پیش زمینه سرمایه انسانی و پیشرفت تحصیلی مهاجران نسل دوم در فرانسه

In this paper, we study the impact of parental human capital background on ethnic educational gaps between second-generation immigrants using a large data set conducted in France in 2003. Estimates from censored random effect ordered Probit regressions show that the skills of immigrants explain in the most part, the ethnic educational gap between their children. Fluency in French and the length of their parents’ stay in France also matter. The impact of the immigrants’ education on the educational attainment of their children further depends on their country of origin, their place of schooling, and their proficiency in French.

In France, 42% of the young men and 27% of the young women whose parents are Northwest Africans leave school without any diploma. Among the children whose parents are natives or Southern Europeans, this proportion is about two times lower among men and nearly three times lower among women (Lainé & Okba, 2005). In many countries, significant differences are also observed in the educational achievements of children from different origins (OECD, 2006). What can explain such inequalities? As emphasized in the Chiswick's seminal paper (1988), three main hypotheses may explain why different ethnic groups achieve different levels of educational attainment. Firstly, some communities are likely to have a greater preference for schooling, which may be due to cultural, religious or historical factors. This particular taste for schooling can lead members of these communities to invest more in the human capital of their descendants. Secondly, ethnic differences in educational attainment may arise from discrimination. During their studies, children from some communities may be discriminated against with regard to access to schooling, quality of schooling, grade retention or tracking decisions (Losen & Orfield, 2002). During their working life, they can face less favorable job conditions. As the returns of their investment in human capital are lower, they would then be less motivated to invest in skills (Coate & Loury, 1993). Thirdly, some ethnic communities may be over-represented in the most disadvantaged socio-economic groups. Following the human capital theory, immigrants of these communities would then invest less in the education of their children. Do we have to promote special educational programs in favor of some second-generation youths? Do we have to assist immigrants themselves in their educative mission? Are anti-discriminatory policies which encourage anonymous applications able to narrow the educational gaps? To evaluate the relative efficiency of such policies, it is necessary to rigorously identify the determinants of the educational attainment gaps. In this paper, we investigate how differences in human capital background among immigrant communities explain the educational attainments gaps among their descendants using a data set on immigrants living in France in 2003. We extend the growing literature which intends to understand the role of the family socio-economic background on the educational attainment of the second-generation immigrants in the following ways. On the one hand, our contribution is the first study to focus on this issue using French data. Previous empirical studies have dealt with Anglo-Saxon countries, Germany (Gang & Zimmermann, 2000) and the Netherlands (Van Ours & Veenman, 2003). It is not obvious that these results can be readily extrapolated to the situation of immigrants living in other countries. Institutional differences in immigration policies and education systems between Anglo-Saxon and European countries could affect the educational achievement of children of immigrants. On the other hand, the quality of the data allows us to better take the migratory history of the parents of second-generation immigrants into account. For instance, our regressions control for their fluency in the host country's language, their length of stay in France or their place of study. We show that skills of immigrants explain, in the most part, the ethnic educational gap between their descendants in France. French fluency and the length of stay in France of parents also matter. The impact of the immigrants’ education on the educational attainment of their children further depends on their country of origin, their place of schooling and their proficiency in French. The remainder of our paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we briefly review the literature on human capital background and educational attainment of second-generation immigrants. We describe the French data used for our empirical analysis in Section 3 and provide some descriptive statistics in Section 4. We present our econometric strategy in Section 5 and discuss our results in Section 6. Finally, Section 7 concludes.

In this paper, we have investigated the determinants of the educational attainment of the second-generation of immigrants living in France. Our regressions control for unobserved heterogeneity at the family level and account for censoring of enrolled children. Our main finding is that the skill of immigrants explain, for the most part, the ethnic educational gaps between their children. Immigrants’ fluency in French and length of stay in the host country also play a significant role, while the impact of immigrants’ educational attainment on the educational attainment of their children depends on their place of origin, their place of schooling as well as their proficiency in French. When comparing the different ethnic groups, we find that educational attainment is lower among children of Middle Eastern origin. Also, the returns to parental education are lower when parents are from North Africa. From a public policy viewpoint, this suggests that it could be useful to promote special educational programs in favor of these disadvantaged groups. At the same time, it would be of interest to further understand why some parents tend to under-invest in the human capital of their children. If for instance parents choose to invest less in the education of their children because they expect their children to be discriminated against on the labor market, then anti-discriminatory policies encouraging anonymous applications would be effective in narrowing the educational gaps among children of different origins. A final comment is that we have only focused on the educational attainment of second-generation immigrants in this paper. This is due to the fact that the PRI survey only includes respondents of foreign origin. It would therefore be useful to further compare not only educational outcomes, but also employment and earnings of both second-generation immigrants and natives in France. At the same time, our paper clearly shows the necessity of having large data sets on immigrants in developed countries to be able to study the magnitude of potential differences in the behaviors of various ethnic groups. The focus often placed on behavioral differences between natives and migrants should definitely not mask heterogeneity within the immigrant community.