Abstract
Drawing on the second wave of the European Social Survey, we analyse the educational attainment of 1,039 second generation immigrants from different countries of origin in 13 EU countries, relative to that of the natives of these EU countries. In addition to testing the effects of individual factors, such as parental education and religion, we estimate the effects of macro characteristics of both origin and destination countries. Next to parental educational level, the average educational level of the natives of the countries of destination and the generosity of the naturalization laws have positive effects on the educational level of both male and female second generation immigrants. Other macro-characteristics of countries of origin and destination have no significant effects on educational outcomes of these immigrants. However, Muslim men of the second generation are found to have lower levels of education.
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- 1.
The first wave of the European Social Survey did not allow for the precise coding of the countries of origin of the second generation of immigrants.
- 2.
There are only 25 respondents in the Finnish sample who can be properly classified as first or second generation immigrants and can be assigned a country of origin. However, the refusal rate of the question in which country the respondent was born is significantly higher in Finland than in other survey countries, resulting in a large number of persons for whom we do not know whether they are immigrants or natives. Given the limited information about these respondents, we decided to exclude them from the sample which lowered the number of immigrants in Finland to an unacceptably small number.
- 3.
We have conducted the same analyses together with first immigrant generation (Fleischmann & Dronkers, 2007). However, in most cases this first generation received their education in their countries of origin, which makes it misleading to estimate the effects of the country of destination on their educational level, because these effects rather reflect the selectivity of the migration towards these countries of destination and not the effects of the educational systems of these destination countries. We also tried to distinguish a so-called 1.5-generation, which consists of individuals who were born outside the country of destination, but who migrated at such a young age that they received most or all of their education in the destination country. A problem in the construction of this category is that the European Social Survey does not provide exact information about the years since migration, since this is measured categorically. Using the maximum of the categories in the survey (which systematically underestimates the age at migration) and selecting all immigrants who had migrated before the age of 14 based on this calculation resulted in a share of 10.8% of all immigrants constituting the 1.5 generation. In light of this small share despite very generous definition, we refrained from analysing this group of immigrants separately and included them in the deleted first generation.
- 4.
We imputed missing values for the highest level of education of the respondent (31 cases among natives, 21 among immigrants), using the mean of groups sorted according to gender, immigrant status, immigrant generation and country of origin in the case of respondent’s education. We did this in order to keep in the analysis the maximum number of immigrants.
- 5.
We imputed missing values for the highest level of parental education (556 missing values, 135 of which among immigrants), using the mean of groups sorted according to gender, immigrant status, immigrant generation and country of origin.
- 6.
In the multilevel analysis, we contrast Muslims and those who are not affiliated with any religion with all others. This residual category mainly consists of Christians (Catholics, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox) plus very few affiliates of Judaism, Eastern and other religions. The latter groups were, however, too small to be separated in the analysis.
- 7.
Respondents in France did not indicate the religion they belonged to if they classified themselves as being religious (which 58.7% of natives and 60.1% of the immigrants in France did). For natives, we assume that if they are religious, they will belong to a Christian religion, hence the percentage of French natives who belong to a non-Christian religion is estimated to be 0. For immigrants who indicated that they belong to a religion, we imputed this religion using information about the country of origin, religiosity, the intensity of religious practice and the educational level.
- 8.
We use a liberal definition of neighbouring countries which also includes countries who share sea borders with the country of destination. A list of the matches of neighbouring countries is provided in the appendix.
- 9.
These are, in the first place, countries that have been or still are colonies (for instance India for the UK, the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America for Spain, and Brazil for Portugal). But, in the case of Austria, Germany, the UK and Sweden they also included those countries that were a part of their former territories (for example Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the former Yugoslavia for Austria; Norway for Sweden).
- 10.
Kogan (2007) found a positive effect of the liberal welfare state on immigrants’ labour market integration, in the form of higher labour market participation and lower unemployment. However, it is difficult to derive hypothesis on educational outcomes from this finding. On the one hand, the prospect of easy access to the labour market might increase second generation immigrants’ incentives to invest in education in order to reach a high occupational status. On the other hand, easy access to the labour market and low unemployment rates can also go together with low average occupational status for immigrants. Furthermore, an abundance of job opportunities might actually lower the educational attainment of the second generation, since staying longer in education increases its short-term costs in the form of foregone earnings, while the long-term benefits of higher education are less secure.
- 11.
This non-significant interaction is not shown in the table, since the interaction entered stepwise into the regression model. For reasons of readability, we only present significant interactions.
- 12.
Islam has no significant effect in the multilevel analysis for the female immigrants, again replicating the results of the OLS-regression for the female immigrants.
- 13.
This is, however, an assumption that needs to be qualified by the findings of other research on educational careers of immigrants where it is frequently found that second generation immigrants, although being born in the country of destination, spend a part of their childhood in the country of origin, often in the care of members of the extended family. Hence, they might complete a part of their education, most likely at the primary level, in the country of origin.
- 14.
Unfortunately, we cannot take this large variation into account since it is not measured in the European Social Survey.
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Dronkers, J., Fleischmann, F. (2010). The Educational Attainment of Second Generation Immigrants from Different Countries of Origin in the EU Member-States. In: Dronkers, J. (eds) Quality and Inequality of Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3993-4_7
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