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Ethnic identity, majority norms, and the native–immigrant employment gap

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Abstract

Earlier studies do not agree on whether ethnic identity, i.e., immigrants’ attachment to the home country and the host country, can explain lower employment outcomes among immigrants. This study investigates the relationship between employment and ethnic identity and complements the literature by capturing a novel dimension of ethnic identity: openness to majority norms. Reproducing measures from earlier studies, I find that immigrants’ employment outcomes do not systematically associate with their ethnic identity. However, immigrants who share social norms with the majority experience significantly better employment outcomes, particularly first-generation immigrant women. Furthermore, I show that interethnic differentials in majority norms could account for up to 20 % of the explained part of the employment gap between natives and first-generation immigrants. Those results shed more light on the interethnic employment gap and aspects of immigrants’ identity relevant to economic integration.

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Notes

  1. In Denmark, the 2008 European Values Survey reveals that one of the biggest concerns associated with immigration is the undermining of the majority culture, and only 6 % of the Danish population wishes that immigrants keep their customs and traditions. This evidence points toward public preferences for an assimilation policy. See also Gundelach (2011).

  2. Nekby and Rödin (2010) also call ethnic identity “acculturation identity” when it accounts for attachment to both the country of origin and the host country. See Section 3 for a presentation of the ethnic identity measures used in this study.

  3. See, e.g., Chiswick (1978), Borjas (1985), and Constant and Massey (2003), for major works on the economic assimilation of immigrants. See also Constant and Zimmermann (2011) for a review of this literature.

  4. Sen (1977) represents a pioneer work in the economics of identity literature. Again, see Constant and Zimmermann (2011) for a thorough presentation of the more general literature on the economics of identity. The work of Akerlof and Kranton (2000) constitutes a major reference for recent works linking identity choice and economic outcomes among immigrants. For instance, their model has been used by Fryer and Levitt (2004) to explain the utility associated with the choice of distinctive names among black communities in the USA.

  5. See Constant et al. (2009) for further details on the construction of the ethnosizer. One innovation of the ethnosizer is to measure ethnic identity in two dimensions, placing individual identity relative to both the home and the host countries.

  6. Numbers are given within the sample age categories, i.e., 18–50 for first-generation and 18–34 for second-generation immigrant, and are taken from Statistics Denmark (2012). See, e.g., Liebig (2007) and Alfieri and Matthiesen (2005) for further details on Denmark’s immigration history.

  7. In this paper, the term immigrants designates both first- and second-generation immigrants. The EGV definition of group ancestry equates that of Statistics Denmark. First-generation immigrants were born abroad of parents without Danish citizenship and born outside Denmark. Second-generation immigrants are born in Denmark and none of their parents are both Danish citizen and born in Denmark. If one or both parents born in Denmark become Danish by naturalization, their children will not be second-generation immigrants anymore but natives. If both parents born in Denmark hold their foreign citizenship, their children will be second-generation immigrants. I call second-generation immigrants alternatively descendants.

  8. Gundelach and Nørregård-Nielsen excluded countries of origin close to Denmark in terms of values but largely represented in the immigrant population in 2005 such as Norway and Germany. See Gundelach and Nørregård-Nielsen (2007) for more details on the data set construction.

  9. This period coincides with the international crisis that followed the publication of Mohammed cartoons in a Danish newspaper. Although this crisis could have influenced respondents’ answers, statistics from the EGV data cannot depict major differences in responses before and after the cartoon publication date.

  10. Given that 2006 corresponds to one of the lowest unemployment rates within the past 30 years in Denmark (4.5 % of the total workforce in June 2006, Statistics Denmark (2006), one may fear that a selection of non-working immigrants may have occurred among the survey respondents. In fact, the opposite is true. As found for other surveys conducted among immigrants in different countries (Deding et al. 2008), one can rather observe an overrepresentation of immigrants in employment in the EGV survey.

  11. The EGV survey asks also how many grades (in all education categories) were completed in the home country. The average is around 8.5 (standard deviation 4.3) for both male and female first-generation immigrants. Adding the number of grades from the home country does not appear significant and does not change the results.

  12. A standard factor analysis shows that, even though the variance does not vary much across the four dimensions, the first dimension on the tolerance of some actions and the fourth dimension on gender equality explain most of the variance. See Fig. A1 of the Electronic Supplementary Material for a graphic representation of immigrant shares across the values of the modernization index.

