With this thesis, I aim to provide a better understanding of immigrants’ integration processes in internationalizing societies by studying how the structural conditions under which immigration takes place affect immigrants’ economic incorporation. Immigrants’ successful economic incorporation is key to their successful integration in the receiving society; yet, it is often impeded by immigrants’ foreign qualifications that prove less valuable in the receiving labor market. My research scrutinizes how national institutions shape the opportunities of immigrants with foreign qualifications in the labor market. First, I zoom in on the interplay between educational institutions in immigrants’ sending and receiving countries, which I argue will determine the opportunity structure for importing foreign education. Depending on the institutional configuration in their sending country, immigrants will bring a certain type of education, and depending on the institutional configuration in the receiving country, employers will prefer a certain type of education that can prove more or less compatible with that supplied by immigrants. Second, I study the effectiveness of institutions that receiving countries put in place to improve immigrants’ opportunities in the labor market. To facilitate employers’ recognition of the foreign education that immigrants bring, several countries have introduced procedures to officially recognize foreign educational credentials. In factorial surveys, I simulate hiring processes for medium-skilled positions in various occupations and study how employers respond to foreign-educated applicants that recently immigrated. Using vignettes, I experimentally vary the applicant profiles in several dimensions, and ask the employers to rate how likely they would invite the applicants to interview for jobs that correspond with their foreign qualifications, and how much on-the-job-training they expect would be required upon hiring the applicants. This controlled experimental setting provides excellent leverage for analyzing how national institutions shape immigrants’ opportunities. By exploring how employers in different institutional contexts of reception respond to foreign-educated applicants from systems of various institutional configurations, I can clarify how the interplay between educational institutions in sending and receiving countries affects immigrants’ prospects in the labor market. Moreover, by comparing how employers respond to immigrants with non-recognized foreign credentials, recognized foreign credentials, and credentials acquired in the receiving country, I can demonstrate the extent to which foreign credential recognition improves immigrants’ prospects of successful positioning. The empirical findings underpin that the institutional context in which immigrants have acquired their foreign education clearly matters to employers: Immigrants from countries where highly standardized vocation-oriented education and training systems are in place have better chances of importing their foreign qualifications and getting hired for adequate jobs than immigrants from countries with less vocation-oriented systems. Notably, this is the case both in labor markets where vocational pathways strongly regulate the allocation of workers to jobs, such as in Germany, and in more flexible markets, such as in England. Nevertheless, there remains some hope for immigrants that do not have the right type of educational background: Further analyses reveal that under certain circumstances, they will be able to overcome the institutional shortcomings of their education – for example, when they bring extensive occupational experience from their sending country. Moreover, the analyses show that the official recognition of foreign credentials has considerable potential to effectively foster immigrants’ labor market integration. Although foreign credential recognition does not lift foreign-educated applicants’ hiring chances to the level of native-educated applicants, immigrants with recognized foreign credentials have significantly better prospects of accessing adequate jobs. Taken together, this thesis highlights the institutional embeddedness of stratification processes and immigrants’ integration in internationalizing labor markets and provides new insights into the conditions and strategies that allow immigrants to access jobs that correspond with their foreign qualifications.
