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This chapter examines the residential contexts of immigrant families, which also affect the starting point for the second generation. Fears that immigrants and their children will end up living in “parallel societies” like the black ghettoes of American cities are vastly overblown. Nevertheless, neighborhoods of immigrant concentration, at least for low-status groups, may create marked disadvantages. The chapter assesses the actual extent, and consequences, of residential segregation, and looks at the role of public policies in shaping these patterns. Neighborhoods are often the places where immigrant minorities and native majorities have initial contacts and thus where the impacts of immigration on the mainstream society are particularly salient. The chapter then considers the emergence of “super-diverse” neighborhoods.

This concluding chapter summarizes the lessons learned from this book's study. This book has analyzed the experiences of immigrants and their children in Europe and North America in the contemporary period, putting heavy emphasis on institutional factors shaping their successes as well as continued difficulties. Yet a consideration of potential remedies calls attention to the fact that the problems that have been discussed are not inevitable or unchangeable. In the years ahead, a wide range of social, economic, and political changes are likely to have positive effects on integration pathways, including: the transformation of population structures; educational and occupational gains made by many children and grandchildren of immigrants who may also live near, work with, and sometimes form families with longer-established natives; and growing political representation of immigrant minorities. Government policies as well as strategies and political struggles by those of immigrant origin themselves also have the potential to ameliorate or reduce difficulties they currently face.

The inclusion of immigrants in general and Muslim immigrants in particular is straining liberal democracies in western Europe. This chapter re-examines an earlier and more expansive understanding of tolerance. To be tolerant, it is now agreed, means to be willing to put up with others that one dislikes or ideas that one disagrees with. So understood, tolerance is a synonym for toleration. Toleration has become not merely the primary but also the sole meaning of tolerance as a value in democratic politics. The consequence has been to bury an older understanding of tolerance: to “support, nourish, maintain, sustain, preserve.” The chapter calls attention to this older understanding of tolerance because it points the way to recognizing what contemporary measures of tolerance actually are capturing. It argues that in addition to identifying those with ill will toward immigrants, standard measures of anti-immigrant attitudes also identify those whose stance toward immigrants is supportive, affirmative, and inclusive—so much so that they treat immigrants as full members of a common community.

Chapter 6 moves beyond formal rights to substantive social rights, and it provides a systematic comparison of immigrants' social rights across the six countries, using the Luxembourg Income Study Database (LIS). It compares the substantive social rights of immigrants (foreign born) and native citizens. Substantive rights are operationalized as participation in transfer programs and receipt of benefits. The analysis reveals a stratification in the social rights of immigrants and native citizens across welfare states, with the widest differences between the rights of native citizens in relation to noncitizens and ethnic minority immigrants. However, the analysis also confirms the importance of the type of welfare regime for immigrants' substantive rights. The welfare state policies of the social democratic regime countries are more effective in poverty reduction for both citizens and immigrants than those of the other regime countries.