Abstract
Confronted with structural demographic challenges, during the last decade European countries have adopted new labour migration policies. The sustainability of these policies largely depends on the intentions of migrants to stay in their country of destination for the long term or even permanently. Despite a growing dependence on skilled labour migrants, very little information exists about the dynamics of this new wave of migration and existing research findings with their focus on earlier migrant generations are hardly applicable today. The article comparatively tests major theoretical approaches accounting for permanent settlement intentions of Germany’s most recent labour migrants from non-European countries on the basis of a new administrative dataset. Although the recent wave of labour migrants is on average a privileged group with regard to their human capital, fundamentally different mechanisms are shaping their future migration intentions. In contrast to neo-classical expectations, a first path highlights economic factors that determine temporary stays of a creative class benefiting from opportunities of an increasingly international labour market. Instead, socio-cultural and institutional factors are the decisive determinants of a second path leading towards permanent settlement intentions. Three main factors—language skills, the family context and the legal framework—make migrants stay in Germany, providing important implications for adjusting and strengthening labour migration policies in Europe.
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Notes
Besides these three entry gates included in the latter empirical analyses, two additional options for labour migration exist. Section 16 of the Residence Act provides foreign graduates with the option to extend their residence permit by up to 1 year for the purpose of seeking a job adequate to their qualifications (introduced 2005). Secondly, Section 20 of the Residence Act (introduced 2007) offers a special residence title for researchers. This option is rarely used (in 2013 only 930 migrants lived in Germany holding this title) and is not included in the latter empirical analyses.
Response rates for the surveys varied between 21.9 % in the case of self-employed persons, 37.2 % for general labour migrants and 54.1 % for the survey of high-skilled newcomers. All migrants holding one of those three residence titles are labour migrants, whereas potentially accompanying family members would hold separate residence titles. For more information about the data and their sampling procedures, see Block and Klingert (2012) and Heß (2009, 2012).
The focus on those with a maximum duration of stay of 5 years results from the interest in the most recent wave of labour migrants as well as the fact that German immigration law provides for the possibility to apply for a permanent residence title after 5 years of continuous residence in Germany. The sample then becomes increasingly less representative for the group of labour migrants due to these potential status changes.
Although generally seen as an important aspect of economic integration, the latter analyses do not control for working status. Because a job is required for being issued a residence title as a labour migrant, only less than 6 % are currently not employed (due to job loss or other circumstances, e.g. parental leave).
An alternative measure for socio-cultural integration of migrants regularly found in similar analyses is the migrants’ previous experiences in Germany. The multivariate analyses showed, however, that the inclusion of language skills accounts for the same theoretical dimension. Previous experiences were therefore not included in the final analyses.
The detailed results of the factor analysis are available from the authors on request. The reliability of both scales was subsequently tested with Cronbach Alpha of 0.85 in the first and 0.58 in the second case.
The sign and significance of all effects presented on the basis of logistic regressions are controlled by linear probability models to account for potential unobserved heterogeneity (cf. Mood 2010). Binary rather than ordinal logistic regression models were preferred for theoretical reasons but additional linear regression models were fitted on the original dependent variable, confirming reported empirical results. Descriptive statistics as well as results on all additional models are available from the authors on request.
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Acknowledgments
The opinions expressed in this article are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions to which they are affiliated. The authors greatly appreciate the support of Astrid Schwietering, our colleagues Stine Waibel, Robert Naderi, Stephan Humpert and Elisa Hanganu as well as methodological advice from Markus Ganninger in calculating the post-stratification weights of the applied dataset as well as to participants of the “highly skilled migration, gender and family” session at the International Conference on Population Geographies 2013 in Groningen. They provided helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this article.
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Ette, A., Heß, B. & Sauer, L. Tackling Germany’s Demographic Skills Shortage: Permanent Settlement Intentions of the Recent Wave of Labour Migrants from Non-European Countries. Int. Migration & Integration 17, 429–448 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-015-0424-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-015-0424-2