immigration
Definition
Immigration is the movement of individuals or groups into a new society, where they encounter different cultural norms, institutions, and populations, prompting psychological and behavioural change in both the arriving and receiving groups. It is treated in acculturation research as one condition of intercultural contact, alongside circumstances affecting refugees, asylum seekers, international students, and diasporic communities. Forced migrants and international students represent distinct subpopulations whose adaptation is shaped by time pressures specific to their new sociocultural settings, whether camps or campuses. The psychological consequences of immigration extend beyond the individual, feeding back to group-level phenomena and altering cultural practices on both sides of the contact relationship.
Sources: Berry (2025)
Related Terms
- acculturation (1 shared article)
- integration (1 shared article)
- adaptation (1 shared article)
- commentary (1 shared article)
Applications
Immigration and Acculturation Strategies
Acculturation strategies describe the ways individuals engage with their heritage culture and the larger society of settlement, and immigrants are among the primary populations for whom these strategies have been studied. The integration strategy, involving active engagement with both cultures, has been consistently associated with better psychological and sociocultural adaptation than assimilation, separation, or marginalisation across a wide range of methodologies and immigrant contexts. Approaches such as latent profile analysis and fourfold categorical models offer a more direct test of these differences than regression-based interaction terms, which are limited in representing integration as a lived strategy.
Sources: Berry (2025)
Immigration and Telemedia
The rise of telecommunications has accelerated and increased the frequency with which immigrants engage with both their heritage cultures and the societies in which they settle. Forced migrants and international students benefit particularly from this access, as they face immediate pressures to orient themselves within new sociocultural environments. However, media-based contact differs from classical acculturation in that it can be indirect, symbolic, and unidirectional, making it theoretically distinct from the reciprocal interactions acculturation traditionally presupposes.
Sources: Berry (2025)
