In_equality Podcast

Citizenship as a Path to Equality with Helmut Rainer

• Universität Konstanz - Exzellenzcluster "The Politics of Inequality" • Season 2 • Episode 4

Share episode

Hosts:
Gabriele Spilker – Professor of International Politics and Global Inequality and Co-Speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” at the University of Konstanz.

Marius R. Busemeyer – Professor of Comparative Political Economy and Speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” at the University of Konstanz.

Guest:
Helmut Rainer – Professor of Economics at LMU Munich and Director at the ifo Institute. His research covers labour, family and demographic economics, with a focus on gender, citizenship and ethnic inequality.


Episode Overview

How do early childcare and citizenship shape the opportunities of second-generation immigrants in Germany? In this conversation, our Hosts speak with Helmut Rainer about two major reforms from the late 1990s and early 2000s that expanded childcare access and introduced birthright citizenship. Both policies generated “natural experiments” that help identify their long-term effects on education, employment and integration.

Rainer shows how additional months in early childcare boost language skills and later labour-market outcomes, especially for children from non-German-speaking households. Birthright citizenship similarly raises educational attainment and reduces welfare dependence—at comparatively low fiscal cost. The episode also discusses cultural conflicts within immigrant families, gender-specific effects, and why some reforms trigger both empowerment and short-term psychological strain.


Episode Highlights

  • Why second-generation immigrants matter
  • Childcare expansion and language development
  • Birthright citizenship as integration policy
  • Gender and intergenerational tensions
  • Policy implications


Links & Resources

Contact: cluster.inequality@uni-konstanz.de
 

New episodes every first Wednesday of the month – subscribe now!

Transkript_Staffel 2, Folge 4: “Citizenship as a Path to Equality” with Helmut Rainer  

 

Gabriele Spilker: Welcome to a new episode of the In_equality Podcast. My name is Gabriele Spilker, and I am a professor for International Politics and Global Inequality and co-speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”. And next to me as always is… 

 

Marius Busemeyer: Marius Busemeyer. I am a professor of Comparative Political Economy and speaker of the Cluster here in Konstanz.

 

Gabriele Spilker: Our guest today is Helmut Rainer. Helmut is an applied microeconomist with a focus on labor and family economics. He is currently a visiting senior fellow at our Cluster, and when he is not visiting our Cluster, Helmut is a professor of Economics at Ludwig Maximilians Universität, LMU in Munich and he is the director of the Center for Labor and Demographic Economics at the IFO Institute in Munich. Helmut has researched and published on a wide range of topics, from domestic violence and fertility in Africa to taking part in protests organized by Fridays for Future. However, the focus of most of his research is on inequalities related to gender, ethnicity and citizenship rights and how they affect labor market outcomes. A research agenda that is clearly and very well connected to our research at the Cluster. So welcome, Helmut. 

 

Helmut Rainer: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. 

 

Gabriele Spilker: The focus of our today's podcast is on immigrant integration and labor market outcomes. And I would like to start with a potentially very general question. In your most recent research, your focus is on second generation immigrants and their integration into the labor market. From an economic perspective, why is it important to focus on second generation immigrants and potentially also why is this related to inequality? 

 

Helmut Rainer:  One of the defining characteristics of our societies in Europe is population aging, and population aging has many consequences; for labor markets, it means it comes with labor shortages in many sectors. And, if we want to sustain economic growth, innovation, potential productivity, this requires us to think about, how to mobilize underutilized labor resources. And we don't have that many policy levers in this respect. So, we can think about women in the labor market, how do we increase their participation? We can think about older workers and how to extend their working lives, but another very important group in this respect are immigrants. And in particular their children born in a host country, so second generation immigrants. Across Europe, in many European countries, also in Germany, this is a demographically very important group. Here in Germany, also in France, almost one in five individuals aged 15 to 25 have a migration background, so they are second generation immigrants but it also turns out that across Europe, they grow up with severe disadvantages, they face a very high risk of childhood poverty. They carry forward this kind of childhood disadvantages into education in the labor market. There is a high risk amongst them at age 15 to lack basic reading skills and a very high risk of them being unemployed when transitioning from the school system to the labor market.

 

Marius Busemeyer: Can you say how much of this disadvantage is sort of caused by these initial disadvantages in early childhood and how much is then added throughout their educational careers? Because the education system certainly also adds some disadvantages that migrant children are treated differently in school and so on. 

