How should we refer to the children of immigrants? The traditional answer is “second-generation immigrants”, yet “first-generation locals” is far more accurate, as a new research paper co-authored by Alan Manning, one of the UK’s top economists, points out. It has more to offer than linguistic improvements. In the US, first-generation locals generally do better than the children of locals. But that’s prompted a puzzle, because in European countries that is often not the case, with the children of migrants having below average educational and labour market outcomes. This has prompted worries from the left about discrimination and from the right about a lack of integration. The new paper focuses on Denmark, tracking children born in the 1980s over four decades to see what has become of them aged 30, among them people whose parents were born outside Denmark. This confirms the bad news: first-generation locals have worse outcomes in a wide range of areas, on average earning around $9,000 (£7,400) less than those with two local-born parents. But does this mean that being a first-generation local is causing this disadvantage? Here comes the important bit, because when the economists go on to compare those whose parents had similar socioeconomic backgrounds (education, jobs, income), first-generation locals actually earn more than those with local-born parents, mirroring what we see in the US. This is far from just of academic interest: almost 2 million UK-born children have two migrant parents and they generally face higher rates of deprivation. So the key issue for first-generation locals isn’t that their parents are migrants – it’s that they are often poor. Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org