Toward a quantitative approach to migrants integration

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 among 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 strength of the random interactions, the ratio among the two party sizes and the cultural influence. Few steps forward, toward more refined models, which include some structure on the random interaction topology (as dilution to avoid the plain mean field approach) and correlations of experiences felt among the two parties (biasing the distribution of the coupling) are discussed at the end, where we show the robustness of our approach.

References in corpus (6)

• Broken Replica Symmetry Bounds in the Mean Field Spin Glass Model
• Social Balance on Networks: The Dynamics of Friendship and Enmity
• Quantitative relations between corruption and economic factors
• The mean field Ising model trough interpolating techniques
• Irreducible free energy expansion and overlaps locking in mean field spin glasses
• Stochastic Stability: a Review and Some Perspectives

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Equilibrium statistical mechanics of bipartite spin systems
• Free energy and complexity of spherical bipartite models
• How glassy are neural networks?
• An analysis of a large dataset on immigrant integration in Spain. The Statistical Mechanics perspective on Social Action
• Quantum decision making by social agents
• Mean field bipartite spin models treated with mechanical techniques
• Interpolating the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick replica trick
• Replica symmetry breaking in multi-species Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model
• Emerging heterogeneities in Italian customs and comparison with nearby countries
• Equilibrium statistical mechanics on correlated random graphs