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This article investigates the educational participation of refugee adolescents in Germany as a main European destination country of refugee migration. Opportunities and restrictions for school participation vary not only across countries–, but in the case of the Federal Republic of Germany, also within countries. The influence of different regional educational policies on refugees' educational participation and the extent to which they limit or enable individual agency, are however, widely understudied. We thus aim to analyze how different regional educational policies within Germany influence refugee students' educational participation regarding four central indicators: the duration until school enrollment, the type of class attended (newcomer vs. regular class), the type of school attended, and whether they are enrolled in settings appropriate for their age. We rely on a theoretical model which sees educational decisions as the result of rational cost-benefit calculations. The individual educational investments depend on individual motivations and resources within a given opportunity structure. We integrate the legal regulations via the opportunity structures into the theoretical model. Our analyses are based on data from 2,415 adolescents who were interviewed in the “ReGES–Refugees in the German Educational System” study. Our results show significant correlations between different regional educational policies and the four domains of educational participation. These effects remain stable when considering family and individual resources, as well as further control variables that previous research on social and ethnic educational inequality has shown to be relevant. Family and individual resources only partially influence educational participation. This indicates that refugee students and their parents have only limited options for action concerning their educational participation. Thus, our study shows that educational policies in fact matter: the assignment to a federal state plays a significant role in determining the duration until school enrollment, whether one is placed to a grade level age-appropriately, and whether one attends a newcomer class. Most significantly, legal regulations strongly influence refugees' chances of attending a higher school track (Gymnasium). Due to the low permeability of the German education system, this creates path dependencies for the further education and career paths of new immigrant students.

This paper investigates subjective labour market incorporation of European physicians in Germany as high‐skilled intra‐EU immigrants by analysing their perceived career advancement. Applying reference frames as an analytical tool, understood as comparisons with as significant perceived social others, my approach not only scrutinises immigrants' career assessments but also disentangles the differentiation mechanisms that the physicians interviewed deem responsible for their career advancement, whilst accounting for transnational comparisons as a possible compensatory strategy. Building on an original mixed‐methods study, this paper distinguishes based on survey data (N = 963) between those who perceive themselves as disadvantaged towards German peers and those who do not. The analysis rests on 19 semi‐structured interviews. The results emphasise migrant physicians' framing focussing on the country of arrival rather than a transnational perspective. Gender more than migrant status seems to account for career obstacles for some, whereas for Eastern Europeans especially both dimensions appear to reinforce one another.

This article investigates the subjective employment mobility, defined as migrants’ evaluation of their employment situation before and after migration, of European physicians in Germany. Analyzing different dimensions of occupation (e.g., income, working conditions, use of skills, career opportunities) of physicians who migrated to Germany from within the European Union (i.e., EU physicians), it examines which factors influence physicians’ perception of whether migration worsened or improved their employment situation. I argue that the original reasons to migrate (e.g., economic, career-related, or family reasons) and other migration-related factors (e.g., language skills), as well as characteristics of the occupation (e.g., the hierarchical structure), must be considered to understand subjective employment mobility. The analyses are based on original survey data collected among EU physicians in Germany ( N = 1,058). Results from OLS regressions show that physicians’ original reasons for migration largely matched their subjective employment mobility, suggesting that migration for career reasons and a perceived improvement of use of skills and career opportunities are positively linked while migration for economic reasons positively affected physicians’ perception of income and working conditions. Physicians aiming for the highest position perceived their overall employment situation as worse compared to before migration, and the origin region mattered, particularly for physicians from EU Eastern member-states, who were more likely to perceive an improvement in their employment situation. Results further inform understandings of labor-related migration of high-skilled professionals by identifying obstacles and conducive conditions at migration for a group that is often assumed not to face barriers in using migration for professional advancement.