What a Difference Immigration Law Makes: PISA Results, Migration Background and Social Mobility in Europe and Traditional Countries of Immigration

Nicoleta Minoiu and Horst Entorf

No 04-17, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to evaluate the importance of social class, migration background and command of national languages for the PISA school performance of teenagers living in European countries (France, Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, and Sweden) and traditional countries of immigration (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US). Econometric results show that the influence of the socioeconomic background of parents differs strongly across nations, with the highest impact found for Germany, the UK and US, whereas social mobility is more likely in Scandinavian countries and in Canada. Our empirical results imply that for students with a migration background a key for catching up is the language spoken at home. We conclude that educational policy should focus on integration of immigrant children in schools and preschools, with particular emphasis on language skills at the early stage of childhood.

Keywords: PISA tests; socioeconomic status; migration; social mobility; language skills (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J15 J18 O15 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/24002/1/dp0417.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:1603

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().