Support Network And Social Integration

Social integration is a classical topic for discussion in immigration research.As a non-traditional immigrant importing country,China has an accelerating trend of internationalization in recent years that made the social integration of immigrants a new research direction.For the first time,this paper focuses on the influencing factors of support networks for immigrant integration in China,and explores the impact of support networks with different structures and properties on psychological and behavioral integration.Using the data from the Survey on Foreign Residents in Hangzhou(SFRC 2018),the study found that immigrant social demographic attributes,human capital,and social capital play a key role in social integration through the methods of contingency analysis,latent class analysis(LCA)and multinomial logistic regression analysis.The study found that bridging social capital plays a key role in improving immigration integration,while bonding social capital is not.This discovery directly expands the theory of the differentiation of bridging and bonding social capital proposed by Putnam.At first,at the level of research on network generics,immigrants have basically cut off informal support for affinity with the native state.For immigrants in China,the informal social support of relatives has no significant impact on their social integration,while the formal social support network provides important support for immigrants'behavior and psychological integration in China from the aspects of medical care and organization.Secondly,the size of individual networks is related to social capabilities and willingness to communicate.Local networks,ethnic networks,and international networks within the immigration network are related,but there are also heterogeneities.This study found that under the characteristics of healthy and balanced network,the larger the network size is,regardless of the nature of the source country,the more positive effect on the behavioral integration of immigrants it brings.However,the ethnic group network has a two-way effect,and a strong ethnic group network predicts the social alienation of immigrants in behavior.Only the size of the localized network significantly affects the degree of psychological integration of immigrants.The larger the scale of the localized network,the higher the degree of integration.The ethnicization/internationalization network is not the main factor affecting the degree of psychological integration of immigrants.