Social assistance recipiency among immigrants in West Germany

This study focuses on the reception of benefits from the social assistance scheme among various ethnic groups in West Germany in 1995. We distinguish households of Germans and foreigners with residence of more than ten years from immigrants who came to West Germany throughout the last decade. The latter group is differentiated according to ethnic origin, e.g. Ubersiedler from East Germany, Aussiedler (ethnic Germans from former Eastern block countries), asylum seekers and refugees, etc. The empirical analysis is based on data from the German Socio-economic Panel Study (GSOEP) as of 1995 and takes into account its new immigrant sample. A first descriptive analysis shows that immigrants rely most heavily on social assistance, followed by the group of long-time residents, where we find foreigners to be more dependent on social assistance than Germans. Within the very heterogeneous group of immigrants Aussiedler as well as asylum seekers and refugees are most likely to receive social assistance. Using logistic regressions to prove these findings when controlling for a variety of socio-economic characteristics, it can be shown that the result for foreigners and Germans is mainly determined by the less favourable social structure of foreigners. In a final step we focus exclusively on immigrants in order to control for the effect of length of residence in Germany. The main result is a significant reduction in the probability of receiving benefits from the social assistance scheme with increasing years of residence. Thus, social assistance proves ro be an effective instrument for integrating immigrants into the German society.