Some of Naomi’s research over the years dealt with issues of immigration and absorption, mainly in the context of absorption of immigrants in Israel. This began with her doctorate (1976-H), in which the research population was new immigrants in development towns, whose social and economic absorption were analyzed (Carmon 1981-E). Carmon later studied migrants (and Olim) as carriers of urban renewal (Carmon 1998-E). Together with the doctoral student Einat Amoyal, she researched social capital and its place in immigrant absorption processes, while discriminating between personal social capital and community social capital, and between bonding social capital and bridging social capital, studying the relationship between these and components of neighborhood planning (Amoyal and Carmon 2011–H).
In 1993, during the large wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union, Naomi Carmon organized an international workshop of international experts on immigration and integration. The articles submitted to the workshop were read and discussed at the workshop by the experts and a large group of Israeli decision-makers. Later, they were edited by Carmon and published in a book that was titled: Immigration and integration in post-industrial society. The articles shed light on the phenomena, from the macro level of policy through the personal level of the immigrant (Carmon 1996-E). In the opening chapter of this book, Naomi identified and characterized two main flows of international migration: a flow of migrants with high levels of education and skills that comes from the east to the west, mainly from the former communist countries, but also from the Far East to Western countries, and a flow of migrants with a few resources that comes from the south to the north, from Africa to Europe and from South America to its north. In spite of the big differences between them, the two flows were creating significant economic benefits for the migrants themselves and for the countries in which they settled, but the cultural difficulties in integrating them into the receiving societies were not getting easier with the passing years. When this chapter was written in the middle of the 1990s, Naomi dared to hypothesize that in a future global world, people will be able to freely move between countries, and instead of being tied to civil rights in their countries of origin, they will carry with them, wherever they go, their human rights and social rights. Twenty years later, the chances of this hypothesis to be supported by developments in the real world are sinking.
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