What is the situation of students of immigrant origin in Western Europe? What are their outcomes, with respect to educational attainment, achievement, and choices? How do they perform when compared to their native peers? Do they fare similarly across countries, or rather, do their educational outcomes change when considering international comparisons? The present chapter addresses these questions (i) by reviewing the state-of-the-art literature from the sociology and the economics of education and (ii) by presenting original analyses focused on the relative disadvantage in educational achievement experienced by second-generation immigrants when compared to their native peers. In doing so, I lay bare the explanandum of this study: migrant achievement penalties, which differ considerably across Western European countries. This raises the question of why this variation occurs and whether it can be traced back to different kinds of educational systems. Throughout the chapter, I refer to educational systems as potential explanantes. However, the explanation of cross-country variation in migrant penalties is addressed in a more systematic way in Chapter 4.

Previous studies

The learning disadvantage of children of immigrants has been extensively studied by sociologists as well as by economists of education. The literature review presented in this section is organized by topic rather than by discipline. In other words, I try to highlight commonalities and divergences in the empirical findings of both sociological and econometric studies addressing similar research questions. However, it should be noted that – though interested in the same empirical phenomenon – scholars from the two disciplines frame it differently.

Within sociology, asymmetries in the educational outcomes of students of native and immigrant origin are conceptualized as the result of a stratification process. To start with, stratification underlies one of the key questions of the current integration debate, which we can think of as part of a general resources framework (Kristen et al. 2011): can the resources and opportunities available within the immigrant group provide favorable conditions for educational success? While segmented assimilation theory predicts that ethnic resources, in terms of relationships, networks, orientations, identities, and language use, compensate for structural disadvantages (Portes and Zhou 1993; Zhou 1997; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Rumbaut and Portes 2001), assimilation and new assimilation theories predict that the lack of linguistic, cultural, relational, and informational resources relevant to the host society hinders the educational opportunities of children of immigrants (Alba and Nee 1997; Perlmann and Waldinger 1997; Farley and Alba 2002; Esser 2004).