OECD study: Immigrant children do better in "new world" than in Europe.

[pampango]

http://www.oecd.org/document/42/0,3343,en_2649_33931_43965226_1_1_1_37415,00.html

In most European OECD countries, the native-born children of migrants are overrepresented among the low-educated, particularly in Austria and Belgium, where native-born children of immigrants find themselves twice as often among the low-educated as the children of natives. In contrast, native-born offspring of immigrants have similar education levels as children of natives in non-European OECD countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States, but also in Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Children of immigrants have also lower employment rates than children of natives. The differences are particularly large in Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and France, where the differences are more than ten percentage points, for both gender. As a result, in many countries children of immigrants are among those who are most marginalised in the labour market. On average over the OECD countries for which data are available, male native-born children of migrants find themselves more than twice as often among the low-educated who are neither in employment nor in education than children of natives – in Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands the ratio is even three times and more.

Perhaps surprisingly, for women the figure relative to the offspring of natives is lower. Indeed, for women, one observes a strong improvement for the native-born offspring of immigrants compared with their foreign-born counterparts. This is not observed for men.

A key result of the study was that there remain strong differences between the labour market outcomes of children of immigrants and children of natives even at the same education levels. In Belgium, France and the Netherlands, the differences are particularly large within the group of the low-educated. Also in the United Kingdom, there are relatively large gaps for the low- and medium-qualified. Even when children of immigrants are high-educated, they have lower employment rates than children of natives – on average over the OECD countries five percentage points for men and seven percentage points for women. On average, only about a third of the gap in the employment rates between children of natives and native-born children of immigrants can be explained by differences in the educational attainment.

[Hannah Bell]

1. no worries, european-style $-based ed coming this way soon.