Moving to Move up?

Anna Manzoni, Yale University

We examine socioeconomic mobility among German immigrants in the US and their offspring. Using a unique combination of data from US and German surveys, we match German immigrants to the US to observationally comparable individuals living in Germany. Our research design is innovative in combining survey data at both origin and destination. Unlike previous studies, US immigrants are matched to non-migrants at the origin (rather than to a particular cohort) and, in some cases, to behaviors and outcomes of people during the period before they migrated. We test (i) whether (and how much) first-generation migrants are upwardly mobile; (ii) whether inter-generational mobility differs (and how) for second-generation immigrants compared to their counterparts in the country of origin; (iii) whether mobility patterns differ by gender; (iv) whether mobility patterns differ by country of origin; and (v) whether mobility patterns differ across ethno-racial groups. In this paper we concentrate on occupational mobility.