Abstract
The social status and well-being of political immigrants’ children are seldom touched upon in literature. This paper focuses on the impact of refugee experience on the relative educational attainment of second-generation immigrants in Taiwan. In contrast with the results in van Ours and Veenman (J Popul Econ 16(4):739–753, 2003) and Riphahn (J Popul Econ 16(4):711–737, 2003) who showed that second-generation immigrants lag behind their native counterparts, this paper’s principle finding is that the father’s immigration status can help his children achieve a higher educational qualification than native Taiwanese after controlling the relevant determinants of educational attainment, including parental background and the neighborhood where the interviewee grows up. In addition, women born in the earlier cohort benefit more by their fathers’ immigration status than their male counterparts do. However, Taiwanese schooling advances across generations are impressive, whereby the gap in schooling attainment between second-generation immigrants and native Taiwanese is found to decline over time.
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Notes
Stigler and Becker (1977, p.76) also cited a similar explanation of Reuben Kessel about why there are few Jews in farming: “Since Jews have been persecuted so often and forced to flee to other countries, they have not invested in immobile land, but mobile human capital—business skills, education, etc.—that would automatically go with them.”
There are some mainland Chinese who moved to Taiwan before 1949, but not many. For example, they only consisted of 0.52% of Taiwan’s civilian population at the end of 1946.
For example, the cultural difference between mainland Chinese immigrants and native Taiwanese is much less than that between Turkish immigrants and native Dutch people considered in Van Ours and Veenman (2003).
Data are from the Statistical abstract of Taiwan Province, 1946–1967 (1971). The data show that at the end of 1949 there are 250,788 male and 165,909 female mainland Chinese immigrants among the 7,396,931 civilians in Taiwan. In fact, female immigrants only consisted of 2.07% of Taiwan residents at the end of 1949, provided we assume all the 600,000 military personnel are males. As a result, many male mainland Chinese immigrants had to marry native Taiwanese, if they want and could. Moreover, it is well known in Taiwan that many of the 600,000 military personnel remained single for the rest of their lives. These statistics explain why in Table 1 we find only 77 individuals with both parents born on the mainland China. Indeed, there are only 82 mothers who were born in mainland China. These statistics also explain why only 10.77% of fathers are from mainland China and the share of mothers who are from mainland China is only 3.82% based on the 2,144 observations used for our empirical studies.
The survey data are the output of an attempt to develop a unique panel dataset in Chinese society. These data have been used in Tsay and Chu (2005) to investigate the fertility behavior of married Taiwan women. The letter “R” represents respondent and R-I 1999 denotes the first of a sequence of surveys conducted in 1999 for a group of respondents born between 1953 and 1963. We have two other groups of respondents surveyed in 2000 and 2003 and their data are contained in R-I 2000 and R-I 2003, respectively. The respondents for R-I 2000 were born between 1934 and 1954 while the respondents for R-I 2003 were born between 1964 and 1976. Note that we do not have R-I 2001 and R-I 2002 but we do have R-II 2000, which represents the second of a sequence of surveys conducted in 2000 for the same group of respondents for R-I 1999, i.e., R-II 2000 is the first follow-up of R-I 1999. For details, please see http://psfd.sinica.edu.tw.
The procedure for selecting the observations is mainly based on an exogenous historic event to distinguish who are first-generation immigrants, i.e., we only include the individuals who were born in Taiwan after 1949 and they are not the third generation of mainland Chinese immigrants. In so doing, the number of observations decreases from 4,105 to be 2,730. Because all the data are asked retrospectively, we do not include the data of interviewees when the record is missing or incomplete as van Ours and Veenman (2003, p.744) used a net sample that contains information about the education of children and the education of their parents. As a result, the number of observations further reduces from 2,730 to be 2,144.
Please see the overview of Haveman and Wolfe (1995) about the determinants of children’s educational attainment.
The data about the population of each zip code are from Department of Household Registration Affairs, Ministry of the Interior, 2004. Moreover, one anonymous referee kindly suggested that immigrants tend to concentrate in particular areas, which are typically found in urban centers, and this could have an effect on the transmission of human capital as documented in Borjas (1995) who used the 1/100 Neighborhood File of the 1970 Public Use Sample of the US Census and a specially designed version of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, which groups workers into 1,978 zip codes. Moreover, the referee points out the findings in Hendricks (2004) showing that there can be considerable spatial differences in educational attainment within a country and those in Riphahn (2003) who used two dummies for the size of city where the interviewee lives at the time of survey to control the regional fixed effect.
The likelihood ratio statistic is 2×(2812.3111−2590.6769)=443.2684 and it is significant at the 0.01 level in a one-tailed χ 2 test with 8 df.
For example, please see the schooling ambitions, career planning, and orientation on return migration as mentioned in van Ours and Veenman (2003).
Under the ruling era of Japan, it was not legal for Taiwanese to publicly learn a traditional Chinese education.
For research on the economic value of language, please see Angrist and Lavy (1997) and the references therein.
The likelihood ratio statistic is 2×(2590.6769−2582.7866)=15.7806.
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Acknowledgements
We are indebted to Hou-Yi Lee and Kuan-Ying Lee for stimulating the idea of this paper. We thank An-Chi Tung for generously providing the data about the decomposition of Taiwan’s population and Chi-Hung Lin for her excellent research assistance. We are also grateful for the valuable comments and suggestions of two anonymous referees and the editor, Klaus F. Zimmermann.
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Tsay, WJ. The educational attainment of second-generation mainland Chinese immigrants in Taiwan. J Popul Econ 19, 749–767 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-005-0055-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-005-0055-6