Second-generation immigrants and labor market integration in Sweden : The matter of local context for explaining occupation status differences between ethnic groups

Sammanfattning: The focus of this paper is second-generation immigrants and their labor market performance. With increased immigration from a more diverse ethnic background during the latest decades, it has become apparent that there is a difference between immigrant ethnic groups in labor market performance, in which some groups are more disadvantaged. Now more of these children have grown up, and research shows that the difficulties their parents had, affects the second generation. It is therefore of interest to understand what causes problems and generates opportunities for the second generation and try to understand the division between groups. One theory regarding the integration over generations and the differences between groups is segmented assimilation theory, proposed by Portes and Zhous (1993). According to this theory, both individual characteristics, and the context of immigrant lives are important. Starting with this theory, this paper looks deeper into individual characteristics and context, with special attention towards the implication of the context and the labor market. The thesis does this by testing if “local context,” a concept by Ellis & Almgren (2009) branched to understand the local geographical dimension at a smaller scale than national matter, in the shape of regions. The focus toward context and labor market is due to a small degree of research that attempts to explain how well the second-generation succeeds, depending on the labor market. The method for this is quantitative and builds on comparisons between regressions. A measurement called International Socioeconomic Index (ISEI) is used to explain the impact of the differences between ethnic groups. First are ordinary least square regressions with only ethnic groups, individual characteristics and no spatial aspect compared to a multilevel model based on labor market regions. Further are the spatial characteristics (whether a region is a big city or not), and the degree to which a region is knowledge-based. These factors are added in a multilevel regression to see if these spatial aspects can explain what it is about the regions that have an impact. The result shows a difference between both ethnic groups and regions, and that regions do explain some of the difference between the ethnic groups. The data also show that some non-European groups have higher status occupation than previous research has indicated. Other factors affecting immigrant groups are whether they live in a big city region or not, and how knowledge-based a region is, there it is an advantage living in regions with these factors. However, there is still an unexplained difference between ethnic groups, due to unknown factors. The result are also influenced of sample selection, it is therefore important to be aware that this result only show people with occupation and not labor market performance overall, as unemployment is not taken into account.