Caught between Cultures: Unintended Consequences of Improving Opportunity for Immigrant Girls

Abstract

What happens when immigrant girls are given increased opportunities to integrate into the workplace and society, but their parents value more traditional cultural outcomes? We answer this question in the context of a reform which granted automatic birthright citizenship to eligible immigrant children born in Germany after January 1, 2000. Using survey data we collected from students in 57 schools and comparing those born in the months before versus after the reform, we find the introduction of birthright citizenship lowers measures of life satisfaction and self-esteem for immigrant girls by .32 and .25 standard deviations, respectively. This is especially true for Muslims, where parents are likely to prefer more traditional cultural outcomes than their daughters. Moreover, we find that Muslim girls granted birthright citizenship are less integrated into German society: they are both more socially isolated and less likely to self-identify as German. Exploring mechanisms for these unintended drops in well-being and assimilation, we find that immigrant Muslim parents invest less in their daughters’ schooling and that these daughters receive worse grades in school if they are born after the reform. Parents are also less likely to speak German with these daughters. Consistent with a rise in intrafamily conflict, birthright citizenship results in disillusionment where immigrant Muslim girls believe their chances of achieving their educational goals are lower and the perceived odds of having to forgo a career for a family rise. In contrast, immigrant boys experience, if anything, an improvement in well-being, integration, and schooling outcomes. Taken together, the findings point towards immigrant girls being pushed by parents to conform to a role within traditional culture, whereas boys are allowed to take advantage of the opportunities that come with citizenship. To explain these findings, we construct a simple game-theoretic model which builds on Akerlof and Kranton (2000), where identity-concerned parents constrain their daughter’s choices, and hence lower their daughter’s well-being, when faced with the threat of integration. Alternative models can explain some of the findings in isolation.

The Effect of Offspring Sex on Parents’ Migration Probabilities and Outcomes—A Natural Experiment

“…This may suggest that immigrants also expect more from their daughters when it comes to brokering between them and the host society. On the other hand, Dahl et al (2020) have shown that immigrant Muslim parents in Germany invest less in their daughters' education than sons' and allow sons to take advantage of opportunities while pushing daughters into traditional familial roles. In a quasiexperiment, they show that the discrepancy between opportunities and not being allowed to take advantage of them lowers immigrant girls' well-being and self-esteem more than a simple lack of opportunities.…”

“…To sum up, taking into account prior research on household decision-making (Bailey and Boyle 2004;Cooke 2008;Goldring 2001), gendered migration decisions and experiences (Grasmuck and Pessar 1991;Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994;Klüsener et al 2015;Morawska 2011;Pedraza 1991;Striffler 2007;Tummala-Narra 2013), children's role in family migration decisions (Ackers 2000;Bushin 2009;Mason 2000), differential parental investment by offspring sex (Dahl et al 2020;Hopcroft 2005), different levels of risk aversion by offspring sex (Pogrebna, Oswald, and Haig 2018), offspring sex effects on parents' political attitudes (Conley and Rauscher 2013;Warner 1991;Washington 2008), and, finally, boys' and girls' different ability to adapt to new geographical surroundings (Kessler, Duncan, and Gennetian 2014), this paper exploits the randomness of offspring sex to identify the causal effect of having sons or daughters on parents' decision to migrate to Germany, as well as their integration into German society, as measured by their ability to speak German, feeling connected to their neighborhood, and overall life satisfaction.…”

“…Parents of sons might be better integrated if sons make their parents more likely to migrate in the first place and they are, thus, more personally invested in the goal of making the best of their migration for their children's sake. Also, if parents allow sons but not daughters to take advantage of opportunities in the host country (Dahl et al 2020), this might lead to a better integration of boys and, by extension, an increased ability of sons compared to daughters to help integrate their parents.…”

“…The first question is informed by literature that suggests that men's and women's decisions to migrate differ in motivation and, when part of a household, in weight (Bailey and Boyle 2004;Cooke 2008;Goldring 2001;Green 1997;Hardill et al 1997;Smith 2004), that parents consider their children's welfare when deciding to migrate (Ackers 2000;Bushin 2009;Dreby 2010;Mincer 1978;Teo 2003), and that offspring sex affects parents' attitudes, including risk aversion (Pogrebna, Oswald, and Haig 2018). The second question is motivated by literature that shows that children of immigrants often assume the role of brokers between their parents and the host society (Bauer 2016;Katz 2014;Schaeffer 2013), that boys and girls adapt differently well to new environs (Dahl et al 2020;Kessler, Duncan, and Gennetian 2014), and that offspring sex affects parents' politics (Conley and Rauscher 2013;Warner 1991;Washington 2008). Based on this scholarship, we can expect parents of first-born sons to have a different probability of migrating and integrating than parents of first-born daughters.…”

Ethnic Enclaves and Cultural Assimilation

“…4 My second contribution to the literature is to propose a revealed preference measure of cultural assimilation, i.e., using hormonal contraceptives. 5 A sense of identity on the part of immigrants (Bisin et al, 2008(Bisin et al, , 2016Dahl et al, 2021) does not provide the full picture of the acculturation process. Someone who grew up in the West may still self-identify as belonging to the country of origin.…”