 

Helmut Rainer: Let me just give one example of the disadvantages that are very specific to the second generation, and that has to do with the host country language. Many immigrant groups in Germany or children from many immigrant groups in Germany face a high risk of growing up in households, in homes where German is not spoken as the native tongue. And this is of course a key factor that holds them back in the education system and it generates disadvantages that's very difficult for them to overcome in their entire schooling career. So that's one disadvantage that's very specific to certain immigrant groups in Germany but elsewhere as well.

 

Marius Busemeyer: Do you see differences across different immigrant groups? I mean are there cultural differences maybe? 

 

Helmut Rainer: I have studied extensively second-generation immigrants with a Turkish background. They are the largest group in Germany, and this is the one group where I can say also based on empirical facts that this is certainly the case. I don't want to say, can't say too much about other groups but they are also typically much smaller and a bit more fractionalized. So, rigorous empirical evidence on this is a bit more difficult to come by for these other groups.

 

Gabriele Spilker:  Speaking about language disadvantage, I mean one policy level you study is early childhood care and how does this relate to this language aspect for instance? So, I imagine that this has a pretty strong influence on language uptake.

 

Helmut Rainer:   Exactly. In my recent work we looked at two interventions in early childhood and studied their long-term impacts on the outcomes of second-generation immigrants when they transition from the schooling system to the labor market. And, one of these policies is really giving children extra childcare. And it's giving them extra childcare, roughly five to six months of extra childcare at the age of three. This is of course a critical age for language acquisition. And it is kind of an intervention where one would think that it has a disproportionately strong impact on second generation immigrants. Exactly for the reason that I just highlighted. Because they do often grow up in homes where German is not used as the mother tongue. So having this extra five or six months of early childcare at the age of three means of course they are now exposed to disadvantaged homes but they will have interactions in kindergartens with other natives. They will be exposed to the German language. And this is of course a fairly small change in early life conditions. But of course, these changes can then kind of accumulate over time to produce persistent long-lasting effects on the second-generation.

 

Gabriele Spilker:  If I'm not mistaken this is exactly what your research shows. That these kids profit from this extra month of early childhood.

 

Helmut Rainer: Exactly!

 

Marius Busemeyer: But maybe also from a research design perspective, how can you actually do this? Did you sort of trace the children from age three until they are then finally on the labor market? Or how can you manage to find these effects as a researcher over such long periods of time?

 

Helmut Rainer:  Excellent question. Thank you. We leverage a fairly unique setting in Germany. We focus on a few cohorts of children born in the late 1990s early 2000s. And their environment changed due to two reforms. So first of all, in the late 1990s there was an expansion of childcare for three- to six-year-old kids in Germany. And these expansions came with age involvement cut-offs. And because of your birth date, this ultimately meant that some kids could start early childcare at the age of three, while other kids had to wait for a few more months. The specific birth date cut-off that's relevant for our study is January 1st. So, if you are born in December of a given year, as opposed to being born in January of the next year, you will have five months extra childcare at the age of three. 

 

And we are also studying a second policy. There was also a second policy change in the late 1990s and that was the introduction of birthright citizenship. And that reform, this introduction, also came with a very same birth date cut-off. So, it was implemented on 1st January 2000. So, if you are a child with a migration background and you were born in December 1999, you wouldn't benefit from the reform. But if you were born in January 2000, you would be a beneficiary of that reform. And this is exactly the birth date cut-off that we are leveraging for three consecutive birth cohorts in Germany to study the long-term effects of these two policies. 

 

Gabriele Spilker: And just to clarify, that doesn't mean that these other kids were not able to get the German citizenship at all. It just meant that for those born after the deadline, it was easier, right? 

 

Helmut Rainer:  Exactly. The birthright citizenship reform was the introduction. If you were eligible for the reform, you would automatically become a German citizenship at birth. Parents couldn't renounce the child’s citizenship. It was literally recorded in your birth certificate. 

 

Marius Busemeyer: So maybe also to our listeners, this is, I think, also the typical economist approach, if I may say so, to look for these instances where you have a random element to some extent, whether you're born on December 31st or January 2nd is to some extent a random thing but this cut-off point has real effects. As you say, you either get half a year or five months extra childcare, you get a citizenship or not. So, this is a big change, but the randomness is around that cut-off date. 

