With the TIES Stakeholders Conference we want to organise a dialogue to formulate what constitutes good practice based on country and city comparison and to set up an international agenda of best practice.

European countries face practically the same problems with integration, but they still are all formulating their own national answers and achieving different results – even though many countries have migrants of the same national origin, having come in at the same time and bringing with them the same kind of capital. Besides, processes of economic reconstruction in the various European countries have influenced these groups in similar ways.

The relative position of the second generation with regard to education and labour force participation is often viewed as a robust measure of group integration as a whole. Studying specific ethnic groups with the same starting position (the second generation) makes it easier to compare them cross-nationally and gives the opportunity to study the importance of the receiving context in integration processes.

The international research project TIES (The Integration of the European Second generation) focused on comparison across Europe. Different national contexts were viewed as a natural ‘laboratory’ for investigating the influence of a wide range of universal and targeted policies and allowing comparison on their effects on the children of immigrants.

Conference aims and objectives

Participants