The Assimilation of Turkish Immigrants in the German Labor Market : Cross-national comparative study with the Austrian labor market and emphasis on differences in integration policies

The economic assimilation of immigrants is one of the main topics of the migration economic literature. The United States, the United Kingdom, or even Canada, are usually chosen to lead such studies. We have decided to observe the differences in immigrant’s economic assimilation between two host countries which are less studied in empirical papers and very similar in terms of geography and language: Germany and Austria. The country of origin for the immigrants observed in this study is Turkey because Turkish immigrants are highly represented among the immigrant population in the both host countries. We have found that both female and male Turkish immigrants assimilate faster in Germany than in Austria. This faster assimilation could be partly due to the implementation of less restrictive migratory policies in Germany compared to Austri