Economic integration of immigrants

On observe deux grandes phases de l’évolution démographique de l’après-guerre au Québec. La première étant le baby-boom qui concerne les générations très nombreuses nées entre 1946 et 1966 et qui fut plus important au Québec que dans la majorité des autres pays touchés par ce phénomène. La seconde étant le baby-bust, qui lui, concerne les générations nées après 1966. L’écho du baby-boom fut relativement peu important par la dimension des cohortes de naissances concernées, et nettement insuffisant pour rétablir un certain équilibre dans la dimension des cohortes de naissances, d’où l’analogie avec « The Pig and The Python ». Cependant, une politique d’ouverture sur l’immigration internationale a fait en sorte que la disproportion entre les effectifs des baby-boomers et celles des baby-busters s’atténue graduellement au cours du cycle de vie. L’objectif de la présente communication est de montrer: L’écart important entre les effectifs dans leur jeunesse ; Un écart de moins en moins important aux âges adultes du à l’immigration nette ; une quai-disparition de l’écart dans les âges de la retraite du à cette immigration cumulative.

We provide the first attempt in France to evaluate the Immigrant Assimilation Hypothesis. This latter predicts the convergence of immigrants’ wages since arrival towards those of natives. Coupling the only two national specific surveys on immigrants, our pseudo-panel methodology nets out the cohort and period effects. Three country-specific profiles stand out: (1) for Sub-Saharan and North African immigrants, the recent highly-educated arrival cohorts record higher earnings convergence rate but witnessed at entry higher earnings disadvantage and worse labor market conditions compared to their less-educated earlier cohorts, thus making the occurrence of the earnings crossover with natives unlikely; (2) conversely, the Turkish and South-East Asian group improves its relative earnings position across successive cohorts of arrival via a reduction in the entry earnings gap, shortening considerably the duration before the catch-up earnings ; (3) the group of Portugal is by far the less skilled group but the most successful: all successive cohorts manage to reach earnings parity more and more precociously and, better still, overtake native earnings. The negative relationship emerging between economic successfulness and skill level suggests, with the immigrants low return to education, the existence of an education-to-job mismatch.

Most studies of the link between migrants’ legal status and their integration into destination societies conceptualize legal status as a dichotomy and focus on economic outcomes such as employment and wages. This paper will broaden the investigation to include multiple legal domains and multiple indicators of economic integration across multiple contexts of reception. Using data from the MAFE-Senegal project, this study will include time-varying indicators of legal status in the domains of work and residence to predict employment, occupational prestige, and subjective assessments of both absolute and relative economic well-being. Preliminary results indicate that legal authorization to work and reside at destination are significantly associated with all four outcomes, but that these associations vary by context of reception. Not having a work permit is associated with lower probabilities of employment in Spain and Italy, while not having a residence permit is associated with higher probabilities of employment in all three destinations.

The risk of unemployment in France is higher for second–generation North African immigrants than it is for second generations from other ethnic origins. The extent to which employer prejudice is responsible for this poor labor market outcome is subject to debate. We propose to test the role of intermarriage on descendants' labour market entry. We compare the risk of unemployment of natives and three second-generation sub-groups: people born to two immigrant parents, those born to an immigrant father and a native mother and those born to a native father and an immigrant mother. Using the French employment surveys 2006-2008, we estimate the probability to be unemployed, controlling for human capital variables, region and parents’ social characteristics. Our results indicate that second-generation North Africans born to mixed parents have a higher risk of unemployment if they have an immigrant father than if they have an immigrant mother. This difference in the unemployment rate according to which parent has immigrated is not observed in the case of second-generation South Europeans. We conclude that statistical discrimination probably plays a role in the high rate of unemployment of second-generation North Africans on the French labor market.

This paper addresses two gaps in the migration literature: (1) the need for longitudinal microdata to study the impact of migration and (2) the absence of studies that analyze whether immigrants in “new destinations” in the U.S. are doing better or worse socioeconomically in those places. The 1996 and 2001 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation are used here to track the before- and after-migration incomes of natives and immigrants in the U.S. using descriptive and multivariate regression techniques, taking selection and endogeneity into account. The goal is to assess whether immigrants who migrated between “traditional” and “new” metropolitan areas during the late 1990s and early 2000s are better or worse off economically compared to (1) before they migrated, (2) non-migrant immigrants in traditional metropolitan areas, and (3) native migrants. Destination types are categorized by traditional versus new destination state and also by size of metropolitan area. This research is necessary for understanding how immigrants in different parts of the U.S. are incorporating socioeconomically.