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Multigenerational Consequences of Migration: Women's Gains vs. Labor Market Barriers

By Sait Bayrakdar, Şebnem Eroğlu and Ayse Guveli

While significant strides have been made in family dynamics, gender roles, and educational attainment, ethnic penalties persist as a major barrier, preventing migrants and their descendants from fully benefiting from their education.
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Source: Yavuz Selim Uylaş 

Since the bilateral guest-worker agreements of the 1960s and 1970s, migrant integration (or adaptation) has become a key concern for European policy makers. Preoccupied with the integration question, researchers mostly compared migrants with the majority populations, documenting persistent disadvantages for migrants in terms of educational and occupational outcomes. However, migrant-‘native’ comparisons tend to reinforce a deficit narrative as they are unable to fully capture the advancements migrants and their children make despite experiencing unique challenges; for example, due to limited country-specific cultural capital (e.g., language skills) and structural barriers (e.g., racism) in access to education or labour market.

The 2000 Families Project offers a novel approach that examines the transformation of migrants and their descendants from the dissimilation perspective, based on comparisons with their counterparts who have never left their origin country. Thereby, it approximates the counterfactual scenario to answer the question of what would have happened to the migrants and their offspring if they had stayed in the origin country. 

The project generated a large-scale survey database on the largest non-EU migrant population in Europe, by developing an innovative screening strategy to locate guest-worker men from five high migrant-sending regions in Turkey between 1961 and 1974 and their counterparts who remained in the regions. By tracing their families across Turkey and Europe up to the fourth generation, the survey constructed the family genealogies of about 49,000 individuals nested within 1992 families.

Findings reveal substantial changes in family processes and dynamics, social and cultural attitudes and behaviours and gender relations as well as their socio-economic positions. For example, as compared with their stayer counterparts in Turkey, migrants (and their descendants) are found to exhibit less traditional behaviours when it comes to childbearing and making marriage arrangements for their children. They are shown to display more egalitarian attitudes to gender as well as adopting more gender-equal approaches to financial decision-making within the household. The above sketched tendencies indicate that migrants are indeed going through change – or more specifically, a process of acculturation leading them to dissimilate from their origins. 

As for their socioeconomic outcomes, the emerging picture is far from being straightforward. Educationally, migrants and their descendants living in Europe, especially the members of the third generation, obtain considerably higher qualifications than their stayer counterparts. At face value, these results may support the assumptions of the classical assimilation and integration theorists. However, their educational gains do not necessarily translate into better economic outcomes. Migrants and their descendants are indeed more likely to find themselves in relative monetary poverty and lower-status occupations than the stayers with commensurate education. 

That said, some gender differences are observed. Migrant women and their daughters not only achieve higher qualifications than their stayer counterparts, but also join the labour market to a greater extent. Migration may be benefiting women more by increasing their chances of employment and thereby empowering them but like men, it appears to compel them to accept jobs below their educational status. 

The 2000 Families project also provides unique insights into policy making. It allows documenting the nature and extent of progress migrants have made by moving from their origins as well as the barriers they encounter in their journeys. This research design better captures change than creating a deficit narrative through comparisons of migrants with the ‘natives’ who do not undergo migration-specific challenges. Overall, in line with past research, the weight of evidence obtained from the 2000 Families project suggests that ethnic penalties continue to act as a barrier for migrants and their descendants to obtain fair returns to education. Thus, a concerted policy effort is needed to lift these penalties. 

In 2011 when the 2000 Families Survey was conducted, the third generation, i.e., the grandchildren of the guest workers, was on average aged 25. In 2026, they will have reached their 40ies. The Third Generation (ThirdGen) project, led by Professor Ayse Guveli and her team, will examine the long-term impact of migration and trace change and continuity in their lives. This new project will additionally focus on the care arrangements and plans they may have made for their children, parents and grandparents. Thereby, it will shed light upon a policy area, of which currently little remains known. 

 

Acknowledgement:

The ThirdGen project was selected for funding by the European Research Council (ERC) and granted €2.75 million by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). For further information about the new project please refer to http://third-generation.co.uk/.

 

References:

For further details on the above-presented results from the 2000 Families Survey, please refer to the selected publications below or the project website accessible at https://2000families.org/. The survey database is available for researchers to use via the GESIS Archive: GESIS-Suche: 2000 Families: Migration Histories of Turks in Europe. 

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