Understanding Life Trajectories of Immigrants and Their Descendants in Europe and Projecting Future Trends

In recent decades, European countries have witnessed increasing immigration streams and ethnic heterogeneity of their populations. Facilitating immigrant integration and social cohesion has become a major societal issue. The project moves beyond previous research by first investigating how employment, housing and family trajectories evolve and interact in the lives of descendants of post-WWII immigrants and post-1990 immigrants in the UK, France, Germany and Sweden, and how factors related to a societal context, an early life context and critical transitions shape their life histories. Second, the study will project their future life trajectories using innovative simulation techniques, considering the main life domains and diversity between and within immigrant groups. Although recent studies report substantial diversity in employment, in housing and in family patterns among descendants of post-war immigrants and recent immigrants in Europe, the causes of this heterogeneity remain far from clear. Furthermore, it is not known whether observed differences between immigrants and natives are short-term outcomes in a long-term process of cultural and economic integration or rather reflections of different pathways and outcomes for immigrants and their descendants. The project will exploit large-scale longitudinal data from four countries and apply advanced longitudinal methods, including multichannel sequence analysis and multilevel event history analysis. Microsimulation will be applied to project life histories for immigrants and their descendants. The project will significantly deepen our understanding of the relationships between the three life domains, and the causes of less and more successful life trajectories among immigrants and their descendants. This project will show whether the current heterogeneity between and within immigrant and minority groups vanishes over time or rather persists, suggesting an increasing diversity of European societies.