Nineteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The research describes Georgian Migrant’s life in a new social environment. After the collapse of the USSR Georgia found itself in a completely new geopolitical and socioeconomic situation. Motivation and processes of migration differ among individuals and family migrants. People’s decision to migrate is often motivated by a complex of interrelated factors: social, institutional, political, health and even environmental factors. The purpose of this study is to identify factors, which are important for Georgian migrants for adaptation process to a new social environment of host society. With the purpose of this research, we followed the general advice of migration scholars advocating an in-depth examination of such experience. We used qualitative methods to capture how participants of this study assimilate, acculturate, integrate and adapt, in hopes of generating more reliable and multifaceted data. Based on the in-depth interviews with migrants living in European Union Country (Portugal, France, Germany) and in the United States of America, this work focuses on the study of perception of Georgian emigrants about the dynamic during adaptation process. The study answers the following questions: What were migrants’ reasons for choosing the country they migrated to? What type of problems did migrants face with integration? What are the impacts of perception and attitudes in the integration process into a new socio-cultural space? The study also reveals the different factors, which are more helpful for adaptation and migration processes, like knowledge of host countries languages, living with family or without, age groups and educational level of migrants.