Breaking down the barriers: educational paths, labour market outcomes and wellbeing of children of immigrants

ABSTRACT

The goal of successfully incorporating ethnic minorities represents a decisive challenge for modern societies. However, migratory background continues to negatively affect the life trajectories of migrants’ descendants. ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ barriers determine long-term inequality gaps and low intergenerational social mobility in both longstanding and more recent European immigration countries. This special issue complements the sparse findings on education, labour market outcome and wellbeing relating to immigrant offspring by providing original insight in order to individuate strategies for removing the obstacles that the descendants of migrants face. In-depth analyses have been performed for specific Southern European contexts in order to explore the specific inequality patterns that are emerging in these more recent and unexplored immigration contexts. The main findings suggest that the lower academic performances of immigrants’ descendants can be raised through language-support programmes, mentoring programmes, positive role and disciplinary climate, extra-scholastic activities and parental involvement. Equality opportunities in education should support school-to-work transitions and better allocate the underutilised human capital reserves of migrants’ descendants. Conversely, long-lasting penalties in educational careers and integration processes may arise when children are physically separated from their parents because of delayed family reunification.

KEYWORDS:

• Children of immigrants
• ethnic penalty
• education
• labour-market
• well-being
• Southern European countries

Acknowledgements

The largest number of the articles appearing in this special issue stems from twopanel sessions organised by guest editors within two main conferences: the 49th scientific meeting of the Italian Statistical Society (Palermo, June 20–22, 2018) and the 3rd annual conference of the Italian Society of Economic Sociology (Naples, January 31–February 2, 2019). Authors thank participants for useful insights on draft versions of their manuscripts. The authors also thank the editorial team of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies for the opportunity to publish this special issue. In addition, we are grateful to the reviewers for constructive comments on earlier versions of each of the articles in this special issue.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Access here: https://ec.europa.eu/migrant-integration/librarydoc/declaration-of-the-european-ministerial-conference-on-integration-zaragoza-15-16-april-2010 (last accessed April 4, 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Naples Federico II, under the grant E66J17000330001, D.R. n.408 of 07/02/2017, and by the Ministry of Education Universities and Research (MIUR), under the grant 2017N9LCSC_004 (PRIN 2017).