Origins matter: Immigrant selectivity in Western Europe

该项目建立在移民社会学的一个核心原则之上，即移民不是原籍人口的随机样本，而是在某些特征上与留在原籍人口不同。第一个目的是提供一个描述在不同的西欧目的地的一系列不同的移民群体的教育选择性。除了教育选择性（这是本研究的主要焦点）之外，态度的选择性也被考虑在内。第二个目标是从理论上理清和实证调查选择性与移民融入接收社会之间的联系。重点是选择一些重要的结果，包括文化整合（就语言习得而言），位置或结构整合（就教育和劳动力市场表现而言）以及社会和身份整合方面（就种族间关系和态度而言）。另一个方法学目标是通过系统地实施改进的选择性措施来为文献做出贡献。在这个项目中，选择性被定义为个人层面的特征，而不是基于群体的规范的常见方法。我们通过记录个体的年龄和性别在原籍国选择性特征分布中的位置来衡量选择性。由此产生的选择性测量承认，起源群体通常由不同比例的积极和消极选择的个体组成。数据可得性方面的进步使人们能够利用各种数据源，既适用于大批原籍国，也适用于整个欧洲的各种移民目的地。将向科学界提供所有数据协调工作以及复制在项目过程中进行的分析所需的脚本。

This project builds upon a core principle in the sociology of migration, namely that immigrants are not a random sample of the origin population, but differ in certain characteristics from individuals who stay behind. The first aim is to provide a description of educational selectivity for a range of different immigrant groups across a variety of Western European destinations. In addition to educational selectivity, which is the main focus of this research, selectivity in attitudes also enters the account. The second aim is to theoretically disentangle and empirically investigate the links between selectivity and immigrants’ incorporation into the receiving societies. The focus is on a selection of important outcomes including cultural integration (in terms of language acquisition), positional or structural integration (in terms of education and labor market performance) and aspects of social and identificative integration (in terms of inter-ethnic relations and attitudes). An additional methodological aim is to contribute to the literature by systematically implementing improved measures of selectivity. In this project, selectivity is framed as an individual-level characteristic as opposed to the common approach of group-based specifications. We measure selectivity by recording an individual’s age- and sex-specific position in the origin country’s distribution of the selectivity characteristic in question. The resulting selectivity measure acknowledges that origin groups are typically composed of varying proportions of positively and negatively selected individuals. Advances in data availability allow making use of a variety of data sources, both for a large set of countries of origin and for various immigrant destinations throughout Europe. All data harmonization efforts as well as the scripts necessary for replicating the analyses carried out in the course of the project will be made available to the scientific community.