For a century, scholars have studied immigrant integration in a range of destinations. Yet, the precise role of context in shaping integration outcomes remains poorly understood. Drawing from an analysis of an original database of articles and books in migration studies, I argue that this knowledge gap may be due to two closely related tendencies in the scholarship. First, case selection has relied on criteria such as the immigrant population's size and growth rate that are not clearly connected to integration outcomes. Second, most scholars have studied either heavily urban contexts (with large immigrant populations) or very rural contexts (where the immigrant population is growing rapidly), while much less attention has been given to destinations in-between. To improve the understandings of the role of context in immigrant integration, migration scholars should endeavor to move past population criteria when selecting study sites and to study the full range of contexts where immigrants are settling. To contribute to these efforts, I propose a framework that does not rely on population or newness as criteria for case selection and that focuses, instead, on the components of context that existing research has shown matters for intergenerational mobility. I also introduce a typology of contexts based on possible combinations of four of these components and offer some initial hypotheses of how these context types might affect immigrant integration. The arguments presented here recenter the role of local context in migration studies and contribute to debates about where and how scholars should study context moving forward.

一个世纪以来，学者们研究了一系列目的地的移民融合。然而，环境在塑造整合结果中的确切作用仍然知之甚少。通过对迁移研究中文章和书籍的原始数据库的分析，我认为这种知识差距可能是由于学术研究中两个密切相关的趋势。首先，案例选择依赖于移民人口规模和增长率等标准，这些标准与融合结果没有明确的联系。其次，大多数学者要么研究了重度城市环境（移民人口众多），要么研究了农村环境（移民人口迅速增长），而对介于两者之间的目的地的关注却少得多。为了提高对背景在移民融合中的作用的理解，移民学者在选择研究地点时应努力超越人口标准，并研究移民定居的所有环境。为了促进这些努力，我提出了一个框架，它不依赖于人口或新鲜度作为案例选择的标准，而是关注现有研究表明对代际流动很重要的背景组成部分。我还介绍了基于其中四个组件的可能组合的背景类型，并提供了一些关于这些背景类型可能如何影响移民融合的初步假设。这里提出的论点重新审视了当地背景在移民研究中的作用，并促成了关于学者应该在哪里以及如何研究前进的背景的辩论。