Life satisfaction of immigrants: does cultural assimilation matter?

Abstract

To investigate empirically the association between a direct measure of assimilation with a host culture and immigrants' subjective well-being, this study uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. A positive, significant association arises between cultural assimilation and immigrants' life satisfaction, even after controlling for several potential confounding factors, such as immigrants' individual (demographic and socio-economic) characteristics and regional controls that capture their external social conditions. Finally, the strength of the association varies with time since migration; it is significant for "established" and second-generation immigrants but vanishes for "recent" immigrants.

Ethnic attrition, assimilation, and the measured health outcomes of Mexican Americans

“…This is consistent with earlier work (Antman, Duncan, and Trejo 2016) showing similar results applied to a broader range of health outcomes, but relying on a more limited measure of ethnic attrition across immigrant generations. Future work should investigate other measures of well-being used in the cultural assimilation literature, such as life satisfaction (Angelini, Casi, and Corazzini 2015), to assess the impacts of ethnic attrition on a wider set of outcomes.…”

Returning to the country of origin in later life: Longitudinal evidence from the German Socio‐Economic Panel

“…Given that these variables are likely to be highly correlated one with another, we use the Principal Component Analysis in order to build a synthetic indicator for economic well‐being. Second, we consider health status, proxied by the number of individual visits to a doctor in a year (Angelini et al., ). Subjective well‐being is captured by an index of life satisfaction (Wright, ); following Angelini et al.…”

“…Subjective well‐being is captured by an index of life satisfaction (Wright, ); following Angelini et al. () and Kóczán () who investigate the determinants of life satisfaction of immigrants in Germany by means of GSOEP data, we consider a measure of overall life satisfaction, recorded on a 0–10 scale, where 0 means “Completely dissatisfied” and 10 “Completely satisfied.”…”

Bringing Happiness Into the Study of Migration and Its Consequences: What, Why, and How?

“…At the individual level, studies report that income has only a modest association with migrant happiness, which means that migrants may be mistaken in placing great emphasis on economic gains in their search for a happier life (Bartram, 2011). The determinants of migrant happiness go well beyond the economic domain; for instance, perceived discrimination has a strong negative effect on migrant happiness (Safi, 2010), while acculturation has a modest but positive relation to happiness (Angelini, Casi, & Corazzini, 2015).…”