Who is counted as a native?

My interest in answering the question “Who is counted as a native?” came as a predicament when I wanted to compare the subjective well-being of East European migrants in different parts of Europe and to see how these differences relate to the well-being of the natives in those regions (Popa, 2018). Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS), I wanted to compare East Europeans’ situation in the destination country, first with that of other migrant groups, and then with that of natives. But as I found, grouping respondents from surveys into the “natives” or the “immigrant” categories is both a theoretical and a practical difficult enterprise. Given the rich multicultural context found in many European countries, the Netherlands included, the task of comparing the situation of “new immigrants” from Central Eastern Europe here with the established population and dividing the latter into “immigrant” and “natives” (Popa, forthcoming) is of particular difficulty. […]