Abstract
Objective: This paper draws on data from the Microcensus to provide a long-term overview of the labour market performance of different arrival cohorts of non-German women and men who immigrated to (western) Germany.
 Background: While there is a large body of research on the labour market outcomes of migrants to Germany, a long-term and gender-specific overview is missing.
 Method: We provide descriptive analyses of the employment rates, working hours, and occupational status levels of different arrival cohorts by gender, calendar year, and duration of stay. The data cover the time period 1976-2015.
 Results: With the exception of the earliest cohort, migrant women and men were consistently less likely to be employed than their German counterparts. While the average working hours of migrant women of earlier cohorts were longer than those of German women, this pattern reversed due to a considerable decline in the average working hours of migrant women across subsequent cohorts. The occupational status levels of female and male migrants increased across the arrival cohorts, corresponding to higher levels of education. Analyses by duration of stay indicate that the occupational status of the arrival cohorts tended to decline during their initial years of residence, and to stagnate thereafter. This pattern seems to be due in part to selective outmigration.
 Conclusion: Our results clearly show that the labour market performance of immigrants varied greatly by arrival cohort, reflecting the conditions and policy contexts during which they entered Germany. This conclusion applied especially to migrant women.
Highlights
Germany has become one of the world’s leading immigration countries
This paper has provided a descriptive overview of the employment patterns of firstgeneration non-German immigrants who moved to West Germany between 1964 and 2010
The large sample sizes of the Microcensus enabled us to cast a nuanced light on the employment profiles of men and women who belonged to different arrival cohorts
Summary
Germany has become one of the world’s leading immigration countries. In 2018, 16 per cent of the resident population in Germany (13.5 million people) were born outside the boundaries of the Federal Republic of Germany (Destatis 2019a). The changing contexts and the heterogeneity of migrant populations over time call for an arrival-cohort-specific perspective on their labour market integration in Germany. We exploit data from the German Microcensus between 1976 and 2015 to provide a comprehensive and nuanced picture of the employment patterns of different “arrival cohorts” of non-German immigrants (i.e., excluding ethnic Germans) who have moved to Germany in specific time periods. We conduct all analyses over time and discuss the emerging patterns against the backdrop of compositional changes in migrants’ levels of education. This approach allows us to elucidate how migrants’ integration patterns are stratified along key dimensions of social inequality. While our findings are indirect and tentative, they shed some additional light on the role of outmigration in, for example, shaping changes in the occupational status of first-generation migrants by the duration of stay in the country
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