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The questions asked in the paper are whether and to what extent the employment situation among recent third-country immigrants differs across European Union countries and how it is related to these countries' labor market characteristics. The European Labor Force Survey data for the 1990s are used to disentangle the roles that the individual characteristics of immigrants, on the one hand, and the structural features of the receiving societies, on the other, play in the process of immigrants' labor market integration. The results of multilevel regression analyses confirm that in receiving countries with stronger demand for low-skilled labor, unprivileged immigrants are less disadvantaged at employment entry. Among men immigrants' employment disadvantages are found to be lower in liberal welfare states marked by their flexible labor markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deportation, understood as the physical removal of someone against their will from the territory of one state to that of another, has moved to the forefront of academic and policy agendas. Although there is a growing literature on legislation and policy, there is very little in-depth data on what happens post-deportation. In this article, we examine possible post-deportation outcomes. We argue that, whatever reasons existed for people to migrate in the first place, deportation adds to these and creates at least three additional reasons that make adjustment, integration, or reintegration difficult, if not impossible. These include the impossibility of repaying debts incurred by migration, the existence of transnational and local ties, the shame of failure, and the perceptions of ‘contamination’. We draw on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data gathered in Europe and Afghanistan to argue that many deported Afghans attempt and succeed in re-migrating. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One might expect economic migrants to experience an increase in happiness after migration: life in wealthier countries might be better, particularly for migrants who succeed in improving their financial situation. From the perspective of ‘happiness studies', however, migration motivated by the prospect of economic gain is perhaps a misguided endeavor. In general, people do not gain happiness from an increase in their incomes, and migration as a means of gaining an increased income might not amount to an exception to that general pattern. This article explores happiness among migrants and stayers in a number of European countries, investigating individuals from eastern European countries who went to western Europe. Migrants generally appear to be happier than those who have remained in the countries of origin—but there is evidence that this difference is the result of a greater tendency towards migration among people with higher levels of happiness (thus not a matter of happiness increasing as a consequence of migration). In addition, there is significant variation by country: migrants from Russia, Turkey, and Romania are happier than stayers, but migrants from Poland are significantly less happy than stayers. Models that determine whether a correction for endogeneity is necessary suggest that those country-level differences represent increases and decreases (respectively) in happiness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]