The following contributions constitute the second round of this Review's debate on immigration policy. Whereas the essays published in the first round (SPSR 7(1), 2001: 95-118) focused on a concrete case of policy reform -namely, the current revision of the Aliens Law in Switzerland -this second round discusses one particular aspect of national immigration policies: the question of immigrant integration. Long neglected, the question of how to ensure immigrants' insertion in a host society is one of the most controversial aspects of the national immigration policies in Europe today. Current controversies in Germany about the sense and nonsense of a Leitkultur are just one expression of this search for a new paradigm for expressing the mutual expectations that structure the relationship between citizens and immigrants, between the "old" and "new" members of society. The discussions on the desirability and the limits of multiculturalism are another expression of this broader debate which has spread across all European countries and societies.
These political controversies are mirrored in the academic debates on the term "integration". As the following contributions show, the meaning of integration is profoundly contested, reaching from more cultural notions of assimilation to more socioeconomic conceptions of participation in the different institutions of society. In contrast to the discipline of sociology, where these questions have gained a firm basis in both research and curricula, no similar development has hitherto taken place in political science. Our debate offers a taste of the different theoretical and empirical arguments that are at the core of current academic controversies on integration.
It starts off with a representative fraction of the advanced sociological debate on integration. Hartmut Esser, Professor at the University of Mannheim, identifies the different dimensions in which immigrant integration takes place and offers a typology of social-integration and assimilation models. Discussing the chances and challenges that face these different models in society, he argues that there is no alternative to structural assimilation if ethnic stratification is to be avoided.
Michael Bommes, Professor at the Pedagogical University, Freiburg, and Researcher at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS), OsnabrΓΌck, presents an alternative approach to integration. Drawing on the concepts of systems theory, he