Mixed Marriages in Germany: A High Risk of Divorce for Immigrant-Native Couples

This study investigates the effect of native/immigrant intermarriage on divorce. We used a rich longitudinal dataset from the German Socio-Economic Panel and applied event-history techniques to examine the risk of divorce among immigrants in Germany. Our analysis of the divorce rates of 5,648 marriages shows that immigrant couples have a lower risk of divorce than do natives. However, marriages between German-born individuals and immigrants have a higher likelihood of separation than marriages between two German-born individuals or between immigrants from the same country, supporting the exogamy hypothesis. This pattern largely persists when controlling for the socio-demographic and human-capital characteristics of the spouses. The divorce risk increases with the cultural distance between the partners and when the spouses demonstrate differences in their social backgrounds, also supporting the heterogamy hypothesis and the selectivity hypothesis. We found no support for the adaptation and convergence hypotheses. Divorce levels for mixed marriages are neither similar to the levels of one of the constituent origin groups, nor do they fall between the levels of the two groups; the divorce levels for native/immigrant marriages are higher than those for endogamous marriages.