Toward a quantitative approach to migrants integration

¹  Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza Università di Roma - P.le Aldo Moro 2, 00185, Roma, Italy, EU
²  Dipartimento di Matematica, Università di Bologna - P.le Porta S. Donato 5, 40126, Bologna, Italy, EU

Corresponding author: adriano.barra@roma1.infn.it

Received: 5 November 2009
Accepted: 9 March 2010

Abstract

Migration phenomena and all the related issues, like integration of different social groups, are intrinsically complex problems since they strongly depend on several competitive mechanisms as economic factors, cultural differences and many others. By identifying a few essential assumptions, and using the statistical mechanics of complex systems, we propose a novel quantitative approach that provides a minimal theory for those phenomena. We show that the competitive interactions in decision making between a population of N host citizens and P immigrants, a bi-partite spin-glass, give rise to a social consciousness inside the host community in the sense of the associative memory of neural networks. The theory leads to a natural quantitative definition of migrant's “integration" inside the community. From the technical point of view this minimal picture assumes, as control parameters, only general notions like the strength of the random interactions, the ratio between the sizes of the two parties and the cultural influence. Few steps forward, toward more refined models, which include a digression on the kind of the felt experiences and some structure on the random interaction topology (as dilution to avoid the plain mean-field approach) and correlations of experiences felt between the two parties (biasing the distribution of the coupling) are discussed at the end, where we show the robustness of our approach.