  13. Yet, once the first-generation sample is restricted to Turkish and Pakistanis, the only origins observed for second generations, males from the second generation classify more often as highly modern than males from the first generation of the same origin (see Fig. A2 of the Electronic Supplementary Material).

  14. Tolerance toward abortion, divorce, or homosexuality correlates negatively with the degree of religiosity—the raw coefficient for the whole sample is −0.3. Accordingly, I control simultaneously for religious and a high modernization index in the employment equations.

  15. Origin of regular contacts and language spoken at home constitute two dimensions of the Constant et al. (2009) ethnosizer index. The reproduction of the ethnosizer was considered but abandoned due to a high correlation between employment and interactions measures and the non-availability of pre-study employment information. Nevertheless, in the estimations, I keep the two dimensions of contacts and language as alternative indirect identity measures.

  16. In addition, a measure similar to the oppositional identity index of Battu and Zenou (2010) was reproduced. The reproduction of the index is shown in the Electronic Supplementary Material (Tables A3 and A4).

  17. Yet, this pattern does not hold when restricting the first-generation sample to Turkish and Pakistani immigrants (results are not shown but are available from the author).

  18. Looking at simple correlation teaches us that the modernization index only associates with measures of ethnic identity with coefficients below 0.25 for most of them (see Table A1 of the Electronic Supplementary Material).

  19. Previous works have acknowledged the difficulty to eliminate endogeneity and identify a causal relationship between ethnic identity and employment (e.g., Casey and Dustmann (2010)), also when using data on earlier employment (e.g., Nekby and Rödin (2010)).

  20. Other works, however, show that age, time of arrival, and years spent in the country also can shape ethnic identity (Casey and Dustmann 2010).

  21. Running separate models for male and female descendants leads to similar results in terms of associations between employment, ethnic identity, and norms adoption, but due to a significant loss in the number of observations, the statistical significance of other covariates such as education becomes less stable (see Table A2 of the Electronic Supplementary Material). Furthermore, in estimations not shown here, I exclude first-generation immigrants above the age of 35 (upper limit for the descendant sample) and do find very similar results.

  22. Simultaneous endogeneity between employment and, in particular, ethnic identity measured with regular contacts is very likely.

  23. Response bias, including social desirable responding, constitutes a major issue in self-reports on individual attitudes and behaviors (Paulhus 1991).

  24. See, e.g., Carlsson and Rooth (2007, 2012) for recent evidence on ethnic discrimination on Scandinavian labor markets.

  25. As results from the previous section show that modernization and religious correlate significantly with employment only for first-generation immigrants, I decompose the employment gap for this group only.

  26. F is the cumulative distribution function from the logistic estimation. Yet, to remain consistent with the previous results, I also employ probit functions to decompose the employment gap.

  27. The ethnic inequality literature often interprets the latter term as actual ethnic discrimination but, as Aaberhardt et al. (2010) discuss, the term unexplained is more appropriate.

  28. Following Jann (2006), I also use weights from a pooled sample of both first-generation immigrants and ethnic Danes. Moreover, weights from this pooled sample were computed after controlling for additional immigrant characteristics. Finally, weights from a larger pooled sample including the two immigrant generations and natives were used. Those robustness checks are shown in Table A6 (Electronic Supplementary Material) and present estimates similar in size and statistical precision.

  29. A recent Danish investigation shows employees’ preference for working with individuals of the same ethnicity (Rockwool Foundation Research Unit 2011).

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Acknowledgements

Support from the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation for the funding of this project through a grant provided to the Danish Graduate School for Integration, Production and Welfare is gratefully acknowledged. I am in particular thankful to three anonymous referees, Sylvie Blasco, Herbert Brücker, Anna Piil Damm, Vibeke Jakobsen, Chantal Pohl Nielsen, Giovanni Peri, Dario Pozzoli, Marianne Simonsen, and Lars Skipper for the valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks, moreover, go to participants at seminars at Aarhus University and SFI, the NORFACE migration network 2011 conference in London, and the ESRA 4th Conference in Lausanne.

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  1. Department of Economics and Business, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Cédric Gorinas

  2. The Danish National Centre for Social Research (SFI), Herluf Trolles gade 11, 1052, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Cédric Gorinas

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Correspondence to Cédric Gorinas.

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Responsible editor: Klaus F. Zimmermann

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Gorinas, C. Ethnic identity, majority norms, and the native–immigrant employment gap. J Popul Econ 27, 225–250 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-012-0463-3

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