Marriage patterns among Jewish immigrants in Israel

Immigrants’ marriage patterns and spouse selection carry important long-term implications for their economic and social integration. This study focuses on immigrants’ spouse selection and asks whether immigrants tend to marry co-ethnics. Israel’s 2010 Labor Force Survey, collected by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, is used to reveal effects of ethnicity, age at immigration, education and age at marriage on spouse selection among immigrants in Israel. The results show that immigrants tend to marry immigrants of the same ethnicity; when they marry out of their ethnic group, they tend more to marry Israeli-born partners than to marry other immigrants. Also, 1.5-generation and second-generation immigrants tend more than first-generation immigrants to marry native-born Israelis, both co-ethnics and of different ethnicity.