When children of immigrants come of age. A longitudinal perspective on labour market outcomes in Switzerland

Abstract

Migration during childhood has a negative impact on educational outcomes. As a result, migrant youths enter the labour market with lower educational assets and experience obstacles and delayed transitions. Even so, little is known about later labour-market outcomes of youth who migrated to Switzerland during childhood and attended post-compulsory education there. Are there differences with respect to the labour-market outcomes for these young adults, and do these differences persist once we account for educational attainment and other relevant characteristics? For a longitudinal analysis of these research questions, we draw on panel data of the first TREE (Transitions from Education to Employment) co-hort. With reference to descriptives of their educational and labour market situation, we propose a number of explanatory models to predict the effect of migration characteristics while controlling for relevant characteristics including educational attainment. We consider the effect of three variables related to migration: respondents’ country of birth, respondents’ nationality and parental country of birth. Our results show that, in a longitudinal perspective, those who migrated during childhood experience higher risk of unemployment, are to be found in lower occupational positions and have lower incomes than native youths. While some differences can be explained by the lower level of education of those born abroad, this is not the case for other differences such as income differentials. Moreover, some effects vary by type of migration characteristics (respondent’s country of birth, parental country of birth and respondent’s nationality) or appear only in a longitudinal perspective, thereby underlining the necessity of framing migration multidimensionally and relying on panel data.