Self-employment of immigrants in Germany: Exclusion or path to integration?

In Germany, as in several other European countries, the number of self-empl oyed immigrants has steadily increased throughout the past years, which mig ht be interpreted as an indicator of the increasing integration of immigran ts into German society. However, it has been argued that this development h as been caused by the rising level of unemployment among foreigners and tha t for this reason the forced self-employment will not contribute to the soc ial and economic integration of former guest-workers. On the contrary-so th e argument goes-, the marginal position of the self-employed will rather re semble those of wage-earners. By analysing the German Microcensus of 1995 we tried to find out whether th e self-employment of immigrants in Germany could be interpreted as a sign o f integration. For this purpose, we compared Germans with the foreign popul ation, which we divided into two groups: immigrants from countries most for mer guest-workers came from, such as Greece and Turkey, were distinguished from immigrants from industrial nations, such as the United States, France, Great Britain, and others. It is well known that these two groups differ c onsiderably in their socio-economic characteristics. Therefore, the startin g positions for self-employment show significant differences for the two gr oups. Our findings confirm that the self-employment of immigrants from former gue st-worker countries does not have the same quality in terms of branches and income as the self-employment of Germans and foreigners from industrial na tions. At the same time, however, it turns out that among immigrants from f ormer guest-worker countries the self-employed have higher levels of educat ion and income than workers and employees. A logistic regression confirms t he more favourable income structure of the self-employed while controlling for relevant variables. For this reason, the increasing number of self-empl oyed immigrants from former guest-worker countries can certainly be conside red as a sign of their gradual integration.