Immigrant Careers in German Organizations

• Applicant: Professor Henning Hillmann, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 465971452

Immigrants face considerable disadvantages in labor markets. This project studies the careers of immigrants in German firms, focusing on the informal strategies that immigrants use to navigate the firms’ internal labor markets and to compensate for existing disadvantages. Using Linked-Employer-Employee Data (LIAB) of the German Institute for Employment Research, we follow several thousand immigrants over the course of their working lives and through the organizations that employed them. The dataset also includes information on the work histories of their almost two million colleagues within the same firms. These comprehensive data allow us to consider the role that organizational structures and work histories, particularly early career moves, play in the economic integration of immigrants from a career perspective. We develop new measures for a better understanding of two key dimensions of informal career strategies: career resemblance and organizational exposure. Career resemblance measures the similarity between an immigrants’ individual career and typical careers of both Germans and immigrants. Organizational exposure measures the degree to which an immigrant employee takes on different jobs within an organization, contingent on the positions available in the given organization. We then use longitudinal data analysis and matching techniques to assess how immigrants’ early career moves affect subsequent job shifts, earnings, and career trajectories. The important contribution of our proposed project is thus to demonstrate the significance of informal career strategies for understanding why some immigrants succeed in overcoming the challenges they face in the labor market and why others fail to do so.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Philipp Brandt, Ph.D.