 

Helmut Rainer:  And we are literally studying kids who were born just before this cut-off date versus kids being born just after this cut-off date to identify the long-term effects of these two policies.

 

Marius Busemeyer: The causal effects…

 

Gabriele Spilker: Speaking of the long-term effects, it's still super interesting and we have not heard enough about how you measure these long-term effects. So how do you trace these kids then 20-25 years later? 

 

Helmut Rainer:  The study is very data-hungry because of comparing kids who are born very close to this birth date cut-off. And so, what we are leveraging is social security data from Germany. So that's covering all individuals who've ever been employed, subject to social security or have participated in active labor market policy. 

 

Marius Busemeyer: That's a lot of people.

 

Gabriele Spilker: And it's also a lot of these young people, right? I mean, because you made sure that most, or you told us before, that most of these kids were in some sense part of this registry, because they handed out newspapers or worked at a coffee place, right? 

 

Helmut Rainer:  Exactly. And there are some challenges that we had to overcome with this data set. One challenge is that we do not observe migration background directly, but we do observe the names of individuals in these social security records. And based on the names and using onomastic procedures, we actually... 

 

Marius Busemeyer What does that mean? What is it? 

 

Helmut Rainer:  These are just algorithms that assign to names a certain country of origin. The  really important group that we wanted to identify are second-generation immigrants with a Turkish background. And they have fairly unique names. And so, this is why our algorithm does a very good job in identifying them as being second-generation immigrants.

 

Marius Busemeyer But we cannot be 100% sure, but it's, of course, parents that give their children a typical German name. 

 

Helmut Rainer:   That's correct. But we've also fielded a survey, which we can link back to the social security data, and that serves as a robustness check, what is an onomastic algorithm.

 

Marius Busemeyer: Coming back to the findings. You mentioned that this provision of extra childcare has a positive effect on young adults. But what about citizenship rights? I assume this is also a little bit of a positive effect. But here it's, for me, a little bit harder to understand why that actually occurs. Just giving citizenship, why does it have positive effects? 

 

Helmut Rainer:  You could say it's really a minor change in a child's life, because it's basically just being given a passport at birth. And by the way,  we find that just as much as early childcare, growing up as a German citizen also has very positive impacts on second-generation immigrants in the long term. It increases their likelihoods, just as an example, to attend college at age 22, it reduces their probability of being on welfare also quite significantly. So very similar positive effects as early childcare. But the mechanisms, very likely, very differ. I mean, in earlier work that I've done also with a University of Konstanz researcher, Christina Felfe, where we've shown that already in childhood, having benefited from the citizenship reform, improved the educational outcomes of second-generation immigrants. 

 

And so how can you explain that? I mean, perhaps most plausible explanation would be that it changes how parents invest in their children's human capital. The idea being that with growing up as a citizen means that immigrants have the same opportunities as their native counterparts. In theory, this should increase the returns to investing in children's human capital. And what we have shown in earlier work, that this seems to be indeed the case. So, immigrant children who benefited from that reform had better language skills at age five. And we've used school entry data from school entry examinations to demonstrate that, that the lower probability of repeating a grade in primary school, and they had a much higher probability of being tracked into the academic track of high school, in the gymnasium. A very likely channel explaining all of this is really a change in how parents invest in their children's human capital. Then of course, later when they are adolescents and realize also that as German citizens or realize all the chances that German citizenship affords them, it could also increase the aspirations looking ahead. And we've also found some evidence for that in some other work that we've been doing on the more short and medium run effects of this citizenship reform.

 

Gabriele Spilker:  Super interesting. Is this the same for boys and girls? I remember that there might be some differences.

