In The Language of Political Incorporation, Amy Liu examines the determinants of the political incorporation of immigrants into local communities. She argues and demonstrates that the diversity of migrants’ linguistic networks explains varying levels of civic engagement and trust in institutions. In other words, it is language, rather than country of origin or national identity, that explains the political incorporation of immigrants.
This excellent book sets itself apart in several ways. It focuses on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), a region neglected by previous research on Chinese immigrants. It is not centered on one country but offers a comparative analysis of immigrant communities in five CEE capitals: Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest, Belgrade, and Zagreb. It creatively deals with several significant methodological challenges, including how to measure the political incorporation of migrants when existing indicators will not do. It carefully considers alternative explanations and establishes the potential for the book’s core argument to travel to other cases. Last, but certainly not least, it examines the link between language and political incorporation by taking account of migrants’ overall multilingual repertoires instead of looking only at their proficiency in the host country’s language.
Liu argues that two types of linguistic networks crucially influence the political incorporation of immigrants in CEE, because they affect with whom migrants interact. Bonding networks are defined by linguistic homogeneity and high barriers to entry. Membership in them, therefore, provides mostly contact with co-ethnics. In contrast, bridging networks are characterized by linguistic diversity and the presence of a shared lingua franca that is widely spoken by many migrants (either Mandarin or the local language). These networks connect migrants to a more ethnically heterogeneous set of contacts, including locals who speak the lingua franca. Migrants’ linguistic repertoires thus determine what kinds of networks they are situated in and what types of brokers they rely on for the provision of goods, services, and information. This, in turn, affects their political incorporation: those in bonding networks have lower levels of political incorporation because they remain insular, whereas those in bridging networks are connected more broadly and are therefore more politically incorporated.
Liu offers a coherent account of Chinese migrants’ political incorporation in CEE based on a thoughtful and thorough research design. Following the introduction, her theory chapter conceptualizes bonding and bridging networks and links them to political incorporation. Next, Liu offers an overview of Chinese migrants in CEE, traces their paths to the region, compares their communities to counterparts in other parts of the world, and introduces the five primary research sites. Six empirical chapters follow. Chapter 4 introduces the survey data and presents the results of statistical analyses that establish the link between network type and political incorporation: migrants in bridging networks have higher levels of political incorporation than those in bonding networks. The next two chapters dive more deeply into two of the cases. Chapter 5 examines why Chinese migrants in Hungary—a country whose competitive authoritarian government espouses right-wing, anti-immigrant narratives and policies—display consistently high levels of political incorporation. It explains this anomaly by arguing that the Chinese community in Hungary has purposely been excluded from Victor Orbán’s anti-immigrant rhetoric as part of his efforts to foster a strategic relationship with China. Chapter 6 takes advantage of a natural experiment that presented itself to Liu as she administered her survey in Romania, when the local Chinese community felt disproportionally targeted by a government initiative to curb tax fraud. Liu shows that a sense of betrayal was felt particularly strongly among migrants in bridging networks, whose incorporation levels suffered as a result, while the already lower incorporation levels of migrants in bonding networks remained unchanged. Chapters 7 and 8 provide evidence for the generalizability of Liu’s argument by extending the analysis to Muslim migrants and to Western Europe, respectively. They present results consistent with the findings of previous chapters for Muslims in CEE and for the Chinese in Lisbon. Chapter 9 looks at the public attitudes toward Chinese migrants among locals in CEE and provides evidence that contact with migrants has a positive effect on those attitudes. Chapter 10 concludes by offering a list of key policy recommendations for how governments can facilitate the incorporation of migrant communities, such as promoting lingua franca use, dispersing settlement, and maintaining regularized channels of communication.
A particular strength of the book is Liu’s creativity in capturing concepts that are difficult to measure, starting with her main independent variable: migrants’ language networks. Actually measuring such networks would be exceedingly difficult—indeed, likely futile—so Liu infers a latent network from migrants’ language repertoires. Ultimately, her argument is sufficiently intuitive and plausible that her account is convincing despite not directly measuring the network members, ties, and effects she posits. Liu’s creative measurement choices also show in her main dependent variable, the political incorporation of migrants. Measuring political incorporation poses a challenge when the migrant communities in question do not have citizenship and therefore cannot engage in those activities often used to gauge political engagement, such as voting or running for office. Liu therefore uses surveys to measure trust in and engagement with locals and local state institutions by asking, for example, whether migrants would report being robbed to the police, if they had experienced discrimination at the immigration office, or whether they would help a local who is looking lost.
Another important strength of Liu’s book is her anticipation of and systematic engagement with potential challenges to her conclusions. Having demonstrated a general correlation between network type and political incorporation, she carefully analyzes Hungary as a potentially deviant case, leverages a natural experiment in Romania to suggest a causal relationship, extends the analysis to non-Chinese migrants and to another part of Europe, and factors in the attitudes of locals toward migrant communities. In other words, Liu carefully and thoughtfully builds her case and, in the process, strengthens the reader’s confidence in her argument and conclusions.
Convinced by Liu’s theoretical propositions and empirical results, I would only offer two critiques. First, the inference, as opposed to the measurement, of the social networks to which Liu ascribes principal explanatory power may leave some readers wanting more direct evidence of the network itself and of its effects. Providing that evidence would not necessarily have required measuring language networks or using full-fledged social network analysis methods to examine them. But some additional “proof of concept” (beyond a short section on validity) would have been useful, for example by offering additional qualitative evidence to support the assumption that the latent network and its effects are real.
Second, readers who are not steeped in previous research on the integration and political incorporation of immigrant communities would have benefited from a more deliberate and extensive elaboration of the implications of Liu’s findings that went beyond a brief overview of the book’s contributions early on and a short discussion of three key policy suggestions at the end. Not being an expert on the topic, I would have welcomed additional guidance on how to situate the book and its findings in relevant bodies of research, which previous assumptions and conclusions to question, and what primary insights to take away. It would have been similarly useful to offer further discussion of what the book leaves unanswered, which new questions it raises, and potential avenues for future research. In sum, Liu could have done more to situate her book in the existing body of knowledge on immigration, immigration policy, and the integration and incorporation of immigrants.
These, however, are minor quibbles relative to the book’s strengths. Liu makes a genuinely novel contribution to our understanding of crucially important political and policy questions in a world in which enormous numbers of people are displaced by violence, pandemics, climate change, poverty, and other disasters. Her account teaches us a great deal about how and why newcomers become politically incorporated and how this incorporation can be facilitated. In the process, it highlights important benefits of heterogeneity, which more often than not tends to be associated with variety of negative outcomes. Finally, the book demonstrates that it is to our peril that language is far too often ignored or discounted by political scientists as either a key independent variable or as a factor that profoundly shapes the very nature of politics—despite the reality that language is not only inherently political but is also consequential for everything political.
