SOEP Research: Migration and Integration

A Variety of Measures and Initiatives Can Accelerate the Immigration Process for Today’s Refugees: Five Questions to Martin Kroh

Many Refugees Have Work Experience but a Smaller Share Possess Formal Vocational Qualifications

Academic and vocational qualifications play a crucial role when it comes to successfully integrating refugees and other migrants into society. What qualifications did migrants already acquire in their country of origin and which did they obtain in Germany? And to what extent are qualifications gained abroad recognized in Germany? The IAB-SOEP Migration Sample shows that the majority of the migrant ...

Measuring Transnationality of Immigrants in Germany: Prevalence and Relationship with Social Inequalities

The scope of immigrants' transnational ties and the relationship to their social position is subject to a controversial debate that suggests a dualistic picture. On the one hand, globalization theorists argue that an elite of highly educated and economically most successful professionals intensively engages in and benefits from transnationality. On the other hand, most scholars in migration and assimilation ...

Turning back to Turkey - or Turning the Back on Germany? Remigration Intentions and Behavior of Turkish Immigrants in Germany between 1984 and 2011

Der Beitrag der Frage nach, wie sich die Remigrationsabsichten und das Remigrationsverhalten türkischstämmigerEinwanderer in Deutschland im Zeitverlauf verändert haben, und wertet dazu alle Erhebungswellen dessozio-çkonomischen Panels (SOEP) ereignisdatenanalytisch aus. Die Befunde zeigen, dass Remigrationsabsichten und-raten türkischstämmiger Einwanderer seit der Jahrtausendwende angestiegen sind, ...

Turning Back to Turkey - or Turning the Back to Germany? Remigration Intentions and Behavior of Turkish Immigrants in Germany between 1984 and 2011

By applying event-history analysis to all available waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel, we analyze how remigration intentions and actual remigration of Turkish migrants to Germany have evolved over time. The study draws from a broad set of theoretical approaches to remigration and it takes a different focus than previous studies by concentrating on long-term change in these rates. Our findings ...

IAB-SOEP Migration Sample

In cooperation with the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg, the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) has carried out the largest expansion in the number of respondents with a migration background in its 30-year history. Between May and November 2013, around 2,700 households were surveyed, each containing at least one person who had either immigrated to Germany since 1994 or whose parents...

Is Smoking Behavior Culturally Determined? Evidence from British Immigrants

We exploit migration patterns from the UK to Australia, South Africa, and the US to investigate whether a person's decision to smoke is determined by culture. For each country, we use retrospective data to describe individual smoking trajectories over the life-course. For the UK, we use these trajectories to measure culture by cohort and cohort-age, and more accurately relative to the extant literature. ...

Transnationality and Social Inequalities of Migrants in Germany

The relationship between people's transnational ties and practices and their social position is subject to a controversial debate that suggests a dualistic picture. While there seems to exist a group of highly educated people who benefit from transnational mobility and networks, for migrants the maintenance of transnational ties to their 'old homes' appears to lead to a social mobility trap, and thus ...

International Migration as Occupational Mobility

We investigate whether Germans immigrants to the US work in higher-status occupations than they would have had they remained in Germany. We account for potential bias from selective migration. The probability of migration is identified using life-cycle and cohort variation in economic conditions in the US. We also explore whether occupational choices vary for Germans who migrated as children or as ...

Success Despite Starting out at a Disadvantage: What Helps Second-Generation Migrants in France and Germany?