 

Helmut Rainer: In one study, we've really zoomed in on immigrant girls, and we've zoomed in on immigrant girls from very traditional backgrounds and, we have measured through religious backgrounds. And there is this one striking finding. There is this one subgroup of second-generation immigrants, and these are immigrant girls with a Muslim religious background for whom the reform seemed to have backfired at the age of 15. Backfired in the sense of it did, so the Muslim immigrant girls who benefited from the reform showed much lower levels of life satisfaction, so measures of subjective well-being, self-esteem at the age of 15 compared to those who didn't benefit from the reform. Digging deeper into this, what's driving this, what seems to be driving this are actually cultural conflicts, cultural intergenerational conflicts between parents and their daughters. The broad idea, and we've presented evidence for this, is that for the girls themselves, the reform raises aspirations, raises aspirations, for example, to attend college later on. Parents actually sabotaging this integration efforts for the simple reason, and so I mean there's, you know, broader research on immigrant girls from very traditional backgrounds, they're often brought up as being keepers of the culture. They have certain, parents have certain expectations for them, raising families, and so there's this kind of tension between what ideas parents have for their daughters and what their daughters themselves are actually aspiring to. And this is exactly the intergenerational conflict that, you know, that describes this drop in well-being, self-esteem for the girls who actually benefited from it.

 

Marius Busemeyer: I mean we had similar processes in Germany with the changing gender role models in the post-war decades and so on.

 

Gabriele Spilker:  On your previous results, I guess the policy recommendations would be pretty easy in the sense that it seems to be really beneficial to offer citizenship to immigrant kids, but what does this mean for the immigrant girls?

 

Helmut Rainer: I should say something on the immigrant girls. The very last finding that we have actually presented in this study is about the outlook that these girls have on their future life. So while their situation at age 15 or 16 seems to be tough, they have a very positive outlook on their future. So we've also asked questions about the expected life satisfaction five years down the line and using that question it seems that they had a very positive outlook. So, you know, looking forward at the time when they probably had the chance to leave the parental home for this kind of, you know, future scenario, they had actually a very positive outlook. 

 

Marius Busemeyer: Interesting. But maybe, I mean, from your own research or maybe from other research that you know, is this something, this kind of effect of discrimination in the early years and then potentially through interventions less discrimination, is this something unique to Germany because of the stratified education system that we have because of the maybe other countries doing better in terms of integration or can you observe something like that in other countries as well? 

 

Helmut Rainer: Our study looks at two interventions and what is unique about Germany is that it is the, and this is not about the citizenship policy, Germany is the only major immigrant receiving country that has introduced birthright citizenship over the past decade. In that respect, Germany really offers this unique, if you want, laboratory to study the effects of birthright citizenship in the short run, in the medium run, in the long run. We do have evidence on early childcare interventions from other countries. So, I mean, you have some targeted programs in the US, Head Start is a very famous program and there is a fairly broad body of research that has looked at the long-term impacts of this kind of early childhood schooling programs on disadvantaged children, and our research relates to that literature. And by the way, find similar effects that have been highlighted in this literature.

 

Gabriele Spilker: Currently, there's this discussion in Germany about citizenship. And you are studying birthright citizenship, but of course there are other, different ways of becoming a German citizen. And the last government has made this easier to obtain and now there is the discussion of rolling that back. I mean, I know that it's a bit of a leap from your results to the more general questions of granting citizenship, but would you say granting citizenship is, from an economic perspective, something that should be made not too easy, probably, but should be made easier? Or is that really only true if we're thinking about birthright citizenship and these longer-term investments? 

 

Helmut Rainer: My assessment of the broader literature, not just the literature on birthright citizenship, but also on the literature on naturalization, is that facilitating access to birthright citizenship from an economic perspective seems to be almost a no-brainer for the following reason: I mean, it is a policy that comes at hardly any cost for governments. It's very different from building whatever, you know, have targeted childhood programs. These are usually very expensive. Making access to citizenship easier has maybe administrative costs, but when compared to the potential benefits that easier access to citizenship brings to immigrants, but then also to their host societies, I think, you know, this cost-benefit ratio is, you know, very favorable. 

 

Marius Busemeyer: That's a good point. But, besides the disadvantages that are related to migration background, can you also say something about other types of disadvantages, especially, there might be native children coming from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, also struggling in school. Is childcare also good for them, or is it hard to say? 

 

Helmut Rainer: That's an excellent question, and that's a question that we so far didn't manage to address in our study, and the reason is data limitations. So, to answer the question, you would need to have some information about these young adults' backgrounds, their parents' backgrounds. And we have not managed to link generations in this social security data, but the good news is that researchers at the University of Konstanz, Sebastian Findeisen, and I think a PhD student of his, have actually made these links. And so, our hope is to, at some point, maybe to strike a collaboration, and then this would be a super interesting question to study. I mean, do we see similar positive effects for, say, natives from low SES (socio economic status)-backgrounds than we do for second-generation immigrants? I think it's a super important question. 

