Cultural Stratification in the Labor Market Outcomes of University-Educated Migrants in Australia: The Relevance of Cultural and Linguistic Proximity

Previous studies on segmented assimilation reveal that immigrants from various origin countries follow different labor market pathways and achieve diverse socioeconomic outcomes. This paper extends existing research on migrant integration by investigating how cultural and linguistic proximity to the host society affects labor market outcomes. Utilizing unique, whole-of-population, integrated government data on Australian university graduates (N=800,179), this study focuses on permanent migrants from multiple countries who obtained their degrees in Australia. The unprecedented scale of the data allows for detailed analysis of labor market outcomes by country of origin, revealing variations even among countries within the same region. In turn, this diversity enables examining the relationship between cultural and linguistic proximity to Australia and labor market outcomes. Cultural proximity emerges as a significant factor explaining cross-country differences in labor market success among permanent immigrants. However, the results for linguistic proximity are more nuanced, showing positive associations only for selected outcomes. Additionally, the findings indicate that age at arrival moderates the relationship between cultural and linguistic proximity and labor market success. We introduce the term "cultural stratification" to describe these processes.