Diverging pathways:
the effects of initial legal status on immigrant socioeconomic and residential outcomes in France

Tianjian Lai (University of Chicago), Haley McAvay (University of York), Mirna Safi
European Sociological Review, 28 September, doi: 10.1093/esr/jcad047

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This article provides an empirical assessment of the effects of migrants’ initial legal status on socioeconomic attainment focusing on three outcomes:

• household income, 
• neighbourhood disadvantage, 
• concentration in immigrant neighbourhoods.

The regulation of migration in modern nation-states entails the sorting of newcomers along legal lines of demarcation that define residency status. These legal distinctions upon arrival grant or deny rights and opportunities and determine access to citizenship and socioeconomic resources. Certain legal statuses allow migrants to enter the labour market immediately (i.e. work permits), while others provide a faster track to citizenship (i.e. marriage permits). These classifications further shape the degree of inclusion and reception that immigrants encounter.

In this article, we draw on a unique, large-sample data source from France, the Trajectories and Origins (TeO) survey, which includes rare information on migrants’ first residency permit and a wide range of premigration variables. We focus on five initial permit categories - refugee, student, worker, spouse of a French citizen, and family reunification - and measure their impact on socioeconomic attainment and residential attainment as reported at the time of the survey.
Our empirical strategy seeks to disentangle the effects of legal status from confounding factors implementing a series of different methodological approaches.

The results first show that immigrants’ outcomes vary by their initial legal status. Migrants who arrived in France with student, worker and French spouse permits tend to be more advantaged in socioeconomic outcomes, while refugees face greater disadvantage. Yet, some of these disparities disappear once premigration variables and/or individual heterogeneity are accounted for. These results suggest that most initial legal status categories are stratified prior to arrival and not stratifiers in the destination country per se. However, we consistently measure a negative effect of refugee status on respondents’ income across diverse model specifications, suggesting a lasting impact of this legal category.