Legal Contexts of Reception: The Importance of EU-Membership for Initial Employment Patterns of Adult Immigrants in Germany—an Analysis with Retrospective Life-Course Data

Crossing national borders has the potential of changing individuals’ pathways for the better or the worse. One important determinant of post-immigration economic opportunities is the kind of legal status as well as the immigration criteria and integration programs connected with that status. Being an EU citizen or not leads to rather distinct contexts of reception in an EU-member state. Following up on discussions on the importance of legal stratification among immigrant populations and its influence on their incorporation, I investigate differences in the initial incorporation pathways of immigrants with and without EU membership to Germany. The empirical analysis uses retrospective life-course data of the German National Educational Panel Study (2009-2012) and looks at the first six years after arrival of persons who immigrated as adults between 1964 and 2003. The longitudinal data distinguish different social roles and activities—e.g. employment, unemployment, reproductive labour, education—and also differentiate employment hierarchically by occupational status. At first, the “average” employment careers for EU- and non-EU immigrants are juxtaposed. In a second step, using the whole sample with both immigrant groups, a sequence analysis combined with a cluster analysis detects different socio-economic incorporation patterns. A multinomial regression model estimates the probability of belonging to each of these eight pathways with EU-membership (at the time of arrival) as the key independent variable. The multivariate estimation can control for other important influences like e.g. pre-migration activity, level of non-German education, and legal immigration gateways/immigration motive as an alternative to the dichotomous distinction by EU-membership.