Can Migration Disrupt the Transmission of Inequality Across Generations?

• In Event: 20225 - Intergenerational Mobility

Abstract

Across place and time, individuals’ socio-economic outcomes and opportunities critically depend on the family by whom they were raised. Scholarship on the transmission of inequality provides overwhelming evidence that the relationship between individuals’ and their descendants’ social position is positive and strong, and that it persists across several generations. At the same time, research on immigrant integration prominently finds that children of migrants often are exceptionally socially mobile. Our objective is therefore to examine whether migration can break the rigid link between family members’ social destinies. We make three contributions to existing research: First, we propose a theoretical model that pinpoints where precisely migration disrupts the transmission process (returns to or heritability of endowments) based on a multigenerational approach. Second, we provide estimates of persistence and the effect of migration on the perpetuation of education, occupation, and income across three transnational generations. For analyses based on a sample of immigrants in their destination country, we use high-quality survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. We replicate these analyses using an origin-country sample of emigrants from Turkey drawing on data from the 2000 Families Study. Both studies allow us to link children, parents, and grandparents transnationally. Our results show that migration consistently and significantly disrupts the transmission of inequality, compared to non-migrants in the destination and to non-migrants in the origin country. These findings highlight how the decision to move places can have long-lasting effects on social reproduction—a phenomenon consistently shown to stand firm against significant structural, institutional, and policy change.

Authors

• Jonas Wiedner, Berlin Social Science Center

• Nhat An Trinh, University of Oxford