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This article elaborates on the connection between hygiene/cleanliness and the bureaucratic control of Ethiopian immigrants in Israel. It discusses the role of stigmatisation in constructing immigrants' perceived backwardness and weakness, which necessitate guidance. The analysis also demonstrates the patronisation of immigrant women through inspection of their tidiness as mothers and housewives. The case of the Ethiopian immigrants, who began arriving in Israel at the beginning of the 1980s and still immigrate, will be used to suggest that the bureaucratic regulation of immigrants, rather than racism or cultural differentials, is behind the integration process. Moreover, the similarities between the absorption practices applied towards immigrants from Ethiopia and those from Muslim countries in the 1950s will be discussed in terms of the bureaucratic patronage over immigrants in Israel.

Migrants to Europe often perceive themselves as entering a secular society that threatens their religious identities and practices. Whilst some sociological models present their responses in terms of cultural defence, ethnographic analysis reveals a more complex picture of interaction with local contexts. This essay draws upon ethnographic research to explore a relatively neglected situation in migration studies, namely the interactions between distinct migration cohorts - in this case, from the Caribbean island of Montserrat, as examined through their experiences in London Methodist churches. It employs the ideas of Weber and Bourdieu to view these migrants as 'religious carriers', as collective and individual embodiments of religious dispositions and of those socio-cultural processes through which their religion is reproduced. Whilst the strategies of the cohort migrating after the Second World War were restricted through their marginalised social status and experience of racism, the recent cohort of evacuees fleeing volcanic eruptions has had greater scope for strategies which combat secularisation and fading Methodist identity.