Employment careers and unemployment dynamics of immigrants in Germany and Great Britain

This paper examines employment careers of immigrants as compared to the native-born in Germany and the United Kingdom, two countries which differ with respect to several factors potentially influencing immigrant integration in the host society and particularly immigration policies, labour market regulation and welfare regimes. To this end the existing longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) for Germany and the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) for the UK are used. Sequence analysis techniques are applied in order to exploit the full potential of the longitudinal data for the descriptive analysis. The analysis shows that in both countries employment career sequences of immigrants are similarly remote from those of native-born men. Further analysis reveals that long and frequent unemployment spells are behind this dissimilarity in both countries. Results of the cluster analysis of the matrix attained from the pairwise Optimal Matching analysis of the occupational career sequences prove, however, that immigrants in the UK and Germany pursue largely different occupational paths, the former having occupational careers rather similar to those of the native-born, the latter being segmented in manual, mostly unskilled, bluecollar jobs. Multivariate event history analysis is conducted to explore the dynamics and to determine the causes of frequent and prolonged unemployment among immigrants in both countries. In the UK immigrants have similar risks of loosing employment as the native-born. The same is true for immigrants in Germany, but only if the status and particularly the occupation, industry and tenure of their current job are taken into account. This suggests that the higher risk of loosing employment among immigrants in Germany may be attributed to their location in vulnerable occupations and industries. The outsider status of immigrants in Germany is also evident when the risk of exiting unemployment is analysed. They are disadvantaged at entry to white-collar, but have similar or even higher risks to enter unskilled jobs. Completely different picture emerges from the multivariate analysis for the UK. There, immigrants show similar risk of entering white-collar and skilled employment, but lower risk of ending up in the unskilled jobs if compared to native-born Brits.