Meanwhile, their high relative level of education means that they pass on higher levels aspirations and expectations.
Whether high aspirations are rather the cause or theconsequence of migration, i.e. whether higher levels of aspirations for migrants areindependent from, or rather the result of their migration experience is the guidingquestion for the subsequent analysis.
Or, are these higher levels of aspirations rather aconsequence of the migration experience itself, that is, does the migration experiencegenerate higher aspirations?
Higher levels of aspirations, by which migrants areself-selected, are mainly driven (i.e. by about 70percentnt) by aspiration-enhancingcharacteristics such as being of young age, well-educated, and economically and sociallywell-situated.
For the Swedish cohort, all categories of children of immigrants exhibited higher levels of aspirations in the first two models.
Throughout all specifications, migration is associated with significantly higher levels of aspirations and expectations (see columns 2-3 and 5-6).
While recent migrants do not express significantly different levels ofsubjective well-being compared to non-migrants, they express much higher levels offuture aspirations than non-migrants, with almost no or only weak differences betweenrural and urban contexts.
The higher levels of aspirations among students with migrant background have been described as "immigrant optimism" (Fernández-Reino, 2016), or conceptualized as "ethnic capital" (Modood, 2004; Shah et al., 2010).
Since then, a multitude of studies have found stronger educational norms and higher levels of aspirations among children of immigrants and other minorities (Archer & Francis, 2006; Brinbaum & Cebolla-Boado, 2007; D'hondt, Van Praag, Van Houtte, & Stevens, 2016; Goyette & Xie, 1999; Marjoribanks, 2002; Salikutluk, 2016; Teney, Devleeshouwer, & Hanquinet, 2013; Van de Werfhorst & Van Tubergen, 2007).
Interestingly, no significantdifferences in subjective well-being are observed between those respondents with recentmigration experience and the non-migrants, neither in rural nor in urban contexts.However, migrants express strikingly higher levels of aspirations for the future thannon-migrants, with only weak differences between rural and urban populations.
