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Individual Resources and Structural Constraints in Immigrants’ Labour Market Integration

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A Life-Course Perspective on Migration and Integration

Abstract

Entering the labour market, gaining adequate employment and pursuing a successful occupational career are central events in the life course of each individual. Among immigrants such events might occur several times in various societal contexts, implying that opportunities and constraints of these specific social circumstances have to be taken into account. Migration in itself is interconnected with the above-mentioned life course events, so that understanding these interrelationships and figuring out how these might vary across various immigrant origins and socio-economic groups are important aims of the migration-related life course research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cultural knowledge is understood to be a broad knowledge of the functioning of a specific society, including means of navigating in it, such as knowledge of its language or knowledge on how its institutions function.

  2. 2.

    Since the non-immigrant German population of the GSOEP constitutes the benchmark group to which Ethnic Germans and JQR are compared, the phrasing of many questions was taken directly from the GSOEP.

  3. 3.

    We would certainly not expect them to be completely identical, since both datasets differ in the definition of the migrant population, particularly with regard to the years of immigration and age at migration.

  4. 4.

    In such a comparison we assume that immigrants’ self-selection mechanisms, not captured by our control variables, are similar across the two countries.

  5. 5.

    Among the unemployed JQRs with a tertiary education the reservation wage is 1,637 Euros (N = 79), whereas among Ethnic German immigrants with higher education it is merely 1,284 Euros (N = 38). Due to the small sample sizes these results should be interpreted with extreme caution.

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Acknowledgments

The study was supported by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (Grant number 823/2004). Many thanks go to Betty Haire Weyerer for polishing the English of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Mannheim, 68131, Mannheim, Germany

    Irena Kogan & Frank Kalter

  2. German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), 10108, Berlin, Germany

    Elisabeth Liebau

  3. Department of Sociology, Columbia University, 606 West 122nd Street, New York, NY, 10027, USA

    Yinon Cohen

Authors
  1. Irena Kogan
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  2. Frank Kalter
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  3. Elisabeth Liebau
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  4. Yinon Cohen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Irena Kogan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Bremen International Graduate School of, Social Sciences (BIGSSS), Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Matthias Wingens

  2. AG Migration und Stadtforschung, Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Michael Windzio

  3. , Department of Social Research, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, Brussel, 1055, Belgium

    Helga de Valk

  4. Bremen International Graduate School of, Social Sciences (BIGSSS), Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Can Aybek

Appendix

Appendix

Table 6 Definitions and descriptions of the variables used in the multivariate analyses
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Kogan, I., Kalter, F., Liebau, E., Cohen, Y. (2011). Individual Resources and Structural Constraints in Immigrants’ Labour Market Integration. In: Wingens, M., Windzio, M., de Valk, H., Aybek, C. (eds) A Life-Course Perspective on Migration and Integration. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1545-5_4

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