Ethnic spatial dispersion and immigrant identity*

ABSTRACT

The role of ethnic clustering in ethnic identity formation has remained unexplored, mainly due to missing detailed data. This study closes the knowledge gap for Germany by employing a unique combination of datasets, the survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and disaggregated information at low geographical levels from the last two but still unexploited full German censuses, 1970 and 1987. Utilizing the exogenous placement of immigrants during the recruitment era in the 1960s and 1970s we find that local co-ethnic concentration affects immigrants’ ethnic identity. While residential ethnic clustering strengthens immigrants’ retention of an affiliation with their origin (minority identity), it weakens identification with the host society (majority identity). The effects are nonlinear and become significant only at relatively high levels of co-ethnic concentration for the minority identity and at very low levels of local concentration for the majority identity. The findings are robust to an instrumental variable approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic minorities
• residential segregation
• ethnic identity
• spatial dispersion
• ethnic clustering
• ethnic enclaves

Acknowledgments

Financial support from the German Science Foundation (DFG) is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Editor-in-Chief Wenxuan Hou, Victoria Finn, Martin Fischer, Corrado Giulietti and conference participants for many helpful comments and suggestions on previous drafts. The German 1970 and 1987 censuses used in this study were made available by the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis). We are grateful for excellent support by the statistical offices in Düsseldorf and Bad Ems. This is a substantially revised version of IZA Discussion Paper No. 7052.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Raumordnungsregionen are located at the geographical aggregation level between NUTS-2 (Regierungsbezirk) and NUTS-3 (Kreis – county) regions. There are 96 Raumordnungsregionen in Germany, and they are constituted by grouped counties (NUTS-3). On average, they comprise approximately 500,000 inhabitants.

2. Note that the group of foreign citizens in the 1987 Full German Census also includes German-born individuals who hold a foreign passport.

3. The exact questions are: (1) ‘To what extent do you feel German?’ with the options: I feel fully German, I feel mostly German, I feel partly German, I hardly feel German, I do not feel German at all; and (2) ‘To what extent do you feel [e.g. Turkish] here in Germany?’ with the options: I feel fully [e.g. Turkish], I feel mostly [e.g. Turkish], I feel partly [e.g. Turkish], I hardly feel [e.g. Turkish], I do not feel [e.g. Turkish] at all.

4. Borjas (1998), Edin, Fredriksson, and Aslund (2003) and Schönwälder and Söhn (2009) employ a similar definition.

5. Based on a comparable measure of local ethnic concentration in terms of area zip codes, Borjas (1998) finds that 48% of US residents with a migration background lived in relatively high concentration areas in 1979 with significant dispersion across ethnic groups (e.g. 83.8% of Mexicans, 49.6% of Italians, compared to only 25.8% of Greeks). Applying the same calculation for Sweden, Edin, Fredriksson, and Aslund (2003) show that in 1997 42% of first-generation immigrants resided in ethnic enclaves.

6. We use SOEP biography data on employment spells to generate an indicator variable that equals one if the individual had worked at any point in the period between the year of immigration and 1987.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amelie F. Constant

Dr. Amelie F. Constant is a Research Affiliate at the University of Pennsylvania, Population Studies Center. She is associate editor and on the editorial board of several academic journals. She is a Foreign Member of the European Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of CESifo and GLO, an Affiliated Professorial Fellow of UNU-MERIT, and an Academic Member of ATINER. She is past President of the Society of Government Economists. Her research lies in the economics of migration, where she has published extensively in leading journals and top field journals has won several awards for them. She is the co-editor of two books and the first Handbook on the economics of migration; a volume of the Research in Labor Economics Journal, and special issues of the Journal of International Manpower. As a professor, Constant has over fifteen years of experience in teaching. She is heavily cited with over 7000 citations in Google Scholar.

Simone Schüller

Dr. Simone Schüller is a researcher at the German Youth Institute (DJI) and affiliated to FBK-IRVAPP, IZA, GLO and CESifo. Her research interests include labor, migration, family and digitization economics. She published e.g. in European Economic Review, Labour Economics, Research Policy, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Journal of Population Economics.

Klaus F. Zimmermann

Prof. Dr. Klaus F. Zimmermann is President of the Global Labor Organization (GLO); Co-Director of POP at UNU-MERIT; Honorary Professor, Maastricht University, Free University of Berlin, Lixin University and Renmin University of China; Emeritus Full Professor at Bonn University; Research Fellow CEPR, London; Member, German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Regional Science Academy, and Academia Europaea. His research relates to population and applied economics. He has well published with RePEc rank top 1% in journals like American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of the European Economic Association, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Population Economics and China Economic Review.