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Educational aspirations are generally based on past academic achievement and families' endowment with the resources needed to reach targeted educational levels. However, although they perform worse at school and hold lower social status, previous research observes that some ethnic minorities tend to express higher educational ambitions than natives. This study discusses and tests possible reasons for this striking finding using German data from the Young Immigrants in the German and Israeli Educational Systems project, which includes families from Turkey and the former Soviet Union. The results reveal that Turkish students hold higher aspirations than their native counterparts, whereas no aspiration gap was found between natives and adolescents from the former Soviet Union. While German students' aspiration patterns can mainly be ascribed to status attainment motivation, Turkish students' high educational ambitions seem to be stimulated by a desire of status upward mobility.

We classify the empirical literature on the wage impact of immigration into three groups, where studies in the first two groups estimate different relative effects, and studies in the third group estimate the total effect of immigration on wages. We interpret the estimates obtained from the different approaches through the lens of the canonical model to demonstrate that they are not comparable. We then relax two key assumptions in this literature, allowing for inelastic and heterogeneous labor supply elasticities of natives and the \"downgrading\" of immigrants. “Downgrading” occurs when the position of immigrants in the labor market is systematically lower than the position of natives with the same observed education and experience levels. Downgrading means that immigrants receive lower returns to the same measured skills than natives when these skills are acquired in their country of origin. We show that heterogeneous labor supply elasticities, if ignored, may complicate the interpretation of wage estimates, and particularly the interpretation of relative wage effects. Moreover, downgrading may lead to biased estimates in those approaches that estimate relative effects of immigration, but not in approaches that estimate total effects. We conclude that empirical models that estimate total effects not only answer important policy questions, but are also more robust to alternative assumptions than models that estimate relative effects.

The United States has long been perceived as a land of opportunity for immigrants. Yet, both in the past and today, US natives have expressed concern that immigrants fail to integrate into US society and lower wages for existing workers. This paper reviews the literatures on historical and contemporary migrant flows, yielding new insights on migrant selection, assimilation of immigrants into US economy and society, and the effect of immigration on the labor market.

Immigration has been a steady force acting on population and employment within countries throughout human history. Focusing on the last four decades, we show that the mix of immigrants to rich countries has been, overall, rather balanced between college and non-college educated. The growth of immigration has been driven by immigrants from nonrich countries. The economic impact of immigration on receiving economies needs to be understood by analyzing the specific skills brought by immigrants. The complementarity and substitutability between immigrants and natives in employment, and the response of receiving economies in terms of specialization and technological choices, are important when considering the general equilibrium effects of immigration. In the United States, a balanced composition of immigrants between college and noncollege educated, together with the adjustment of demand and technology, imply that general equilibrium effects on relative and absolute wages have been small.

This paper analyses the effect immigration has on the wages of native workers. Unlike most previous work, we estimate wage effects along the distribution of native wages. We derive a flexible empirical strategy that does not rely on pre-allocating immigrants to particular skill groups. In our empirical analysis, we demonstrate that immigrants downgrade considerably upon arrival. As for the effects on native wages, we find a pattern of effects whereby immigration depresses wages below the 20th percentile of the wage distribution but leads to slight wage increases in the upper part of the wage distribution. This pattern mirrors the evidence on the location of immigrants in the wage distribution. We suggest that possible explanations for the overall slightly positive effect on native wages, besides standard immigration surplus arguments, could involve deviations of immigrant remuneration from contribution to production either because of initial mismatch or immigrant downgrading.

\"This paper calculates the effects of immigration on the wages of native US workers of various skill levels in two steps. In the first step we use labor demand functions to estimate the elasticity of substitution across different groups of workers. Second, we use the underlying production structure and the estimated elasticities to calculate the total wage effects of immigration in the long run. We emphasize that a production function framework is needed to combine own-group effects with cross-group effects in order to obtain the total wage effects for each native group. In order to obtain a parsimonious representation of elasticities that can be estimated with available data, we adopt alternative nested-CES models and let the data select the preferred specification. New to this paper is the estimate of the substitutability between natives and immigrants of similar education and experience levels. In the data-preferred model, there is a small but significant degree of imperfect substitutability between natives and immigrants which, when combined with the other estimated elasticities, implies that in the period from 1990 to 2006 immigration had a small effect on the wages of native workers with no high school degree (between 0.6% and +1.7%). It also had a small positive effect on average native wages (+0.6%) and a substantial negative effect (-6.7%) on wages of previous immigrants in the long run.\" (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Längsschnitt. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1990 bis 2006.

Recent literature analysing wage effects of immigration assumes labour supply is fixed across education-experience cells. This article departs from this assumption estimating a labour market equilibrium dynamic discrete choice model on U.S. micro-data for 1967–2007. Individuals adjust to immigration by changing education, participation, and/or occupation. Adjustments are heterogeneous: 4.2–26.2% of prime-aged native males change their careers; of them, some switch to white-collar careers and increase education by about three years; others reduce labour market attachment and reduce education also by about three years. These adjustments mitigate initial effects on wages and inequality. Natives that are more similar to immigrants are the most affected on impact, but also have a larger margin to adjust and differentiate. Adjustments also produce a self-selection bias in the estimation of wage effects at the lower tail of the distribution, which the model corrects.

A growing experimental literature uses response rates to fictional requests to measure discrimination against ethnic minorities. This article argues that restricting attention to response rates can lead to faulty inferences about substantive discrimination depending on how response dummies are correlated with other response characteristics. We illustrate the relevance of this problem by means of a conjoint experiment among all German welfare offices, in which we randomly varied five traits and designed requests to allow for a substantive coding of response quality. We find that response rates are statistically indistinguishable across treatment conditions. However, putative non-Germans receive responses of significantly lower quality, potentially deterring them from applying for benefits. We also find observational evidence suggesting that discrimination is more pronounced in welfare offices run by local governments than in those embedded in the national bureaucracy. We discuss implications for the study of equality in the public sphere.

Following Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) we present a model in which tasks of varying complexity are matched to workers of varying skill in order to develop and test predictions regarding the effects of immigration and offshoring on US native-born workers. We find that immigrant and native-born workers do not compete much due to the fact that they tend to perform tasks at opposite ends of the task complexity spectrum, with offshore workers performing the tasks in the middle. An effect of offshoring and a positive effect of immigration on native-born employment suggest that immigration and offshoring improve industry efficiency. (JEL J24, J41, J61, L24)

Peers have long been found to be of relevance for educational aspirations and hence educational success. While sociological and social psychological theories often assume concrete social mechanisms that focus on ‘significant’ peers, past research predominantly had to rely on classroom-level aggregates. This study examines how educational aspirations among adolescents cluster in friendship networks within school classes. Through the utilization of social network measures from the CILS4EU data on Germany, The Netherlands, and Sweden (15,203 individuals, 50 per cent girls, MAGE 14.9 years), we construct two measures of the most significant peers around individuals, i.e. of the peer milieu, and explore the salience of educational aspirations in these milieus. Applying longitudinal logistic regression models and first-difference models with individual-level fixed effects, we find evidence for clustering of individuals with the same educational aspirations within classrooms, underlining the relevance of peers for educational success.