From school to work: ethnic educational and occupational inequality

The project focuses on minority occupatrional destinations, or more precisely, the return to minority educationbal investment in the labour markets of the receiving countries. One international conference was held at Nuffield, Oxford, where country reports of existing data sources were discussed and a common core for a theoretically informed comnparative approach was outlined. The purpose of the comparative project is to model occupational destinations as a function of educational attainment, transposing the Muller and Shavit comparative book 'From school to work' in native populations to post-migration minorities. To test the null hypothesis of a human resources explanation of ethnic disadvantage, similar multinomial logit models, using census and survey data in each receiving country, compare distinct occupational destinations. Country models were presented at a second international conference in Oxford. In a next step, (1) the core model is to be extended in order to test comnpeting explanations - mostly from the American migration and assimilation literature - depending on the available national data sources; (2) the cross-national data are to be modelled simultaneously, combining ethnic community contexts with national contexts of reception in multi-level modeling; and (3) the occupational attainment of specific ethnic communities (e.g., Chinese, Turks, Caribbeans) will be analysed across national destinations. Follow-up conferences are planned in spring and autumn 2003. The added value of this comparative exercise, given the rich national research traditions on socio-economic incorporation of migrants, should be the use of cross-national comparison to test - necessarily limited and basic - theoretical explanations of ethnic gaps in occupational distributions.

The envisaged output of the research project includes the presentation of country papers at a series of international conferences, the publication of a cross-national comparative book, as well as additional papers on specific ethnic communities across national destinations.

Co-ordinator for Belgium: Karen Phalet Associate Professor