Origins matter: Immigrant selectivity in Western Europe

This project builds upon a core principle in the sociology of migration, namely that immigrants are not a random sample of the origin population, but differ in certain characteristics from individuals who stay behind. The first aim is to provide a description of educational selectivity for a range of different immigrant groups across a variety of Western European destinations. In addition to educational selectivity, which is the main focus of this research, selectivity in attitudes also enters the account. The second aim is to theoretically disentangle and empirically investigate the links between selectivity and immigrants’ incorporation into the receiving societies. The focus is on a selection of important outcomes including cultural integration (in terms of language acquisition), positional or structural integration (in terms of education and labor market performance) and aspects of social and identificative integration (in terms of inter-ethnic relations and attitudes). An additional methodological aim is to contribute to the literature by systematically implementing improved measures of selectivity. In this project, selectivity is framed as an individual-level characteristic as opposed to the common approach of group-based specifications. We measure selectivity by recording an individual’s age- and sex-specific position in the origin country’s distribution of the selectivity characteristic in question. The resulting selectivity measure acknowledges that origin groups are typically composed of varying proportions of positively and negatively selected individuals. Advances in data availability allow making use of a variety of data sources, both for a large set of countries of origin and for various immigrant destinations throughout Europe. All data harmonization efforts as well as the scripts necessary for replicating the analyses carried out in the course of the project will be made available to the scientific community.

DFG (Funding code 417512162)

Schmidt, R., Kristen, C. & Mühlau, P. (2021): Educational selectivity and immigrants’ labour market performance in Europe. European Sociological Review, https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcab042

Welker, J. (2021): Relative education of recent refugees in Germany and the Middle East: Is selectivity reflected in migration and destination decisions? International Migration. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12853

Spörlein, C., Kristen, C., Schmidt, R. & Welker, J. (2020): Selectivity profiles of recently arrived refugees and labour migrants in Germany. Soziale Welt 71(1-2): 54-89. https://doi.org/10.5771/0038-6073-2020-1-2-54

Kristen, C., Spörlein, C., Schmidt, R. & Welker, J. (2020): Mehrheit der Geflüchteten hat höhere Bildung im Vergleich zur Herkunftsgesellschaft. DIW Wochenbericht 34: 563-570. https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.797230.de/20-34-2.pdf

Spörlein, C. & Kristen, C. (2019): Why we should care about regional origins: Educational selectivity among refugees and labor migrants in Western Europe. Frontiers in Sociology 4(39). https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2019.00039

Spörlein, C. & Kristen, C. (2018): Educational selectivity and language acquisition among recently arrived immigrants. International Migration Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/0197918318798343