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Migrants, Work, and Welfare State
... As well demonstrated by intersectionality studies (Gross, Gottburgsen and Phoenix 2016;Valentine 2007), ethnicity often centrally intersects with class. As Denmark historically has had limited skilled labour migration, a large share of the immigrants and refugees entering the country since the 1960s have had low levels of educational qualifications (Tranaes and Zimmermann 2004). Adding to this problem, skilled individuals arriving, for example as refugees or marriage migrants, often have difficulties putting their qualifications to use in the Danish labour market (Nielsen, C 2011). ...
... This deficit was solely attributable to immigrants from poor countries (non-Western). At around the same time, Germany was managing to attract both better-educated and more experienced immigrants than Denmark (Tranaes and Zimmermann 2004). 7 The main reason for the unfavourable mix of immigrants to Denmark in terms of their employability at the time mentioned was the fact that Denmark received relatively few migrants who came to the country for work and study purposes. ...
In this paper, we examine the potential of immigration to strengthen fiscal sustainability, which is under pressure by an ageing population in many European countries. We look at a particularly challenging case, namely that of Denmark, which has extensive tax-financed welfare programmes that provide a high social safety net. The analysis is based on a forecast of the entire Danish economy made using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model with overlapping generations. We present life cycle estimates of the potential fiscal impact of immigration considering the cost of immigration on the margin as well as on average. The main conclusion is that immigrants from Western countries have a positive fiscal impact, while immigrants from non-Western countries have a large negative one, which is also the case when considering only non-refugee immigrants. The negative effect is caused by both a weak labour market performance and early retirement in combination with the universal Danish welfare schemes.
... In Denmark, for example, the employment rate among non-Western immigrants and refugees falls well below that of the majority (Statistics Denmark, 2011), and both unemployment and underemployment are main stressors for immigrant fathers (Shimoni et al, 2003;Roer-Strier et al, 2005). Explanations for this phenomenon include the lower levels of education among immigrants, their sometimes limited language skills and discrimination in the labour market (Tranaes and Zimmermann, 2004). While the employment level of minority ethnic men in Denmark increases from the first to the second generation, it remains below the level of the majority. ...
Many of the ethnic minority fathers, who live in the Nordic countries, stem from countries of origin where gender roles are complementary rather than equal. Such fathers may expect to be family breadwinners, holding positions of authority within the family. However, both the strains of migration, the existence of welfare provisions in the Nordic countries, and the challenges of establishing a life in the country of destination may - especially if ones skills are few or difficult to use - undermine such men’s abilities to be family providers. In some families, parents retain complementary gender roles, which in the dual earner societies often necessitate that fathers work long hours. Other men end up grappling with the challenges of how to be good fathers under the changed circumstances with limited success. And yet other men - or their sons, partially or fully raised in the post-migratory context - find new and sometimes more egalitarian and relationally closer ways of practicing fatherhood. In some cases, wives opt for divorce, and as children in these families mostly end up living with their mothers, the divorced fathers may be left with limited contact with their children as these grow up.
... We use data from the Rockwool Foundation Migration Survey for Germany and Denmark. A detailed presentation of the data set is provided by Zimmermann (2004b) andNiels-Kenneth-Nielsen (2004 These surveys give us the opportunity to access immigrant differences within each country, as well as to assess cross-national differences. There are several comparative advantages on these data sets: they contain information on the pre-migration experiences of immigrants, including schooling, family background, social and environmental settings, and visa status at migration. ...
There are concerns about the attachment of immigrants to the labor force, and the potential policy responses. This paper uses a bi-national survey on immigrant performance to investigate the sorting of individuals into full-time paid-employment and entrepreneurship and their economic success. Particular attention is paid to the role of legal status at entry in the host country (worker, refugee, and family reunification), ethnic networks, enclaves and other differences among ethnicities for their integration in the labor market. Since the focus is on the understanding of the self-employment decision, a two-stage structural probit model is employed that determines the willingness to work full-time (against part-time employment and not working), and the choice between full-time paid work and self-employment. The choices are determined by the reservation wage for full-time work, and the perceived earnings from
working in paid-employment and as entrepreneur, among other factors. Accounting for sample selectivity, the paper provides regressions explaining reservation wages, and actual earnings for paid-employment and self-employment, which provide the basis for such an analysis. The structural probit models suggest that the expected earnings differentials from working and reservation wages and for self-employment and paid-employment earnings
matter much, although only among a number of other determinants. For Germany, legal status at entry is important; former refugees and those migrants who arrive through family reunification are less likely to work full-time; refugees are also less self-employed. Those who came through the employment channel are more likely to be in full-time paid work. In Denmark, however, the status at entry variables do not play any significant role. This suggests that the Danish immigrant selection system is ineffective.
... In this paper I address these problems by using a unique new survey that allows us to apply both IV and matching in a comparative study of Germany and Denmark, as well as panel data approaches in studying the situation in Denmark in isolation. The survey was conducted in Germany and Denmark in parallel and covers some of the largest immigrant groups in both countries, including people from Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Poland, Iran and Lebanon (see Tranaes and Zimmermann, 2004). This rich dataset contains information on both self-assessed language abilities and the interviewers' assessments of the respondents' language abilities, as well as a wide range of other variables, including parental background. ...
In this study I analyze what determines immigrants'language pro…ciency and to what ex- tent pro…ciency in the host country language has an eect on the employment probability. The employment eect of language estimated by OLS may be biased for several reasons. Unobserved heterogeneity may bias the result in any direction whereas measurement error in the language pro…ciency variable will tend to bias the estimates downwards. I address these problems by using pararallel surveys among immigrants in Germany and Denmark. In the Danish case where the data is particularly rich I also address the causality problem that may occur if language pro…ciency is improved by being in employment.
