Vibrant ethnoreligious infrastructures of businesses, associations, and places of worship are key elements of immigrant community life, providing crucial social and economic support for its members. But why do some immigrant communities establish dense organizational ecologies, while others do not? Analyzing 25,117 ethnoreligious organizations catering to 54 immigrant minorities across more than 4,900 local communities in Germany, the authors show that minority communities with similar population sizes can exhibit vastly different organizational ecologies. Contrary to claims emphasizing local context, category consolidation and community homogeneity do not go along with more ethnicity-focused organizations. Instead, various dimensions of cultural distance between immigrants’ origins and the host society consistently predict organizational densities. Analyses produce mixed support for theories of reactive group formation. These findings highlight the importance of cultural distance and challenge prevailing perspectives emphasizing the primary role of local context for immigrant group formation.

The disadvantages experienced by minorities and lack of societal remedies are partly attributable to native-majority citizens’ limited awareness of minority hardships. We investigate whether informing citizens about field-experimental audits on ethno-racial discrimination increases their recognition of the issue and support for equal-treatment policies. Extending a largely US-centric research frontier, we focus on beliefs about discrimination faced by Muslims in Denmark. To further comprehension, we test three types of framing: a scientist stressing credibility, a lawyer emphasizing the legal breach, or a minority expressing grief. Our survey experiment (n=4,800) shows that citizens are generally aware of discrimination and tend to overperceive its extent. Communicating audit evidence corrects misperceptions but does not change recognition or policy support, regardless of framing or initial misperception. Only combining priming, correction, and framing temporarily increases recognition and donations to support groups. These findings suggest audit-based awareness campaigns have limited immediate success beyond donations acknowledging minority hardships.