SOCIAL MOBILITY SANS FRONTIÈRES?

ABSTRACT

In research on immigration, a lot of attention is devoted to the intergenerational socio-economic mobility of second and third generation immigrants, but little is known about the class mobility of first generation migrants. We address this issue with the use of a representative survey on middle-aged and elderly immigrants in France. A comparison between the socio-economic status of each male respondent during his childhood and at the time of the interview reveals some variation in class mobility across countries and regions of origin. At the same time, our analysis of the main determinants of the socio-economic status of the respondents at the end of their careers highlights a strong influence of the socio-economic environment during their childhoods and gives support to our main hypothesis of a dominance effect.

Keywords:

• migration
• social mobility
• dominance effect

Notes

1. Including economic, human and social capital as well as habitus (see section 5 of this article).

2. Specifically, each emigrant is asked to position himself within one of the following 5 categories: (1) very poor, (2) poor, (3) middle-income, (4) rich, and (5) very rich. He is also asked to evaluate in the same way the socio-economic status of his father at the time of the migrant's childhood. We group together positions 1 and 2 and 4 and 5, respectively, as there are very few observations in some of these categories and results among them are not significantly different.

3. We also attempted controlling for factors such as motives for migration, legal status upon arrival in France, religion and location (urban or rural) from which the respondent has migrated. Since they tended to be insignificant and did not improve or model's performance, we omitted them from the final specification.

4. The data were collected through CAPI (Computer Assited Personal Interview) face to face questionnaires. The interviews took place at the homes of the respondants (after sending a letter to make an appointment). Each interview with the questionnaire lasted about 90 minutes.

5. The final sample of 6,211 questionnaires represents 52 percent of the initial random sample drawn from the population census. There were 1,800 (15 percent) refusals, 1,000 (15 percent) addresses not reachable and 2,980 (25 percent) households out of the field (not aged 45 to 70 or non-migrants). To take into account the difference between the initial and the final sample, a weight (coefficient of ponderation) was applied; it was calculated by including different parameters, drawn on the data of the population census (see Attias-Donfut 2006: 345).

6. The great majority of migrants arrived in France as young adults, alone or with their spouse and children. The minority of migrants who came with their parents mainly arrived during their childhood. They belong to the oldest waves of migrants from Spain and Italy. This strong correlation with the country of origin, as well as the very insignificant number of observations for people who have arrived with their parents in the majority of the samples, makes the variable ‘coming with their parents’ irrelevant in our regressions.