Education and Immigrant Integration (Dissertation)

Abstract

The successful integration of immigrants and their children in host-country labor markets is one of the most important and challenging issues, faced not only by the German society, but also by other Western economies with large and growing immigrant populations. This thesis contributes to the ongoing debate about the determinants of long-term immigrant integration by analyzing several potential barriers, with a particular focus on issues related to educational attainment. In the first part I explore whether a lack of cultural integration may in fact have long-term economic or social consequences by investigating intergenerational effects of parental ethnic identity on the next generation's human capital accumulation. Empirical results based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel indicate a positive role of both parental majority as well as minority identity - even controlling for differences in ethnicity, family background, years since migration and exploiting within-family variation. I find differential parental roles with positive impacts of majority identity working through mothers and beneficial minority identity effects being specific to fathers. Additional tests show that the effect of maternal majority identity is closely related to mothers' German language proficiency. Overall, the results point at integrated, rather than separated or assimilated family environments to be most conductive for educational success of the second generation. The second part analyzes the determinants of the persistent native-migrant gap between second generation migrants and native children at several stages in the German education system. One part of the gap can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic background and another part remains unexplained. Faced with this decomposition problem, linear and matching decomposition methods are applied. Accounting for differences in socioeconomic background, the results show that migrant pupils are as likely to receive recommendations for or to enroll at any secondary school type as native children. Comparable natives, in terms of family background, thus face similar difficulties as migrant children. Hence, these results point at more general inequalities in secondary schooling in Germany which are not migrant-specific. In the final part, I assess barriers to integration from the side of the native population by investigating determinants of anti-immigrant attitudes within the host society and the role of education therein. This part is concerned with the importance of ‘non-economic’ determinants of anti-immigrant and anti-immigration attitudes. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and exploiting exogenous variation in interview timing throughout 2001, I find that the exogenous and ‘non-economic’ shock of the 9/11 terror attacks in the US caused an immediate shift of around 40 percent of one within standard deviation to more negative attitudes toward immigration and resulted in a considerable decrease in concerns over xenophobic hostility among the German population. Furthermore, in exploiting within-individual variation this quasi-experiment provides evidence on the role of education in moderating the negative terrorism shock.