Abstract

In this paper, we ask whether the main cause of asylum migration, that is, violence in the home country, still affects the life satisfaction of refugees even after they reach a safe country. We combine individual-level survey data on refugees in Germany with country-level data on terror fatalities. The timing of the survey interviews generates exogenous variation in the intensity of recent terror activity in respondents' countries of origin, which we exploit to assess the effect of terror fatalities on the level of self-reported life satisfaction. Our results indicate that fatalities due to terror activity reduce, on average, the level of life satisfaction reported by refugees. We find that this effect is most substantial for events occurring one or two days before the interview, while older events have no effect. However, we observe an effect of fatalities during the four weeks preceding the interview on persons who have a family member abroad. We show that the group of respondents with a rejected or pending asylum application without legal family reunification options mostly drives this effect.

Abstract

Immigration policy in most high-income countries is designed to promote qualified migration while maintaining high requirements on characteristics such as education and language skills. We rely on a standard self-selection model with heterogeneous migration costs to discuss the effect of access to language learning services in the country of origin on the skill composition of immigrants in Germany. Using individual-level survey data on immigrants from different cohorts over the period 2000 - 2014, combined with unique data on the presence of Goethe Institutes - a German association promoting German language and culture worldwide - in origin countries, the results of our empirical analysis show that the acquisition of the German language is fostered by the availability of language courses abroad. Moreover, we find that language services abroad induce a positive (self-)selection of migrants along several dimensions, such as education, experience, and the probability of holding a job offer at arrival. These characteristics are in turn highly relevant for long- term integration in Germany. To disentangle transmission channels, we perform a causal mediation analysis. We find that 25 % of the total effect of language services abroad on language skills at immigration trace back directly to migrants' participation in language courses, revealing important spillover effects.

Abstract

In this study, we investigate how the attitude of natives—defined as the perceived trustworthiness of citizens from different countries—affects immigrants’ labor market outcomes in Germany. Evidence in the literature suggests that barriers to economic assimilation might be higher for some groups of immigrants, but the role of natives’ heterogeneous attitudes toward immigrants from different countries of origin has received little attention. Using individual-level panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel covering the years 1984 to 2014, we apply survival analysis methods to model immigrants’ unemployment durations. We find that lower levels of trust expressed by natives toward the citizens of a given country, measured using Eurobarometer surveys, are associated with increased unemployment durations for immigrants from this country. We show that this result is not driven by origin-specific unobserved heterogeneity and that it is robust to different specifications and alternative explanations.

Abstract

This paper investigates how governors' partisan affiliation affects the poverty status of immigrants to the U.S. To this end, we compare the poverty outcomes of immigrants in states ruled by Democratic governors relative to the outcomes for those in states ruled by Republican governors. We employ a regression discontinuity design using the re-centered Democratic margin of victory as a running variable, to overcome the identification challenge posed by confounding factors. Consistent with the literature on partisan affiliation, we find that immigrants are more likely to get out of poverty in states with Democratic governors than states with Republican governors. Our results are submitted to a variety of robustness checks and sensitivity tests, to assess the validity of the identification strategy, and highlight conditional lame-duck effects. A formal mediation analysis reveals that the empirical results are mediated through better access to the labor market and possibly through higher wages and labor earnings for immigrants. Last but not least, we check for alternative hypotheses and potential detrimental effects for native populations.

Abstract

The effect of immigration on host and origin countries is mediated by the way migrants take their labour supply decisions. We propose a simple way of integrating the traditional random utility maximisation model used to analyse location decisions with a classical labour demand function at destination. Our setup allows us to estimate a general upper bound on the elasticity of the migrant labour supply that we take to the data using the evolution of the numbers and wages of temporary overseas Filipino workers between 1992 and 2009 to different destinations. We find that the migrant labour supply elasticity can be very large. Temporary migrants are very reactive to economic conditions in their potential destinations.

Abstract

Migrants who move across borders are, to a large extent, motivated by the prospect of earning higher incomes at destination, which can be partly transferred back to their countries of origin via remittances. This suggests that the real exchange rate can influence the incentives to migrate, as it determines the purchasing power of expected income in terms of the currency of the origin country. This article investigates empirically how bilateral real exchange rate fluctuations influence international migration flows. To do so, we build a dataset of 30 OECD destination countries and 165 origin countries over the period 1980–2011 and estimate an equation derived from a micro-founded random utility maximization model that allows for unobserved heterogeneity between migrants and non-migrants. Our results show that migration flows are highly responsive to bilateral real exchange rates: A 10% real appreciation of the currency of the destination country is associated with an 18.2–19.4% increase in migration flows.