Immigration Policy, Assimilation of Immigrants and Natives' Sentiments Towards Immigrants: Evidence from 12 Oecd-Countries

By Thomas K. Bauer, Magnus Lofstrom, Klaus F. Zimmermann. Social Science Research Network, 2000

402 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As in the U.S. and Canada, migration is a controversial issue in Europe. This paper explores the possibility that immigration policy may affect the labor market assimilation of immigrants and hence natives’ sentiments towards immigrants. It first reviews the assimilation literature in economics and the policy approaches taken in Europe and among the traditional immigration countries. Second, a new analysis of individual data from the OECD countries studies sentiments concerning immigration and the determinants of these sentiments is presented. Natives in countries that receive predominantly refugee migrants are relatively more concerned with immigrations impact on social issues such as crime than on the employment effects. Natives in countries with mostly economic migrants are relatively more concerned about loosing jobs to immigrants. However, the results also suggest that natives may view immigration more favorably if immigrants are selected according to the needs of the labor markets. Possible benefits of such a policy are that it may moderate social tensions in regards to migration and contribute to a better economic performance of the respective countries.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b2f0e13dde6ffa877ac2f779f93ffb08ced43eef

Citations in the corpus

• Do concerns about labor market competition shape attitudes toward immigration? New evidence☆ (2015, neutral): “The results are more consistent with alternative accounts emphasizing non-economic concerns among voters associated with ethnocentrism or sociotropic considerations about the effects of immigration on the country as a whole (Bauer et al., 2000; Burns and Gimpel, 2000; Dustmann and Preston, 2007).”
• The dynamics of immigrant welfare and labor market behavior (2009, neutral): “…the 1990’s differs between the two countries, with mostly refugee immigrants in Sweden and predominantly economic migrants in the U.S., the relative success of immigrants in the host country labor market during this period has declined in both countries, see Bauer et al (2000) and Borjas (1999).”
• Ethnic and Socioeconomic Class Composition and Language Proficiency: a Longitudinal Multilevel Examination in Dutch Elementary Schools (2006, neutral): “Though these outcomes corroborate the findings of Bauer et al. (2000) that the Netherlands is one of the countries with the lowest rate of immigrant labour force assimilation in Europe, it has to be stipulated that the lack of immigrant labour participation is apparently not restricted to asylum see”
• European Labour Mobility: Challenges and Potentials (2005, neutral): “Bauer, Lofstrom and Zimmermann (2000) deal with this issue and incorporate a study of natives' sentiments towards immigrants.”
• Immigrants, Labour Market Performance and Social Insurance (2014, neutral): “With considerable variation in the composition of migrant flows across time and space (Bauer et al., 2000), the overall fiscal impacts will vary across destination countries depending on the relative skills and origin mix of the immigrant population.”
• The Impact of Immigration on the Well-Being of Natives (2014, neutral): “A paper by Betz and Simpson (2013), which was conducted after the first draft of this study (Akay et al.”
• Comparing Immigration Policies: An Overview from the IMPALA Database 1 (2016, neutral): “More broadly, immigration, and admissions policies in particular, may influence cultural and ethnic diversity, social capital, political participation, and partisan alignments (Bauer, Lofstrom, and Zimmerman 2000; Putnam 2007).”
• Racial and Economic Factors in Attitudes to Immigration (2007, neutral): “Consider now the reduced form equations, which are obtained by substituting (2) in (1) and (3):”
• Ethnic Discrimination in Germany’s Labour Market: A Field Experiment (2012, neutral): “As Bauer et al. (2000) show, natives in countries that receive many non-economic migrants are mainly worried about increasing crime rates. In contrast, natives in countries that select migrants by skill worry more about labour market competition. Such country-specific effects may limit the transfera”
• Identifying earnings assimilation of immigrants under changing macroeconomic conditions. The Norwegian experience (2001, neutral): “In particular, studies of immigrants both in Europe and North America indicate that the relative labour market performance of immigrants has declined across arrival c ohorts (Borjas, 1985; Baker and Benjamin, 1994; Bauer et al., 2000).”