Across Western European nations, politicians often problematize immigrants’ cultural values and question their fit with majority society. Within this discourse, immigrant women, especially those of Arabic origin, occupy a central place, since they are portrayed as un-agentic victims and reproducers of an oppressive culture that they pass on to their daughters. In this article, we study how, in a climate of suspicion and devaluation, these women make sense of themselves, their values, and their place in society. The research presented here departs from existing work on the role of values in immigrant integration that focuses on attitudinal differences or similarities between immigrant minorities and national majorities. Using the theoretical perspective of boundary-drawing, we seek, instead, to shed light on how women of Arabic origin actively mobilize cultural values to establish (in)compatibility between themselves and majority society and claim their worth. We situate our analysis in Denmark, where the problematization of immigrants’ values is salient, and analyze 12 interviews with pairs of Arabic-origin mothers and daughters. We show that mothers often activated values otherwise presented by Danish politicians and the media as “un-Danish” to demonstrate their fit with and contribution to Danish society. Contrary to political and academic concerns about the children of immigrants feeling constrained or experiencing value conflict, we find that daughters established dual bases of worth by mixing values from different cultural repertoires. We use these findings to discuss the potential of studying values as meaning-making tools used by immigrants and their children in the integration process.

在整个西欧国家，政客们经常质疑移民的文化价值观，并质疑他们与多数社会的契合度。在这个论述中，移民妇女，尤其是阿拉伯裔妇女，占据了中心位置，因为她们被描绘成她们传递给女儿的压迫文化的非代理受害者和复制者。在这篇文章中，我们研究了在怀疑和贬低的气氛中，这些女性如何理解自己、她们的价值观以及她们在社会中的地位。这里介绍的研究偏离了关于价值观在移民融合中的作用的现有研究，该研究侧重于移民少数群体和民族多数之间的态度差异或相似之处。使用划界的理论视角，我们寻求，相反，阐明阿拉伯血统的妇女如何积极动员文化价值观，以在她们与多数社会之间建立（不）兼容性并主张她们的价值。我们将分析设在丹麦，那里移民价值观的问题化很突出，并分析了对阿拉伯裔母亲和女儿的 12 次采访。我们表明，母亲们经常激活丹麦政客和媒体以“非丹麦人”形式呈现的价值观，以证明她们与丹麦社会的契合和对丹麦社会的贡献。与移民子女感到受限制或经历价值冲突的政治和学术担忧相反，我们发现女儿通过混合来自不同文化曲目的价值观建立了双重价值基础。