style universalism. The law of the soil
has been introduced in the German Law only in 2000, whereas it exists in France since 1889. This
historical and legislative difference ignores a large part of people that could have been retained to
carry out this research. The French school, founded with the laicity since 1905, refuses all
expression of particularisms. On the opposite, Germany is the only European country where the
education of the confessional religion is written in the Constitution. Given that the French and
German schools don’t work the same way, then it’s possible that they don’t produce the same
inequities.

The Tucci’s research highlights the fact that the migrants’ descendants don’t experiment exclusion
at the same moment. The Turk migrants’ descendants are excluded as early as the school when the
ethnical penalty of the North African migrants’ descendants takes place when they enter the labor
market. In Germany, the exclusion process is described as social safe-distancing by relegation,
whereas for France, it’s described as social safe-distancing by discrimination. These two types of
safe-distancing are both founded on mechanisms operating at structural, institutional and
symbolic levels. In Germany, immigrants incorporate and transmit to the new generations a
natural order of things (natives are on the upside, migrants are on the downside). In France, the
citizenship and the school favor the internalization of the principle of equality. However, this
principle contributes to hide the borders. The skin color, the name or the accent are as many
characteristics intervening as release mechanisms of discrimination. The approaches of
middle-classes, to which the North African migrants’ descendants aspirate, are repressed by
secretive discriminating practices. To compare the effects of institutionalized arrangements at
school, Crul chooses to focus on differentiation, one of the two aspects the most important to
explain the differences between the school systems. By analyzing the school trajectories, he has
identified the factors influencing these institutional arrangements: the age of leaving the school;
the number of hours done at school; the age at the moment of orientation/selection for the
secondary; the permeability of the diploma fields; the duration of school days; the role of parental
support. The writer shows in this way that these factors have negative effects on the migrants’
descendants.