Max Weber, the preeminent social scientist, once said that all scientific inquiry begins with a modicum of subjectivity – merely in the researcher's choice of topic. It is upon this recognition that one can proceed to the true objectivity necessary for scientific investigation. For me, the journey into immigration scholarship took root in my first one-way plane trip from Israel to the United States as a child. It resurfaced over years of shuttling back and forth, and finding a personal safe haven in the middle – Europe – where I could recreate the foreigner context anew. The immigrant story is remarkably familiar to a significant number of immigration researchers I have encountered over the years, and so it is natural that the spin and interpretations we bring to the fore vary so greatly.

This inquiry on immigration attitudes in Europe has its earliest intellectual origins in my initial graduate training at the London School of Economics. Set among the dynamic intellectual commons at Holborn, the LSE provided me with the opportunity to have observer and subject status at one and the same time. From the vantage point of a foreign student in London, and later Paris, where I conducted my thesis work, I had been privy to the fact that Europe had become a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural society, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps unacceptingly. But one thing was clear: it lacked a corresponding set of attitudes that resembled the American-pioneered “melting-pot” spirit. What was the common European myth?