Hans Bloemen (VU University of Amsterdam and IZA) presented his paper on the “Language Proficiency of Migrants: The Relation with Job Satisfaction and Matching.” He empirically analyzed the language proficiency of migrants in the Netherlands to see if a lack of language skills may induce the migrant to work in jobs that require a lower education level than the level achieved by the migrant and/or may lead to a lower performance on the job. There is evidence of a positive relationship between indicators for language proficiency and satisfaction with work type and professional level for men; but it is not significant for women. Next, Laura Pagani (University of Milan Bicocca) presented her co-authored study on immigrants in Italy. “A ‘Glass-Ceiling’ Effect for Immigrants in the Italian Labour Market?” explores why highly qualified immigrants are unable to earn as much as comparable native Italians.
The traditional highlight of the AM2 is the Julian Simon Lecture. This year’s keynote was given by the renowned sociologist and migration scholar Guillermina Jasso (New York University and IZA). Her research covers socio-behavioral theory, distributive justice, inequality, international migration and many others. In her speech entitled “Studying Immigrant Self-Selection,” she explored her complex research into the reasons for immigrating.
Meghna Sabharval (University of Texas at Dallas) presented groundbreaking ideas on reverse migration in “Why One Leaves? Return Migration of Academic Scientists and Engineers from the United States to India.” Employing data such as the 2003 Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR), Sabharval explained the results from the pilot study revealing some factors that might prompt return migration. The implications are relevant because, for example, it is important for universities to retain talent – of which a great deal is apparently returning to India. After this, Max Nathan (London School of Economics) explained the effect of diversity on innovation in the UK, the first paper of its kind outside of the US. In his paper “Same Difference? Ethnic Inventors, Diversity and Innovation in the UK” he used Patent Microdata from the UK to show that the effect was positive and significant: Immigrants filed for more patents, and diversity was correlated with more innovation. An important policy implication for the UK to increase innovation and thus productivity would be to allow more migration of diverse ethnic groups.
In her paper “Ethnic Concentration and Right-Wing Voting Behavior in Germany,” Verena Dill (University of Trier) found that ethnic concentration was inverse to “far-right” voting behavior. That is, areas of high concentration of far-right voters (who voted for political groups openly hostile to ethnic groups), there are fewer ethnic groups. Martin Ljunge (University of Copenhagen) presented “Trust Issues: Evidence from Second Generation Immigrants.” Through a masterful and complex paper, Ljunge showed differences in trust between the regions of Europe, finding that there is significant transmission of trust on the mother’s side, and trust is strongest in Northern Europe. Building trust in Northern Europe for migrants takes longer while adjustment to the trust levels is Southern and Eastern Europe is fast.
In a session on the success of migration policies, Giovanni Facchini (Erasmus University Rotterdam and IZA) presented joint work entitled “Spending More Is Spending Less: Policy Dilemmas on Irregular Migration.” He developed a model of legal and illegal immigration, allowing for understanding the tradeoffs faced by a government concerning costly enforcement of illegal immigration. The paper argued that when amnesty from the point of view of the destination country is more desirable, investment in enforcement is the appropriate policy. When amnesty is not desirable, the host country would be better off by not devoting any resources to policy enforcement, letting some foreign workers enter and stay illegally. Another paper presented by Pierre M. Picard (University of Luxembourg and IZA) looked into “Sustainable Migration Policies.” The authors considered whether countries might mutually agree on a policy of free movement of workers across countries. For the countries to agree, short-term costs must be outweighed by long-term benefits that result from better labor market flexibility and income smoothing. The paper showed that free movement of workers creates negative externalities on local workers when countries produce some tradable goods, reducing incentives to create free worker movement. Thus in general, free migration policies are sustainable only in an economy with a low share of tradable goods with low congestion factors.
A special lecture was given by honored guest Oded Galor (Brown University and IZA), founder of the Unified Growth Theory. He presented his latest nontraditional macro paper “The 'Out of Africa Hypothesis', Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development.” Galor questioned how today’s economies are affected by the genetic diversity of a population, which is found to be largely influenced by the initial migration of modern humans from East Africa thousands of years ago. Through a complex and well thought out method of analysis using data from population density to migratory distance of ancient ethnic groups, he provided evidence for an optimal level of genetic diversity in a population that allows for the fastest pace of economic development. The United States is found to lie close to the optimal, as was ancient Rome. According to the authors, their findings “suggest that residual genetic diversity explains about 16 percent of the cross-country variation in residual log income per capita.”
In a session on educational considerations, Massimiliano Tani (Macquarie University of Sydney and IZA) presented his research entitled “Does Immigration Policy Affect the Education-Occupation Mismatch? Evidence from Australia.” His paper analyzed the impact of a change in Australia’s immigration policy, indicating that those who entered under more strict conditions have a lower probability of being overeducated than the first. Overall, the policy appears to have brought immigrants that reduced the over-under-education of Australia’s labor market. The final paper was by Stefan C. Wolter (University of Bern and IZA). In “Migration Policy Can Boost PISA Results - Findings from a Natural Experiment,” the authors used education data from Switzerland to assess the before and after effects of a new standardized test taking policy. Using a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis, Wolter found that almost 70 percent of the increases in test scores by first-generation immigrants was due to changes in the individual background characteristics of the new immigrants and improved school composition. The result indicates that internationally comparative analyses should more fully consider differences in national migration policies.
The papers presented at the meeting are downloadable at
http://www.iza.org/AMsquared.
In 2013 the 10th AM2 will take place over four days in combination with the 4th Migration Topic.
