Longitudinal modeling of the future development of the occupational status of third generation migrants using a micro simulation

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Petra Stein
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 280604069

The main subject of this project is the empirical modelling of the future development (middle-term period of 30-40 years) of the occupational status of migrants in Germany. In this context, it is intended to connect the migrants´ status development with the change of the ethnic and socio-structural composition of the population, which is caused by demographic change and the specific migration history in Germany. We believe that those composition effects can influence the assimilation results in addition to causal effects. With the explicit consideration of demographically driven composition effects, the results of this project can offer first insights concerning the long-term development of assimilation patterns in Germany. Thereby, this project focuses on the occupational status of the third generation of migrants, which plays an important role in the process of assimilation because of the specific character of the status-related effect of social origin in this generation: In contrast to the second generation, the parents of members of the third generation do not have any capital which is gained in their country of origin and thus has to be transferred.Due to lack of sufficient data, the development of the occupational status of the third generation has not been investigated up to this point, since most of the members of this generation just grow up or are not even born. However, there is enough empirical information to estimate this development reliably on the basis of a projection model. In this project, the status projection will be realized with a dynamic micro simulation. Since the development of the occupational status will also be projected for the native population, this project also investigates the question how the structural distance between Germans and Migrants will change in the next years.The empirical basis for the prognosis model is provided by theoretically driven longitudinal analyses. Since the effect of social origin plays such a central role, the focus generation in this context will be the second generation of migrants. In this case, there is enough data for complex empirical investigations. The data basis for the longitudinal analyses as well as for the specification of parameters for the projection model will be a combination of data from SOEP and Mikrozensus.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants