Educational and professional difficulties of young people with an immigrant background: effect of origin or geographical effects?

Summary The geographic location of immigrant populations and their segregation in the most disadvantaged areas are often put forward as explanations for their lower educational performance and their unfavorable position in the labor market. In this paper, we seek to determine whether the educational achievement and labor market integration of young people with at least one parent born in North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, or the Near and Middle East are similar to those of young people with non-immigrant parents, given the same sociodemographic characteristics and place of residence. To do this, we use a unique opportunity offered by the geolocation at a very fine scale (Iris) of the Generation 1998 and 2004 surveys. The specifications used in the regression models allow us to measure the effect of the original variable after controlling for a wide range of individual variables and the geographical fixed effect at the Iris level (conditional logit). Our results highlight the magnitude of the differences between the descendants of immigrants and their counterparts who are descendants of natives. These differences remain even after controlling for geographic effects.