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The ability of migrants to use the host country's language is crucial to their integration. Nonetheless, the association between migrant literacy and their labor market outcome is less explored compared to the association between their educational attainment and their economic integration. Moreover, this ability has another vital role in immigrant assimilation, serving as an indicator of cultural capital. The current study, therefore, examines the extent to which language as cultural capital shapes gender differences in migrant economic integration, as measured by educational–occupational mismatch (EOM). Using the PIAAC 2018 dataset, we employ a series of nested fixed-effect linear models in which our dependent variable is years of over-education and study the effect of language use at home, controlling for linguistic competence in the host country language. We find that once controlling for educational level, migrant men who use a different language than the host country's language at home are not more prone to EOM. However, migrant women, who are at higher risk of EOM, suffer even more when using a foreign language at home. We suggest that using a foreign language at home for women might indicate low host-country-specific cultural capital, which could directly affect migrant women’s integration into the labor market.

This paper examines the distinct effects of linguistics distance and language literacy on the labor market integration of migrant men and women. Using data from the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 2018 in 16 countries of destination mainly from Europe and more than 110 languages of origin, we assess migrant labor force participation, employment, working hours, and occupational prestige. The study finds that linguistics distance of the first language studied has a significant negative association with labor force participation, employment, and working hours of migrant women, even after controlling for their abilities in their destination language, education, and cultural distance between the country of origin and destination. In contrast, linguistics distance is only negatively associated with migrant men’s working hours. This suggests that linguistic distance serves as a proxy for cultural aspects, which are not captured by cultural distance and hence shape the labor market integration of migrant women due to cultural factors rather than human capital. We suggest that the gender aspect of the effect of language proximity is essential in understanding the intersectional position of migrant women in the labor force.

We study the interplay between host countries’ characteristics and self-selection patterns in relation to refugees’ economic assimilation using a natural experiment in which immigrants from one region migrated to three destinations under similar circumstances. We focus on emigrants fleeing from Argentina and Chile during the military regimes there to the United States, Sweden, and Israel. We find that those refugees show patterns of selection and assimilation similar to those of economic immigrants. Immigrants to the United States and Israel exhibit better selection patterns and consequently faster assimilation than immigrants to Sweden even considering the positive effect of the Swedish market structure.

A standard proposition in the migration literature is that emigrants are not drawn randomly from their source population, but rather compose a self-selected group in terms of labour market characteristics. Such self-selection refers to observed characteristics, such as education, or occupation, as well as unobserved characteristics such as cognitive abilities. However, due to data limitations, most previous studies on selectivity have analysed immigrants’ characteristics at destinations rather than using data from their source countries. This paper assesses emigrants’ selectivity patterns by following the full-risk population of natives over a long period of time (over 20 years). It also includes an innovative measure of selectivity on unobserved characteristics—namely, school performance—as a proxy for individual motivation and cognitive abilities, and it compares it to the widely used measure of income residuals. We use Swedish register data and assess the probabilities of leaving Sweden between 1993 and 2014 among men and women born in Sweden between 1975 and 1978. We further look for differences among Swedish emigrants who chose different countries of destination. The findings suggest that emigrants are positively self-selected in terms of their observed characteristics, whereas selectivity patterns in terms of unobserved characteristics are more complex. When we assess unobservable characteristics using compulsory school grades as a proxy, emigrants are found to be positively self-selected, while when using income residuals, we find that the effect is U-shaped. Individuals leaving to non-Nordic countries are also found to be more positively self-selected than those heading to neighbouring countries. We discuss these findings and their implications in light of economic and sociological theories.

We study the interplay between host countries’ characteristics and self-selection patterns in relation to refugees’ economic assimilation using a natural experiment in which immigrants from one region migrated to three destinations under similar circumstances. We focus on emigrants fleeing from Argentina and Chile during the military regimes there to the United States, Sweden, and Israel. We find that those refugees show patterns of selection and assimilation similar to those of economic immigrants. Immigrants to the United States and Israel exhibit better selection patterns and consequently faster assimilation than immigrants to Sweden even considering the positive effect of the Swedish market structure.

Migration across well-developed countries has been overlooked in the immigration literature. The present study is designed to evaluate the interplay between the effects of host countries' characteristics and self-selection patterns of immigrants from a highly developed country on their economic assimilation in other developed countries. We focus on immigrants originated from Germany during 1990–2000 who migrated to Sweden and the US. We use the 5 percent 2000 Public Use Microdata files (PUMS) of the US census and a pooled file of the 2005–2007 American Community Survey, and the 2000 and 2006 Swedish Registers. We analyze eight groups of German immigrants – by country of desti¬nation (the US/ Sweden), gender, and skill level (with/without an acade¬mic degree). The results show that almost all German immigrants reached full earnings assimilation with natives of similar observed attributes, and that the assimilation of highly skilled Germans was better than that of the low skilled. We also found that the skilled immigrants were compensated for their human capital acquired in Germany prior to their migration. Finally, we find that despite higher educational levels of the Germans that headed to Sweden, the better assimilation of German immigrants, especially the highly educated, took place in the US. The better assimilation of Germans in the US was probably the result of an interaction between the Germans’ pattern of self-selection (mainly on un¬observed attributes) and the US context of reception – mainly higher returns on their observed human capital in the US.