Why do immigrants have longer periods of unemployment? Swiss evidence
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12309 |
| Author | Daniel Auer,Flavia Fossati,Giuliano Bonoli |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
Why do immigrants have longer periods of
unemployment? Swiss evidence
Daniel Auer*, Giuliano Bonoli* and Flavia Fossati*
ABSTRACT
Immigrant groups, especially those originating from non-European countries, tend to experi-
ence disadvantages in the labour market and to be overrepresented among the recipients of
welfare benefits in many European countries. In the public debate, this outcome is sometimes
explained with reference to migration-related factors such as weaker work values than natives
(i.e., acceptability of remaining on benefits), smaller and lower quality of informal networks
and lower levels of psychological well-being. Indeed, we find that these factors significantly
influence unemployment duration in the expected direction. However, they explain only a
small share of the overall disadvantage that some immigrant groups experience. We conclude
that at least some of the large differences we observed in unemployment durations are likely
to be due to other factors including discrimination by employers.
INTRODUCTION
The disadvantage that some immigrant groups experience in European labour markets translates
into a higher probability that these groups receive some form of welfare benefit, such as unemploy-
ment benefits or social assistance (Barret and Ma^
ıtre, 2013; Br€
ucker et al., 2002: 74). This fact is
often discussed in political debates and used as an argument to limit immigration and/or to depict
some immigrant groups as less attached to national work values and more inclined to take advan-
tage of the “generous”European welfare states (for a discussion on welfare dependency see, for
instance, Nannestad, 2007). This view has gained merit in political circles and large sections of the
electorate in many European countries but has rarely been empirically tested.
As argued below, research on the impact of immigrants’values on their labour market perfor-
mance has focused on broader societal values, such as religion’s place in society or gender relation-
ships (e.g. Koopmans, 2016). Some studies have found that these values affect the probability that
an individual is employed. However, the exact causal chain remains unclear. To investigate the
validity of the claims made by populist politicians across Europe, we must focus on normative per-
ceptions that are at the interface of work and the welfare state. This article investigates such norma-
tive perceptions and determines whether some immigrant groups consider it more acceptable to
remain on unemployment benefit after they have lost their jobs than do natives, and, if so, whether
this attitude is associated with longer unemployment spells.
Of course, values are only one of several factors that can explain the overrepresentation of some
immigrant groups among welfare benefit recipients.
1
Thus, we consider their possible impact together
with a host of other potential drivers including the usual controls, such as human capital, age, gender,
and other aspects that are more closely related to the migration experience. For this reason, in addition
* University of Lausanne, Switzerland
doi: 10.1111/imig.12309
©2016 The Authors
International Migration ©2016 IOM
International Migration Vol. 55 (1) 2017
ISSN 0020-7985Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
to examining the impact of values, we focus on the availability and quality of informal networks and
psychological well-being. We do not expect these three factors to explain the full degree of disadvan-
tage that immigrants experience in terms of unemployment duration. However, our analysis will allow
us to compare the relevance of the three different migration-related variables.
Our dependent variable is unemployment duration. The study of unemployment duration is impor-
tant because it informs us on the processes that link labour market disadvantage to dependency on
the welfare state, an aspect that is often forgotten in public debates on immigrants’overrepresenta-
tion among recipients of social programmes. Some immigrant groups may be overrepresented among
the poor (e.g. Hooijer and Picot, 2015) and among recipients of social benefits (e.g. Swiss Federal
Statistical Office, 2016a) because they experience disadvantage in accessing the labour market.
Our analysis relies on a unique dataset of all newly unemployed individuals in the Swiss Canton
of Vaud in the spring of 2012 and combines both survey and administrative data. This dataset is
particularly suitable for answering our research question because it includes both administrative
data on unemployment duration and survey-based information on variables of sociological interest
such as informal networks and values.
Switzerland has a long tradition of managing immigration, typically in a restrictive manner that
reflects the needs of the economy (Piguet, 2005; Ruedin, 2011; Ruedin et al., 2015). Swiss citizen-
ship law is also restrictive: an individual must reside in the country for several years (typically 12)
to apply for citizenship. In addition, the procedure for obtaining Swiss nationality is long and com-
plex. Hence, many immigrants maintain the nationality of their country of origin after residing in
Switzerland for several years.
In this article, we focus on the immigrant communities that massively entered Switzerland start-
ing in the late 1980s. During this period, immigration from Italy and Spain decreased sharply,
whereas inflows from Yugoslavia, Portugal, and several African and Latin American countries
increased substantially. At the time of writing, this trend continues and the number of immigrants
originating from these regions is on the rise (Swiss Federal Statistical Office, 2014).
The article is structured as follows. We begin by reviewing the literature on factors that deter-
mine an “ethnic penalty”, with a focus on values, networks and psychological well-being. We con-
tinue by providing information on the dataset and methods, present the results, and conclude with a
discussion of the findings and their significance.
LITERATURE AND HYPOTHESES
Much of the labour market disadvantage that some immigrant groups experience can be explained
by compositional factors, such as lower levels of educational attainment, age, and language skills.
However, a rather large corpus of research has shown that “ethnic penalties”remain after control-
ling for differences in these traits. A number of variables beyond compositional differences in
human capital, economic sector, and age may be responsible for the ethnic penalty. These include
cultural aspects such as work-welfare values, knowledge of and compliance with the “unwritten
rules”in the realm of employment in the host country, the availability of informal networks, and
discrimination by employers, to name a few. We rely on three different strands of literature to
explain the existence of an ethnic penalty: migration studies, labour economics and social policy.
Labour market disadvantage and ethnic penalties
An ethnic penalty can be defined as origin-related disadvantage that remains after accounting for
compositional differences between the immigrant and native populations (Ballarino and Panichella,
2015; Heath and Cheung, 2007; Zuccotti, 2015: 230). Ethnic penalties exist in several dimensions
158 Auer, Bonoli and Fossati
©2016 The Authors. International Migration ©2016 IOM
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