Immigrés en France et en Allemagne: naturalisation, performance économique et emploi dans le secteur public – INTEGRATION

This project unites researchers from France and Germany in a single challenge to determine successful strategies of economic integration of immigrants. Newly available data will allow a comparative study of integration indicators for first and second generation immigrants. The Franco-German comparison is interesting because immigrant groups from the same sending countries can be observed in two neighboring countries with similar living standards and labour market regulations, but with traditionally different approaches to integration and naturalization. In the first part of the project, we provide descriptive evidence on various measures of integration for first and second generation immigrants in France and Germany. Apart from wages and employment, we will also consider public sector employment, naturalization and intermarriage as outcomes. Whereas the economic measures of wages and employment stand for (economic) participation in society, public sector employment and naturalization are deeper signals of integration in that immigrants become representatives of the host country through political participation. Intermarriage might be seen as one of the strongest forms of integration. In the second part of the project, we build on a so-called natural experiment provided by a recent change in German legislation on citizenship to identify the causal effects of naturalization. Determination of the effects of naturalization is especially important in light of convergence of citizenship policies, i.e. easing naturalization in Germany and tightening it in France. In addition, offering faster access to citizenship is an a priori budget neutral policy, which is not the case for intervention programmes like training. In the third part, we focus on immigrant employment in the public sector. We examine why immigrants and even the second generation are underrepresented in these jobs. We ask whether this is a consequence of discrimination in hiring. A particular structure of the hiring process of civil servants in France opens an opportunity to investigate immigrants’ performance in an anonymous written and a non-anonymous oral examination. The research proposed here is highly relevant to current policy debates in Germany and in France and will make a contribution to the empirical economic literature.