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Why do some immigrant communities establish dense ethno-religious infrastructures, while others do not come together as organized groups? This study investigates the development of organizational infrastructures in immigrant communities, addressing two major strands of immigration literature: ethnic-group formation and urban ethnic enclaves. We challenge the "groupist" assumption that demographic presence necessarily leads to organized ethnic communities and examine implications of major paradigms of ethnic group and enclave formation: culturalist, reactive, and structuralist. To this end we employ a novel framework that examines the full spectrum of ethnic groupness, from merely nominal co-nationals to highly institutionalized communities. We analyze an original dataset of 25,117 ethnic businesses and ethno-religious organizations catering to 54 immigrant minorities across more than 5,000 local minority communities in Germany. Our research reveals that minority communities with similar population sizes can exhibit vastly differently developed organizational ecologies, questioning the adequacy of proxying community organization by community size in quantitative studies. In contrast to a burgeoning literature on friendship networks, we find no evidence for the structuralist claim that intersectional consolidation or within-group homogeneity promote the establishment of ethnicity-focused organizations. Instead, various dimensions of cultural distances between immigrants' origins and the host society consistently predict the presence of organizations. Finally, our study produces nuanced results on the hypothesis that enclave formation is primarily a response to discrimination: secure residence titles (a measure of legal inclusion) but also the local vote-share of anti-immigration parties (a measure of rejection) are associated with sparser ethno-religious infrastructures. Our insights challenge both essentialist and radically constructivist perspectives on immigrant group formation.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Trinity Term is convened by Kasimir Dederichs, Said Hassan and Anica Waldendorf..  For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.