“Immigrants who are seemingly well integrated do not always feel emotionally connected to their destination country”

In your study, you examined the ‘integration paradox’ together with your colleague Didier Ruedin from the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) for Migration and Mobility Studies at the University of Neuchâtel . Could you first briefly explain to our readers what this means and what previous research has revealed?

The so-called integration paradox describes a pattern that is surprising at first glance: immigrants who are objectively well integrated – meaning particularly well educated and professionally successful – often report more discrimination and less belonging to their country of residence than immigrants who are socio-economically disadvantaged.

This seems paradoxical because integration is often understood in a rather one-sided way: education, work and income are supposed to go hand in hand with social recognition and emotional attachment. However, research in recent years shows that this is not necessarily the case, especially for highly educated immigrants. Scholars assume that highly qualified people have higher expectations of fairness and equal treatment and compare themselves more strongly with the majority society, but these comparisons are usually unfavourable and lead to unmet expectations.

To date, research has focused primarily on the conditions that can lead to unmet expectations and reduce attachment to the country of residence, such as overqualification or ethnic discrimination. Less well understood, however, is how immigrants react emotionally to such disappointments and whether educational differences also play a role here. This is precisely where our study comes in.

Your own research was based on data from the Swiss Migration-Mobility Survey, for which around 5,200 people who immigrated to Switzerland between 2016 and 2022 were surveyed several times. What do you consider to be the key findings of your analyses and to what extent do they expand the state of research on the integration paradox?

We looked at people who had recently immigrated to Switzerland and followed them over several years. We were particularly interested in what happens when people become increasingly dissatisfied with their decision to come to Switzerland over time. So what happens when they realise that their expectations of life abroad are not quite being met?

The key finding is that disappointment with the decision to migrate is accompanied by a decline in emotional attachment to Switzerland. This effect is especially pronounced among immigrants with a university degree: they react much more strongly than immigrants without a university degree. In other words, when expectations are disappointed, highly qualified individuals are hit harder emotionally.

It is also important to note that these stronger reactions occur regardless of whether immigrants are perceived as ‘foreign’ or not. In other words, it is not just a matter of visibility or origin, but of expectations and them not being met.

We are thus expanding on previous research by showing that the integration paradox arises not only because highly educated immigrants are more often disappointed, but also because they react more strongly to disappointment.

Against the backdrop of these findings, do you see any obvious conclusions or even recommendations for action that could be drawn from this for political practice? Could your findings and those of others on the integration paradox be used to support the integration of immigrants in Switzerland and other countries, making disappointed expectations less likely?

There is no simple lever that can be pulled to make expectations more realistic and discourage people from emigrating again. International mobility is a reality of life, especially for highly qualified individuals, and emigration must also be understood as the price of global competition for talent.

What can be deduced from the findings, however, is a change of perspective: integration should not only be measured by whether people stay, work or are professionally successful, but also by how they feel and how they assess their life abroad. This is because there is a silent risk of functional integration: people stay in the country, function professionally, but withdraw emotionally.

For politicians, universities and scientific institutions, this means that successful recruitment does not automatically translate into successful retention in the host country. Attractiveness strategies may be effective in recruiting foreign talent, but they can also lead to high expectations and disappointment after arrival. Those who want to attract international talent should therefore not only talk about attractiveness, but also about how to deal with disappointment, frustration and unrealistic hopes.

In the long term, a better understanding of this emotional dimension can help to better understand why former immigrants leave and also improve the quality of living and working together – for immigrants as well as for society as a whole.