Jozefien De Bock has written a very useful and readable volume that reexamines the concept of “parallel societies,” or immigrants’ spatial, social, and cultural self-organization while isolated within the majority society. The expression, first introduced by sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, has prompted scholarly and public debates about migration and integration since the 1980s. De Bock returns to this debate with a case study of Mediterranean migrants and immigrants in Ghent, Belgium. De Bock studies the initial years of guest workers’ arrival in Belgium during the 1960s and 1970s. This volume will interest a wide audience of scholars and general readers, offering impressive research based on state-level policy making and migrant oral history interviews conducted by the author and archived interview transcripts. The book challenges assumptions that immigrants lived parallel lives in the 1960s and 1970s by examining the extent to which immigrants’ personal agency prevailed in response to structural constraints.
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