Understanding the benefits of migration: multigenerational transmission, gender and educational outcomes of Turks in Europe

ABSTRACT

Research commonly compares the educational outcomes of migrants and the second generation to their native peers in destination countries, often finding the former groups lagging behind in education. Their outcomes are rarely compared to their non-migrant peers in the origin countries. Using the dissimilation from origins perspective, we ask whether Turkish-origin men and women in Europe benefit from migration by comparing their educational outcomes to non-migrants in Turkey. At the same time, we comparatively examine the intergenerational transmission of education to determine to what extent individuals capitalise on their parents and grandparents’ resources. Analysing the novel 2000 Families data, we show that migrants and their descendants in Europe obtain higher levels of education than their non-migrant peers in Turkey. While both men and women experience educational benefits from migration, women’s gains are higher. Another salient finding is that Turkish-origin parents in Europe are less able to pass on their socioeconomic resources to their children than their counterparts in Turkey. Overall, the findings corroborate the theory of the dissimilation of Turkish-origin Europeans from their Turkish peers in educational attainment.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational outcomes
• international migration
• gender
• intergenerational transmission
• dissimilation

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We use ‘Turks in Europe’ to delineate those who moved or whose parent(s) or grandparent(s) moved from Turkey and are living in European destination countries. We are not referring to ethnicity or citizenship.

2 High school enrolment rates show very similar trends.

3 The studies comparing social mobility levels across countries show differences in their methods and measurements as well as their conclusions. That said, almost all studies show that Western European countries show high levels of social mobility with Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands being in the lead and France and Germany being rather close to the mid-levels of the rankings. For an extensive review of the conclusions as well as cross-country differences see Breen and Jonsson’s (2005) review of research on educational attainment and social mobility.

4 Ordinal logistic regression models yield similar results.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NORFACE (New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe) Research Program on Migration in Europe – Social, Economic, Cultural, and Policy Dynamics [grant number 235548].