On the road to integration? Immigrants demand for informal (& formal) education

As the number of immigrants has increased in all developed countries, debates about the processes of socio-economic integration of foreign-born persons have become much more important and contested in policy circles and among the public. Comparisons of immigrants and natives can provide an important assessment of the degree of integration of migrants. There is an abundant economic research literature that has investigated immigrants’ performance and behaviour with respect to several outcome variables such as wages, labor market participation, crime rates, use of welfare support schemes, etc. Less attention has been devoted in the literature to the processes that lead to the observed outcomes and the resources allocated to them.

In this paper, we study the time allocated to informal education by immigrants (and natives) in the US. For immigrants the investment in informal education might represent a fundamental channel of socio-economic integration. In addition, these human capital enhancing activities generate individual level as well as community-wide returns. In their decision to invest in human capital, immigrants face different constraints compared to natives. As barriers to formal educational channels might be particularly high, informal education might represent the only real channel for investing in human capital in the host country.

Also, the opportunity cost of investing in these activities might diverge as the time allocated to nonmarket-activities is closely related to the shadow price of time and to the productivity of consumption time (Becker 1965). Informal education can also be considered an investment in social capital as, compared to natives, the density of immigrants’ social networks is limited (Coleman 1988).

In our study we define informal education as all the activities that have a formative content such as taking a class for personal interest and extra-curricular club activities. These activities are closely related to lifelong learning and are increasingly important, considering rapid technological changes and automation of production processes.

This is a part of a working paper by Nicola D. Coniglio, Rezart Hoxhaj and Hubert Jayet.