Whose Legacy Matters and for Whom? The Relative Contribution of Mother’s and Father’s Socio-Economic Status in the Educational Attainment of the Children and Grandchildren of Immigrants

Mathieu Ferry , Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University
Mathieu Ichou, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

Recent research on intergenerational social mobility in Western societies tends to show greater social fluidity within immigrant families than within native-born families. Yet, the mechanisms underlying this fluidity gap remain unexplored. Based on a new large-scale survey oversampling immigrants and their descendants in France, the "Trajectoires & Origines 2019-20" survey, we use sibling correlation and decomposition measures to show that the effect of measurable socioeconomic origin on educational attainment is weaker for immigrants’ children than for natives’ children. Moreover, while the relative contribution of mothers’ SES is equal to or greater than that of fathers’ in native-born families, the reverse is true in immigrant families in which father’s SES matter more. The gradual erosion of these specificities for immigrants’ grandchildren is in line with the neo-classical framework of immigrant integration. We discuss the specific pathways of social reproduction in immigrant families implied by these results.

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 Presented in Session 43. Migrant Populations and Education