Job Quality of Second Generation Immigrants in the United States and in France

The inequalities that affect the second generation immigrants represent a rising concern in the French society but also in multicultural societies like the United States. These inequalities are for instance materialized into differences in employment rates or in wages, but the issue of job quality is not considered. This paper provides the first attempt to evaluate the so-called Immigrant Assimilation Hypothesis for both cases of France and the United States through the prism of job quality. The empirical challenge is then to measure job quality in a multidimensional point of view and thus how it infers about the economic assimilation process of immigrants in both countries. As a first step, we construct a synthetic indicator of job quality, which is based on different characteristics of the job considered (income, duration, working time, binding nature, training opportunities and work schedule) using the French Labor Survey (Enquête Emploi) and the Current Population Survey for the United States. Then, we use this indicator to analyze the linkages between individual characteristics and their job quality with the help of logistic regressions. Our results reveal that a strong heterogeneity stands between second immigrants depending on the origin of their parents in both France and the United States. Thus our comparison suggests the Segmented Assimilation theory is more appropriate than the Assimilation Hypothesis concerning the integration of immigrants on the labor market.