Refugees’ and Irregular Migrants’ Self-selection into Europe

Abstract

We provide the first large-scale evidence on self-selection of refugees and irregular migrants who arrived in Europe in 2015 or 2016. Our analysis uses unique datasets from the International Organization for Migration and Gallup World Polls. We find that refugees are positively self-selected with respect to human capital, as are female irregular migrants. Male irregular migrants are negatively self-selected. These patterns hold whether analyzing individually stated main reason to emigrate, country-level conflict intensity, or sub-regional conflict intensity. Several additional analyses show that our results are unlikely to be driven by omitted variable bias or liquidity constraints. We offer a theoretical framework to explain these patterns, by extending the Roy-Borjas model to include risks related to staying in an unsafe country of origin, risks related to migration, and gender specific returns to human capital.

The socio-cultural integration of immigrants in Germany: changes across generations

“…The main logic and argument of the contemporary international migration movements, especially towards the Western developed countries, is the economic advantages associated with them and the migrants' expectations of social promotion in the destination country. Therefore, since the motivation for migration is an improvement in living standards in terms of monetary value, the cultural prospects tend to be secondary to the immigrants (Ok olski, 2006;Aksoy and Poutvaara, 2019). In other words, the migration movements are determined by the economic motivation that will bring economic power and privilege in the future, even though numerous migrants have been escaping violent conflicts over the last years, and there is little room for cultural autonomy and enhancement in these movements.…”