Bridge over troubled water? Migration and social capital

The problem of integrating non-Western immigrants into Western welfare states is the focus of this paper. To address this issue, we suggest a social capital approach in which we apply the conceptual pair of bridging social capital (BR), which connects an individual to the broader social structure, and bonding social capital (BO), which closely binds an individual to his or her narrow social group. By this we hope to grasp both the sunny and the more shadowy side of network cooperation and trust in relation to the integration of immigrants. Our data, on non-Western immigrants in Denmark, show a positive relationship between the levels of bridging and bonding capital, suggesting that bonding social capital in the immigrant group does not seem to impede the establishment of the bridging social capital needed for integration.