Public Opinion and Immigration: Who Favours Employment Discrimination against Immigrants?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12457 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Author | Arusha Cooray,Maliha Nazir,Abdeslam Marfouk |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
Public Opinion and Immigration: Who
Favours Employment Discrimination against
Immigrants?
Arusha Cooray* , Abdeslam Marfouk**,**** and Maliha Nazir***
ABSTRACT
Using information from the world values survey wave 6, containing information from 78,743
respondents in 53 countries, we examine the factors which influence respondents’answers to
the question: “when jobs are scarce, should employers give priority to people of the country
of origin rather than immigrants?”Taking into account a number of factors, including the
economic, socio-demographic, political and individual levels, we find that all of these factors
influence respondents’preference for this form of discrimination.
INTRODUCTION
The integration of immigrants into society where they live has become the subject of recurrent
debate and is a key issue in the political agenda of many countries.
1
For instance, a large majority
of Greek (70%), Swedish (65%) and French (65%) and little over half of Italians (52%) and Ger-
man (51%) believe that immigrants living in their country are poorly integrated into society, Ger-
man Marshall Fund Transatlantic Trends (http://trends.gmfus.org/files/2014/09/Trends_
Immigration_2014_web.pdf). Many consider immigrants’integration to be a one-way process,
blaming immigrants for the failure to integrate into society, ignoring that their economic integration
is one of the key preconditions for their full integration into society.
However, a number of indicators show that immigrant labour market outcomes are much lower
compared to native labour market outcomes. In general, immigrants exhibit substantially lower
employment and higher unemployment rates compared to natives-born counterparts. For example,
according to OECD statistics the employment rate gap between native-born and immigrants exceeds
11 percentage points in countries such as Belgium Denmark, Netherlands and Sweden in 2015.
Similarly the foreign-born unemployment rate exceeds 25% in Greece and Spain, and the disparity
between immigrant and non-immigrant unemployment rates is particularly pronounced in Austria,
Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland where the immigrant unemployment rate rep-
resents more than twice that of the native-born (https://data.oecd.org/migration/foreign-born-une
mployment.htm#indicator-chart).
* University of New South Wales, Sydney
** (IWEPS)
*** Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
**** (CEDEM), University of Liege
[Correction added on 28 May 2018 after first online publication: the affiliation of Abdeslam Marfouk was previously
incorrect and this has been corrected in this version]
doi: 10.1111/imig.12457
©2018 The Authors
International Migration ©2018 IOM
International Migration Vol. 56 (6) 2018
ISSN 0020-7985Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This discrepancy can be partially explained by different factors, including differences between
immigrants and non-immigrants in terms of qualifications, social and professional networks, work
experience, language skills, jobs requiring nationality requirements, problem of recognition of for-
eign diplomas and qualifications, especially if earned in developing countries, and in some cases
differences in educational attainment,
2
see OECD (2013). Apart from these factors, a number of
studies provide strong evidence of the existence of discrimination against immigrants in access to
employment. Therefore, the role of discrimination as a major barrier preventing foreign-born work-
ers from fully participating in the labour market should be not neglected, see Cediey and Foroni
(2007); McGinnity and Lunn (2011), among others.
These views are not limited to the global North, but are also present in the global South with the
increase in South-South migration. For instance, in 2004, Cote d’Ivoire passed a law that gave
nationals priority in employment over foreign-born people in all forms of jobs from qualified to
manual labour (Gagnon and Khoudour-Casteras, 2011). Similarly, Sierra Leone’s constitution per-
mits discrimination against immigrants (Gagnon and Khoudour-Casteras, 2012), while the govern-
ment of Nigeria has been found to actively discriminate against immigrants, (OECD, 2011). In
Malaysia, there has been resentment against immigrants for taking jobs away from nationals, partic-
ularly in the Sabah region, (Tajari and Affendi, 2015).
More worrying is the fact that today a sizeable proportion of citizens belonging to different coun-
tries are in favour of discrimination against immigrants in employment. The most recent wave of
the world values survey (wave 6) (http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp) reveals
that, about half of the respondents in Argentina (48%), New Zealand (49%), United States (52%)
and Rwanda (53%) agree with the statement that, “When jobs are scarce, employers should give
priority to people of this country over immigrants,”and a much higher proportion of people in
countries such as Jordan (93%), Qatar (87%), Philippines (80%) and Poland (71%) share this opin-
ion. This could be considered a proxy for what Gary Becker (1957), the laureate of Nobel prize in
economics, calls a “taste for discrimination”(http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp).
Thus, using the most recent wave of the World Values Survey (wave 6), the objective of this study
is to investigate whether people have a “taste for discrimination”. In other words, the research ques-
tion posed by this study will be: “when jobs are scarce, should employers give priority to people of
the country of origin rather than immigrants?”The aim of this research is to provide some important
insights into whether people believe that jobs should be given to natives rather than immigrants when
jobs are scarce, and to understand the factors influencing this decision that are not related to workers’
productivity. We investigate this question by employing a multilevel modelling approach which
allows taking into account the hierarchical nature of the data. We consider not only economic, but
also socio-demographic variables, and variables which capture anti-migrant sentiments, (Scheepers
et al., 2002; Semyonov et al., 2006). It is important to understand the answers to this question from
a policy perspective, for if a “taste for discrimination”did exist, policies to minimize these inequali-
ties that are not related to the productivity of labour need to be understood.
The rest of the article is organized as follows. The next section provides stylized facts. The third
discusses the literature, the fourth describes the data, the fifth discusses the empirical strategy and
results and the sixth section concludes the article.
STYLIZED FACTS
There is a wide consensus on the view that the economic integration of individuals’is the first step
towards their social and cultural integration. A number of indicators however, reveal that in gen-
eral, immigrants lag far behind non-immigrant workers in terms of employment in the labour mar-
ket. For example, Figure 1 shows that, on average, the unemployment rate for foreign-born persons
in Greece and Spain were 32 per cent and 30 per cent in 2015, compared with 24 per cent and 21
6Cooray, Marfouk and Nazir
©2018 The Authors. International Migration ©2018 IOM
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