Education and social support: do migrants benefit as much as natives?

Abstract

Education and having access to social support play a vital role in the human life. Integrated and better-educated people demonstrate an increased personal health and well-being. Social isolation, on the contrary, can affect not only the personal development, but also pertains to society. These topics are especially relevant in the current migration debate. Our paper examines the link between schooling and the individuals’ probability to receive different types of social support, in particular emotional, instrumental, informational, and appraisal support. Using logit and ordinal logit regressions on cross-sectional micro-data provided by the SOEP, we distinguish between two subgroups, the native population and people who migrated to Germany. Our findings confirm that higher levels of education increase the probability to access social support as well as the number of support providers in the network. Migrants are disadvantaged when it comes to the access of social support. However, our results suggest no significant negative returns to education for people with migration experiences.