Arbeitsbereich
Migration und Mobilität
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Understanding Patterns of Immigrants’ Integration in Online Spaces
Jisu Kim, Emilio Zagheni, André Grow-Böser; in Zusammenarbeit mit Soazic Elise Wang Sonne (World Bank Group, Washington, D.C., Vereinigte Staaten), Kiran Garimella (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, Vereinigte Staaten), Ingmar Weber (Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Deutschland)
Ausführliche Beschreibung
Research on migrant integration has typically focused on studying interactions and relationships between migrants and natives in physical spaces, such as neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces, as well as along dimensions of socioeconomic status. However, with the advent of the internet and the proliferation of social media platforms, a significant portion of human interaction is now taking place online. It is thus important to also assess integration patterns in online spaces, as activities and social connections formed online can have important consequences for integration along classic dimensions, and may reduce or expand inequalities, or reflect existing patterns of disparities.
In this project, we aim to examine the patterns of immigrants’ integration into online spaces along with key dimensions that are considered in traditional integration research. For example, we curated a high-quality dataset to quantify patterns of new online social connections among immigrants in the United States. Specifically, we initially focused on Twitter (before it became X), and leveraged the unique features of these data, in combination with a propensity score matching technique, to isolate the effects of migration events on social network formation. The results indicate, among other findings, that migration events lead to an expansion of the migrants’ networks in terms of the people they follow on Twitter in the destination country, relative to the networks of users who have similar characteristics but have not moved. However, we did not find any evidence that migration events expand the migrants' networks of followers in the destination country. In a related project, we found that Twitter users tend to connect with others also based on their country of origin.
In addition, our analyses of Twitter data revealed that migration is associated with an increase in positive expressed sentiments among immigrants that lasts up to one year post-migration, without a corresponding decrease in negative sentiments. This points to a shift in how immigrants express themselves online following migration. Importantly, this effect varies across groups, with younger individuals, women, and those with stronger linguistic ties exhibiting larger increases in positive sentiment, thus highlighting the role of demographic and social factors in shaping post-migration experiences.
In parallel, we used de-identified Facebook data on 2.1 million recent international migrants from 165 sending countries to five major destination countries – Canada, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States – and tracked 3.9 billion friendships formed before and after migration (Breen et al., 2026). We identified a distinct six-month migration preparatory phase preceding migration, during which migrants sharply increase the number of new social ties with individuals in the destination country. During this period, migrants also join online community groups oriented toward integration. Over 45% of migrants join such groups, and those who do form over 50% more destination country ties than those who do not. Many of the ties formed during this preparatory phase are long-lasting, with a substantial share later developing into close friendships. These findings show that social integration begins prior to physical relocation and highlight how digital platforms reshape the timing of integration processes.
Taken together, these results indicate that migrants’ online integration involves multiple dimensions: expansion of social connections, persistence of homophilic clustering, and shifts in emotional expression. These patterns likely reflect broader mechanisms of online behavior, whereby individuals simultaneously adapt to new contexts while remaining anchored in existing social and cultural structures.
Ridgeline-Diagramm des Anteils der in den USA ansässigen Freund*innen nach der Migration für Migrant*innen
The y-axis represents number of years spent in the U.S. Here, we observe that as the number of years migrants spent in the U.S. increased, the fraction of friends they had after migration shifted towards the right. This indicates that migrants who had been in the U.S. for longer periods of time had more U.S.- based friends on Twitter. More specifically, we observe a clear shift for migrants starting in the third year since migration. On the other hand, we also observe that the distributions of the fraction of friends before and after migration were identical in the first year since migration and in the seventh year since migration or later. © Kim, J.; Wang Sonne, S. E.; Garimella, K.; Grow, A.; Weber, I. G.; Zagheni, E. (2023). Online social integration of migrants: evidence from Twitter. Migration Studies, 1–28
Deutschland, Vereinigte Staaten, Welt
Publikationen
Breen, C. F.; Bailey, M.; Rivera, V.; Zagheni, E.; Redmiles, E.:
SocArXiv papers. unpublished. (2026)
Kim, J.; Weber, I. G.; Zagheni, E.:
International Migration Review, 1–30. (2026)
Kim, J.; Weber, I. G.; Zagheni, E.:
SocArXiv papers. unpublished. (2025)
Khatua, A.; Zagheni, E.; Weber, I. G.:
In: Proceedings of the 17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-23): Limassol, Cyprus, June 5th - 8th, 2023, 1143–1147. Palo Alto, CA: AAAI Press. (2023)
Kim, J.; Wang Sonne, S. E.; Garimella, K.; Grow, A.; Weber, I. G.; Zagheni, E.:
MPIDR Working Paper WP-2023-012. (2023)
Kim, J.; Wang Sonne, S. E.; Garimella, K.; Grow, A.; Weber, I. G.; Zagheni, E.:
Migration Studies 11:4, 544–571. (2023)
Chin, A.; Coimbra Vieira, C.; Kim, J.:
In: WebSci '22: proceedings of the 14th ACM Web Science Conference, Barcelona, Spain, 26-29 June 2022, 296–301. New York: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). (2022)
Kim, J.; Pratesi, F.; Rossetti, G.; Sîrbu, A.; Giannotti, F.:
Social Network Analysis and Mining, 1–23. (2022)
Kim, J.; Sîrbu, A.; Rossetti, G.; Giannotti, F.:
In: Complex networks and their applications X: Volume 1, Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications COMPLEX NETWORKS 2021, 130–141. Cham: Springer. (2022)