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The Patterns of Satisfaction Among Immigrants in Germany

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Abstract

Using the data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, the paper focuses on the analysis of life satisfaction and income satisfaction among immigrants in Germany. The results suggest that it cannot be argued that Germany’s immigrants are, ceteris paribus, more satisfied or less satisfied than natives, since some immigrant groups appear to be more satisfied, while others show lower satisfaction levels relative to natives. Separate estimations for natives and immigrants show that, even though the patterns of satisfaction for the two groups are largely similar, several notable differences emerge. The final goal was to take a closer look at the negative relationship between satisfaction and duration of stay in Germany. After constructing reference groups by the timing of arrival, the negative relationship between income satisfaction and years since migration is reduced substantially. On the other hand, the negative association between duration of stay and life satisfaction is persistent, regardless of the way the reference groups are defined.

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Notes

  1. Life satisfaction and happiness are considered synonymous terms in this paper and are used interchangeably.

  2. In this paper, immigrants are defined as those who were born outside Germany.

  3. Constant and Massey (2005), as well as Basilio and Bauer (2010) demonstrate a positive relationship between income and years since migration in Germany using the same dataset as this paper.

  4. These immigrants are grouped into same category due to the same type of migration (namely, labor migration initiated through formal bilateral recruitment programs, so-called Anwerbeabkommen), as well as due to similar average performance on the German labor market. Also included in this group are post-1990 former Yugoslav immigrants, some of whom may be political refugees (they cannot be identified as such in the dataset). However, they certainly constitute only a minor share within the group of Southern European immigrants in this sample.

  5. Note, however, that in the pooled sample of natives and immigrants the coefficients of appropriate interaction variables indicate that this difference in the impact of income on income satisfaction is not statistically significant.

  6. Another regression has been done in which YSM and YSM squared are included instead of the YSM intervals. The general conclusions remain unaffected. YSM intervals are, however, more suitable for comparison with the results from the next section.

  7. Due to simple size limitations, all immigrants, regardless of country of birth, are included in the reference group. An alternative estimation has been done with the reference group defined by fellow arrivals and immigrant group. The results are practically the same as when including all fellow arrivals, but the reference groups constructed in this way are very small and the extent to which they are representative of all immigrants with these characteristics is questionable. Using tighter YSM intervals was not feasible due to sample size.

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Acknowledgments

I have benefited greatly from the comments of Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell, Pau Baizán, Amparo González and two anonymous reviwers on an earlier version of this paper.

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  1. Department of Political and Social Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27, 08005, Barcelona, Spain

    Ognjen Obućina

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Correspondence to Ognjen Obućina.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 6.

Table 6 The effect of duration of stay on satisfaction when considering different reference groups: random effects ordered probit with Mundlak correction
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Obućina, O. The Patterns of Satisfaction Among Immigrants in Germany. Soc Indic Res 113, 1105–1127 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0130-9

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