What’s in a name? Immigrant’s name choices as a signal of belonging

According to a 2018 pan-EU Eurobarometer survey, 91 per cent of Europeans think it is important that immigrants are committed to the values and norms of their host society.

At the same time, the adoption of these values and norms has consistently proved beneficial for immigrants’ economic and social achievements. Against this backdrop, governments could be tempted to respond by forcing immigrants to adopt the language, identity, and customs of the dominant culture. Such policies may however prove to be largely ineffective, as recent evidence on the adoption of majority-sounding names for the children of foreign-born populations suggests.

Following the global financial crisis and the 2015 arrival of refugees, ‘cultural assimilation’ – the process through which immigrants are seen to voluntarily assume the values, behaviours, and norms of their host society – has emerged as a salient and also sharply divisive issue in America and Western Europe. While data on how fully and quickly immigrants come to ‘resemble’ the societies they move to are rare, the adoption of majority-sounding names among foreign-born populations is a relatively well documented feature of cultural assimilation and an empirically important dimension of native culture that could potentially be taken up by immigrants for their children. It has also become a politically relevant issue in the debate on immigration in recent years. This was illustrated by the heated clash on French TV between right-wing pundit Eric Zemmour and journalist Hapsatou Sy, which ignited a public controversy in France about the importance of a first name in signalling Frenchness.

This is a part of blog post by Jérôme Gonnot.