How to make integration work? Public debates addressing this question in the German context often identify immigrants’ place of residence as the key. Discussions revolve around the emergence of neighborhoods where immigrants and their descendants live their lives separate from the majority population. At the same time, they ponder over the consequences of increased spatial proximity to the majority population, potentially fostering contact to them.

Empirical findings concerning this question are mixed. Several studies find a strong association between immigrants’ neighborhood compositions and their contact with the majority population. Other studies, however, report much weaker associations. These findings suggest that to this date, it remains unclear, whose social integration really profits from spatial proximity to the majority and whose does not. Moreover, we do not know why such differences exist.

In a recently published article, ISS researcher Hanno Kruse provided an answer to these questions concerning the friendship choices of young immigrants and their descendants in Germany. Combining information from the “Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries (CILS4EU)” and small-scale neighborhood data from a private geomarketing company, his analyses provided a rigorous test of the association between young immigrants’ neighborhood and friendship compositions in Germany.

Results clearly point towards the importance of immigrants’ social background: the higher it is the stronger the association between spatial proximity to the majority and friendships with them. There is no indication, however, that the social groups differ in how much they rely on their neighborhood context when making friends. Instead, the analyses point toward two other explanations for these differences: First, immigrants with a higher social background face, on average, more majority members at their schools, yielding different meeting opportunities even when neighborhood compositions are identical. Second, immigrants of higher social background are more successful in turning contact to majority members into actual friendships. To summarize, spatial proximity to the majority indeed seems to be a necessary condition for a successful social integration of young immigrants in Germany. However, its impact on young immigrants’ social integration is far from universal.