The article explores the significant role played by the Church in shaping the participation patterns of migrants in nine rural areas in the regions of Piedmont, Latium and Campania. In an era marked by increasing global migration, rural communities are undergoing demographic transformations, with migrants forming a substantial part of these populations. While the experiences of migrants in urban settings have received significant attention, their experiences in rural areas have been comparatively understudied. The article investigates how the Church, as a central institution in many rural communities, affects migrant integration, social cohesion, and community involvement. With the help of interviews, ethnographic observations and legal texts, the article examines the multifaceted dimensions of the Church's influence on migrants' participation. Findings suggest that the Church serves as a critical bridge between migrants and the community. It facilitates the formation of social networks, enhancing migrants' sense of belonging and encouraging their active participation in local activities. Additionally, the Church often provides migrants with access to essential services, such as language classes, job placement assistance, and social services, which further facilitate their integration into rural communities. In conclusion, this article sheds light on the role of the Church in shaping the participation patterns of migrants in rural areas, emphasizing its potential to facilitate social integration and community engagement.

The process of arrival plays an important role for the local integration of immigrants. “Arrival” in this paper has a two-fold meaning: first, it means the process of migration and the spatial and physical arrival of immigrants; second, it refers to the feeling of belonging to a (new) local community. Belonging is not the same as integration, which often goes hand in hand with a one-sided demand to assimilate and is not necessarily expressed in naturalization, as defined in the Austrian Integration Act.

Rural regions are exposed to a variety of difficulties, such as emigration of young people, aging, or the decrease of infrastructure, leading to "places left-behind" (e.g. Rodríguez-Pose 2017; Pike et al. 2023). Furthermore, the immigration of foreigners and refugees has become a special challenge for rural regions as they are often not prepared to provide appropriate housing or support infrastructure.

This paper is going to analyse the institutionalized/formal and non-institutionalised/informal forms of participation of TCNs in rural areas of Carinthia (Austria) as well as the involved actors involved in inclusion and empowerment. Methodologically, the paper is based on 15 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups with female immigrants. The empirical findings illustrate that “arriving” in a new local community goes hand in hand with a certain sense of belonging. Immigrants can become important actors of rural empowerment (also for other immigrants) and political influence themselves in the fields of sports, church, culture, civil society organisations, and other forms of participation that rural areas have to offer.

Despite an extensive body of research on electoral participation among voters with migration backgrounds, migrants’ participation beyond electoral politics has been neglected in Western Europe, where the right to vote is widely reserved for citizens. Acknowledging the changing nature of participation channels, this article focuses on migrants’ involvement in public protests and its fundamental determinants in two diverse national and regional contexts. Taking a novel empirical approach, it investigates data from the European Social Survey (ESS) regional statistics (NUTS) from 2014 to 2022. It reveals the patterns of protest participation among migrant respondents from Vienna and Brussels. A key question is whether the two opposite social and political contexts for migrants’ institutional political participation have been levelled when it comes to non-institutional participation, such as political protests. Furthermore, it asks whether the presence or absence of the right to vote at the local level determines migrants’ engagement in protest activism. The comparative analysis finds a divergence in patterns in migrants’ protest involvement rates in the two cases under study. It presents evidence of higher levels of protest participation among migrant respondents in Vienna than migrants in the Brussels region. This indicates that the explanatory mechanisms for protest participation operate differently from participation in institutional forms, proposing the need for a theoretical reconceptualization.

There is a widespread assumption that especially large-scale immigration and the resulting (ethnic) diversity unavoidably and unidirectionally undermine social cohesion (by decreasing generalized trust, declining support for public welfare, challenging social distribution, etc.). While empirical evidence on this question remains inconclusive, the assumption is being challenged by authors who find that structural inequalities (at national, municipal, or neighborhood-level) are the real cause of societal disintegration and exclusion (e.g. Uslaner 2003, Holtung 2010). This is supported by findings of existing studies suggesting that income inequality at destination can partly explain differences in migrants’ labor-market participation (e.g. Tubergen et al. 2004) and other aspects of their integration. Going further in this direction and turning the original argument on its head, we argue that instead of the arrival of newcomers undermining social cohesion, it is a lack of social cohesion and equality that undermines the subsequent integration of newcomers, while also shaping local residents’ perceptions and opinions about this process.

In this paper, we begin to explore this relationship both conceptually and empirically, by looking at the case of Austria and combining official aggregated municipal data with an original survey conducted across all Austrian municipalities within the Whole-COMM project in 2023. We identify clusters of municipalities with similar patterns of structural social and economic conditions and then analyze different relationships between these conditions and the level and perceptions of integration in different local contexts. Our analysis will show, therefore, how contextual and structural factors explain the often-significant variation in local integration outcomes as well as local residents’ perceptions of these outcomes and of the underlying integration processes. In doing so, the article follows the important call for a 'de-migranticization' of migration research (Dahinden 2016) and will contribute significantly to a better understanding of the dynamics and processes of social inclusion in diverse societies.