Social Networks, Alienation, and National-Belonging among New Muslim Immigrants in the U.S. and Sweden

There is a growing need to understand the complexity of factors shaping the lives of new immigrants in Western nations.  This is especially true of new immigrants from Muslim nations. One important factor that shapes the lives of Muslim immigrants is the degree to which they possess or lack access to mainstream social capital networks in Western nations like Sweden and the United States (U.S.). The Seed Grant from the Maryland Population Research Center  would be use to develop and refine a NIH proposal on social capital networks among Muslim immigrants to be funded at the R03 level.  A pilot study on national and cultural belonging among ethnic minority teenagers in Sweden, a study already conducted in Sweden during the Fall of 2004 will eb extended using the seed grant.  In a nutshell,  Seed Grant funding would be used to  (1) conduct an extensive review of the literature on new immigrants and social capital networks; (2) use census data to locate sites in the U.S. that are comparable to pre-identified  sites in Sweden; and (3) conduct preliminary case studies examining the social capital networks of two Muslim immigrant families in Sweden and two Muslim immigrant families in the U.S. In the face of recent events in Western nations like the September 11th terrorists attacks of 2001 and the November 2005 riots in Paris, it is imperative that scholars capture, with demographic breadth and ethnographic depth, the complexity of factors that may alienate Muslim communities from mainstream social networks.