Integration of immigrants in Germany : economic relevance, measurement, and empirical findings

With regard to an expected further increase in migration movements within Europe and to Europe in the medium term, this thesis examines the economic consequences of immigration and the role that integra-tion plays in it. In addition, existing integration monitoring systems will be presented and evaluated in order to present the integration index as a separate measure of migrant integration in Germany. The index measures the objectively measurable, structural integration on the basis of systematic differences between natives and migrants in the German microcensus. It thus responds to an important point of criticism of the current measurement of integration: Instead of pre-senting a large number of sub-indicators, all the information is com-bined into one number, which increases the signifi cance and enab-les comparisons over longer periods of time with information from consistent data sources. At the end of the thesis, possible explana-tions for differences in measured integration between different mig-rant groups are presented and examined on the basis of the results.