... One issue is that noneconomic migrants have more difficulties in economic performance and labor market integration, and are a larger potential burden to the social security systems than economic migrants. Recent work in Denmark and Germany (see Tranaes and Zimmermann, 2004, Schultz-Nielsen and Constant, 2004, Constant and Zimmermann, 2005 and Constant, Gataullina and Zimmermann, 2009) provides new evidence indicating that an ever-rising number of immigrants are unavailable to the labor force. Instead, migrants arrive as refugees, asylum seekers or for family reunification purposes. ...
Culture is not new to the study of migration. It has lurked beneath the surface for some time, occasionally protruding openly into the discussion, usually under some pseudonym. The authors bring culture into the open. They are concerned with how culture manifests itself in the migration process for three groups of actors: the migrants, those remaining in the sending areas, and people already living in the recipient locations. The topics vary widely. What unites the authors is an understanding that though actors behave differently, within a group there are economically important shared beliefs (customs, values, attitudes, etc.), which we commonly refer to as culture. Culture and identity play a central role in our understanding of migration as an economic phenomenon; but what about them matters? Properly, we should be looking at the determinants of identity and the determinants of culture (prices and incomes, broadly defined). But this is not what is done. Usually identity and culture appear in economics articles as a black box. Here we try to begin to break open the black box.
As the number of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers have grown worldwide, intense debate has emerged about how long and how well they integrate into host countries. Although integration is a complex process, realized differently by different groups at different times, most prior studies capture, at best, disparate parts of the process. Overcoming this limitation is a tall task because it requires data and research that capture how integration is both dynamic and contextual and requires focusing on conceptual issues, emphasizing how integration varies across spatial scales, and including perspectives of the process through the eyes of both scholars and practitioners. This article reviews recent key studies about refugees in Canada, Europe, and the United States, as a way of putting into context the scholarship presented in this special issue of The ANNALS. We analyze whether and how prior studies capture integration as a dynamic process that unfolds in various aspects of life, such as education, employment, and health. We also consider the extent to which prior studies are shaped by long-standing divides between the terms refugee and migrant, and integration and assimilation, and what those divides mean for research on refugee and migrant integration in the twenty-first century. Throughout, we assess the data needed for researchers to address a wide variety of questions about refugee integration and understand the long-term consequences of the ever-growing number of displaced persons seeking refuge. This volume presents research that uniquely enhances our understanding about the breadth of the integration process in the United States, Canada, and European countries.
In the wake of immigration to Western welfare states, certain aspects, such as the financial cost of providing social welfare, have become a subject of debate. The net amount of costs and tax payments, sometimes referred to as net transfers, has been used as a measure for evaluating the sustainability of welfare state systems. The present study analyses determinants of the volume of net transfers in Germany in 2002 with reference to immigrants from Poland, Turkey, former Yugoslavia, Lebanon and Iran. The study focuses on the differences and similarities between their outcomes. In line with previous research, the results below suggest that employment situation and family composition explain a large part of the differences in net transfers. One outcome that has not previously been adequately addressed, however, is that the legal immigration status granted on arrival in Germany is of considerable importance.
A model is set up where migrants must choose a level of social traits and consumption of ethnic goods. As the consumption level of ethnic goods increases, the migrants become ever more different to the local population and are less assimilated. Less assimilation affects the reaction of the local population to the migrants and the willingness of the local population to accept them. This affects wages and unemployment. We show that increasing the unemployment social benefits of migrants increases the consumption of ethnic goods, thus creating a trap wherein the willingness of the local population to accept the migrants into the economy decreases and so increases the probability of the dependence of the migrants on the welfare state.
Drawing on panel data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we compare the economic performance of immigrants to Great Britain, West Germany, Denmark, Luxembourg, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Austria to that of the respective indigenous population. The unit of analysis is the individual in the household context. This allows us to define immigrants state of integration into the host society at the family level taking into account issues such as immigrant/native intermarriage. Economic performance is measured in terms of the country-specific pre-government income position and change in the relative income position due to redistribution processes within the respective tax and social security systems. Our work is based on the premise that countries may be categorized – similarly to existing categorizations based on the type of welfare regime – according to the nature of their immigration policy. From an economic point of view, a successful and integrative immigration policy should result – at least when controlling for background characteristics such as education – in a non-significant differential between the economic performance of immigrants and that of the indigenous population. At first glance, our results indicate that this ideal is not attained in all of the countries analysed, particularly not in Germany and Denmark, where the economic performance of immigrants is much lower than that of the indigenous population. However, results from GLS random-effects models show that immigrants to these countries improve their economic situation rapidly with increasing duration of stay in the host country. This implies that these countries also do fairly well in fostering in the economic integration of immigrants. Our empirical results further reveal that the substantial cross-country differences in the immigrant/native-born performance differential persist even when controlling in detail for socioeconomic characteristics of the household and for indicators of the state of the immigrants integration, such as years since migration and immigrant/native intermarriage. This suggests that not only the conditions of entry to a country impact on immigrants economic performance, but also country-specific institutional aspects such as restrictions on access to the labour market and parts of the social security system that are related to citizenship or immigrant status. There still is a great deal of heterogeneity across EU member states in this respect. This should be taken into account when working towards the harmonization of national EU immigration policies.
Immigration is not evenly balanced across groups of workers who have the same education but differ in their work experience,
and the nature of the supply imbalance changes over time. This paper develops a new approach for estimating the labor market
impact of immigration by exploiting this variation in supply shifts across education-experience groups. I assume that similarly
educated workers with different levels of experience participate in a national labor market and are not perfect substitutes.
The analysis indicates that immigration lowers the wage of competing workers: a 10 percent increase in supply reduces wages
by 3 to 4 percent.