 

Marius Busemeyer: And it's also because your trick with names doesn't really work so well with a native SES, low SES.

 

Helmut Rainer:  No, the issue is that, to really have information on background, you would almost need to know something about the parents. And it is, we cannot, so we have not been able to link young adults to their parents, but we would need to have information on the labor market history of their parents to have some proxy for socioeconomic background. And so, this is something that is very high on our to-do agenda, and hopefully in collaboration with researchers from the University of Konstanz and from the Cluster. 

 

Gabriele Spilker:  And we're definitely looking forward to knowing more about this in the future. One more question on maybe more policy-related outcomes of your work. You do a lot of policy recommendations and you work closely together with policymakers. The results you find in your studies, are they easy to communicate? And do you have the feeling that politicians and policymakers listen to these advices? I mean, for me, what you present is very clear-cut evidence, both in favor of more early childhood care and education. Birthright citizenship, you said, is a no-brainer.  But still, there seem to be all these discussions about that. So, what's going on there? 

 

Helmut Rainer:  Here is an observation that I have: historically, many immigrant-receiving countries have made efforts to integrate immigrants into their societies. This is clearly changing. So, historically, we had very inclusive, relatively inclusive policy frameworks in regards to immigration. This is changing, right?  Many supports that immigrants receiving are currently being withdrawn in many countries. Maybe the most extreme example are actually discussions in the United States about ending birthright citizenship. And I think the results of our study; it has implications for this kind of changing policy paradigms in a way. So, think of the US, for example and suppose that at the federal level, birthright citizenship is being stopped. Then there will still be states in the U.S., on the West Coast, California, on the East Coast, who will want to continue to support the integration of immigrants. And you could say that one implication of our research would be that, well, you know, if we do stop birthright citizenship, then we need some substitutes. And the substitute could be to encourage immigrant families to encourage more take-up of early childcare amongst families and think about incentives that would get them to do so. So, that's kind of a broad policy implication that one could draw from our study. 

 

Marius Busemeyer: Actually, this is also something I wanted to ask about, because looking at this from the child care angle, at least in Germany, as far as I know the data, we also know that the participation, especially in childcare below the age of three, so something that you do not study directly, that the participation rates of those from ethnic minorities is much lower than for natives.

 

Helmut Rainer:  Of course, there would be an implication for Germany, right? So, we have this two-tier system for early childcare: childcare for three to six-year-olds, but then also childcare for under three-year-olds. So, I think take-up rates for children aged three to six are universally very high across different groups in our society. But that's no longer the case for childcare for under three-year-olds, and encouraging take-up in this group, especially for immigrant populations, could be a policy that might pay off in the long term.

 

Marius Busemeyer: Do you have any, I mean, there is this program in Brazil, I think it's called Bolsa Família, right, where they basically pay families to send their children to school. Would that be such an intervention, or is that maybe a little bit too drastic? 

 

Helmut Rainer: It would be super interesting to kind of conduct research on this, but maybe it's also about information provision to immigrant families that could do the trick, but I think this would be a super interesting kind of avenue area for future research as well.      

 

Gabriele Spilker:  Interestingly, I guess from a policymaker perspective, the very same forces that have potentially trouble with birthright citizenship are also the very same ones that might not be in favor of encouraging families to send their kids to school or to kindergarten very early, which is given your findings rather unfortunate, because it would benefit both the kids as well as long-term wise, also our economy, I guess. 

 

Perfect, thank you. I think we are at the end of this podcast. Thank you very much, Helmut, for this super interesting discussion and the findings. Just to summarize what we have talked about in this podcast: Helmut told to us about his research on both early childhood care and birthright citizenship and the very unique situation of Germany, which at the end of the 1990s, early 2000s, had these policy reforms that provided for some kids who were born after a specific date the option to have five more months of childcare and birthright citizenship. What Helmut and his team, what they show is that this has long-term effects for our labor markets and positive effects not only for the labor markets, but also for these adults and therefore should be, as you said, no-brainers in terms of policy recommendations. 

 

So, thank you very much for listening and listening in to the next In_equality Podcast every first Wednesday of the month.

 

All: Bye.

 (This transcript was created using AI.)