Area 3
Issues related to the labour market, ethnic business, educational resources and social conditions (e.g. residential).

AMID Research Projects within Area 3:

Senior Project
Responsible for project: Vera Botelho

Migration and Fertility (Area 3)
The general objective of this project is to examine the fertility patterns of foreign-born women in Denmark and assess to which extent it differs from the Danish-born women. This study also aims to identify which are the factors (socio-economics, cultural, family patterns, education, etc.) that more strongly influence the fertility behaviour of immigrant women. This investigation will be based on data retrieved from several registers, especially from The Fertility Database, and the employed methods will make use of conventional qualitative and quantitative techniques of analysis.

PhD Project (April 1, 2002 to March 31, 2004)
Responsible for project: Bjørg Colding
Responsible faculty: Henning Bunzel (AAU) and Eskil Heinesen (AKF)

Migration and Education (Area 3)
The dissertation will investigate how education resources are allocated among children within ethnic minority families and to what extent differences in educational attainment and choice of field among ethnic minorities and native danes can be explained by differences in parental, family and ethnic background. Specifically, the effect of income and education of parents, family size, ethnic capital and neigborhood characteristics will be explored. Hence the project will provide information necessary for formulation of effective educational policies designed to strengthen the educational performance of ethnic minorities in Denmark.

PhD dissertation and supplement can be downloaded free of charge.

Senior Project
Responsible for project: Ruth Emerek

Migration: Breadwinner Models, the Family and the Labour Market (Area 3)
Over the past 50 years, 65-60% of the Danish population between ages 16 and 60 (the labour-market active period) have maintained themselves, their families and the Danish population as a whole. However, the breadwinner model has undergone a radical change. In the early part of the period, the male breadwinner was the norm, and women were sustained within the family, whereas dual- income and one-parent families, predominantly female, are common in Denmark today, women’s labour-market participation being almost as high as that of men. Men and women in the labour-market active period unable to support themselves are increasingly provided for through public transfers in the form of unemployment and welfare benefits. The result of this change is a gradual and increasing polarization within the working and living conditions of families. Some families are "work rich--time poor", others "work poor--time rich". Previous studies indicate that this polarization contains an important ethnic dimension.The objective of the project is to evaluate this ethnic dimension to polarization and the characteristics of marginalized families. Questions like to what extent the same families continuously depend on public transfers and if female rather than male members are locked into a polarized and marginal position on the labour market will be studied by means of register-based longitudinal methods.The theoretical framework will be a combination of theses and explanatory models from sociology, econometrics as well as gender studies.

Collective Project
Responsible for project: Hans Hummelgaard
Participants: Anna Piil Damm, Hans Hummelgaard, Leif Husted, Vibeke Jacobsen, Kræn Blume Jensen, Peder J. Pedersen, Helena Skyt Nielsen and Michael Rosholm

Migration and Labour Market (Area 3)
In the Danish context, the project is expected to contribute important new knowledge about immigrants' integration and marginalization in relation to the labour market and the factors that are significant in this connection. The outcomes of the project are expected to constitute an important basis for facilitating more efficient use of immigrants' human capital in Danish society, thus preventing a considerable number of immigrants from permanent reliance on income transfers. The project has three main parts. The first part deals with the integration of first-generation immigrants into the Danish labour market and in particular with the transferability of human capital obtained in the home country. The second part focusses on second-generation immigrants, since there are large differences in the way different groups of second-generation immigrants manage on the labour market.The last part examines whether a higher risk of marginalization and permanent reliance on income transfers can primarily be explained by a lack of qualifications or should be attributed to other causes. First, the empirical analysis will be founded on two register-based data sets containing information on each immigrant in Denmark and one-tenth of the Danish population between 1984 and 1997, respectively. Secondly, a qualitative analysis of successful immigrants will be carried out.

Download report on "Wage Assimilation of 1984-1993 First Generation Male
Immigrants in Denmark" (Danish summary and press release (in Danish))

PhD Project (August 1, 2001 to August 1, 2004)
Responsible for project: Trine Lund Thomsen
Responsible faculty: Feiwel Kupferberg (DPU) and Ruth Emerek (AAU)

Ethnic Entrepreneurship as an Acculturation Strategy. Biographical Analyses of Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Six European Countries (Area 3)
Migrants most often experience difficulties when facing the acculturation process in a new society. The problems often arise due to structural barriers and discrimination in many parts of society, for example, the labour market which leads to social exclusion. But they can also emerge due to relatively insufficient subjective resources. These factors have an effect on the individual's possibilities of creating a new life and to gain some degree of inclusion in the new society. In the attempt to obtain social inclusion the individual makes use of different kinds of strategies - one of them being “ethnic entrepreneurship”. Most mainstream approaches to ethnic entrepreneurship have either a structuralist approach, focusing on ethnic, cultural, legal, political or market structures which produce opportunities and constraints for entrepreneurial activities of migrants, or they have a relational approach, focusing on the effects of membership in ethnic networks, seeing ethnic entrepreneurship as a collective achievement. In this project I will position myself between the two approaches by regarding ethnic entrepreneurship as a strategy developed in relation to human agency, as a processual development embedded in both the social, economic, legal and political structures and in the biographical process. Ethnic entrepreneurship is thus an individual strategy emerging from the frame of collective opportunity structures.

The aim of this project is to discover to which degree structures within a given society affect the migrants' opportunities in a new society, and how this influences their choice of acculturation strategy. The empirical part of this project will be based on biographical narrative interviews with migrants from six European countries. On the basis of these interviews, a comparative analysis is to be conducted. Comparing the interviews with ethnic entrepreneurs from six countries with their differences and similarities should give a good picture and an understanding of what lies behind the ethnic entrepreneur strategy and how these migrants experience their own situation. Within the samples I will pay special attention to the aspects of gender, ethnicity and subjective resources. (Area 3; Aalborg University)

Download PhD dissertation (248 pages).