Evidence on the education profile and the assimilation of immigrants in Switzerland

This paper represents an attempt to investigate the assimilation process of immigrants in Switzerland. Some institutional and historical background is first presented, after which we analyse the education profile of the immigrants through four cohorts of arrival. The results tend to show that the immigrant workforce is rather heterogeneous and should be analysed with a breakdown by country of origin. Following Chiswick (1978), we then proceed to an analysis of the assimilation process of immigrants in Switzerland. We take into account the possible decline in cohort quality by introducing cohort dummies. The main results are that the assimilation process is closely connected with the education profile of the immigrants and that training in the home country accounts for a large part of the wage differential between the immigrants and the native Swiss.