A series of studies on the fate of second generation immigrant children in the German labor market has identified a special pattern among those of Turkish heritage. While the disadvantages of the descendants of other labor migrants almost completely disappear when controlling for formal qualifications, Turkish young people as a rule experience a considerable ethnic penalty. This has been confirmed once again by the recent contribution of Holger Seibert and Heike Solga in this journal. In explaining this finding they - like many others - in principle refer to Turkish-specific labor market discrimination. In this paper, however, we argue that alternative explanations for the specific pattern among second-generation Turkish participants in the labor market are also available and that they are not less convincing from a theoretical point of view. Above all, the ethnic penalty may be due to a lack of helpful resources, such as weaker parental support or capital-specific factors in the receiving society. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) we show that the Turkish penalties reported by Seibert and Solga can indeed largely be explained by the ethnic composition of friendship networks and German language proficiency. This finding proves to hold even when applying more strict longitudinal techniques to test the underlying causal relationships. © Lucius & Lucius Verlag Stuttgart.

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