Essays on the Economic and Cultural Integration of Migrants

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays. The first, entitled "Integration of Humanitarian Migrants into the Host Country Labour Market: Evidence from Australia", aims at identifying the factors that influence the labour market integration of humanitarian migrants into the host country. A number of refugees' employment outcomes are examined including access to employment, access to stable employment, the wage/earnings level and the education-occupation mismatch. Using a recently collected panel survey data in Australia, the results show that pre-migration education, work experience, previous migration episodes, as well as English proficiency, English training, study/job training undertaken in Australia and social capital form important determinants of the labour market integration of refugees. Moreover, the essay highlights the differentiated impacts of these resources on the refugees' outcomes at six months, one year and two years after arrival in Australia. This essay provides a unique basis of knowledge for informed policy-making and helps identify the ways to facilitate the economic integration of refugees. The second essay, entitled "Ethnic Identity and the Employment Outcomes of Immigrants: Evidence from France", examines the relationship between economic and social integration. More specifically, it explores the influence that ethnic identity exerts on immigrants' labour market performance in the host country. The objective of this essay is twofold: first, to determine the immigrants' ethnic identity and second, to investigate the impact of ethnic identity on the immigrants' employment outcomes. Using a rich survey data from France and relying on a polychoric principal component analysis, this essay proposes two alternative measures of ethnic identity than the ones used in the literature, namely: i) the degree of commitment to the origin country culture and ii) the extent to which the individual holds multiple identities. The essay investigates the impact of the ethnic identity measures on the employment outcomes of immigrants in France. The results show that having multiple identities is associated with an improvement in the employment outcomes of the migrants. However, when addressing the endogenous nature of ethnic identity, there is no significant impact of ethnic identity on the employment outcomes of immigrants. The last essay, entitled "The Effect of 9/11 on Immigrants' Ethnic Identity and Employment: Evidence from Germany", aims at exploring the impact of terrorism on the economic and social integration of immigrants in the host country. Indeed, over the lifecourse of the migrants in the host country, there might be a number of identity shocks that would affect their social integration. This might as well have an effect on their labour market outcomes. This chapter investigates the effect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the identity choice and the employment outcomes of Muslim immigrants in Germany. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this essay relies on a difference-in-differences strategy to compare the outcomes of Muslims with non-Muslim immigrants before and after the attacks. One concern is the lack of an appropriate comparison group. In order to address this issue, the essay relies on a regression-adjusted difference-in-differences matching strategy. The results show that Muslim immigrants have decreased their degree of identification with Germany after 9/11 compared to non-Muslims. There is no significant impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Muslims' employment outcomes relative to non-Muslims. The results contribute to provide a better understanding of the process of social integration of immigrants.