The Times They Are A‐Changin’: Declining Immigrant Employment Opportunities in Scandinavia1

This article compares and contrasts male immigrant labor market experiences in Sweden and Denmark during the period 1985–1995. Using register‐based panel data sets from Sweden and Denmark, a picture of the employment assimilation process of immigrants from Norway, Poland, and Turkey is presented. The comparative approach shows that immigrants in Sweden and Denmark experienced similar declines in employment prospects between 1985 and 1995 despite quite different developments of aggregate labor market conditions. A possible explanation is that the changing organizational structure – toward more flexible work organization – has resulted in a decrease in the attractiveness of immigrant employees due to the increasing importance of country‐specific skills and informal human capital.     

Source country culture and labor market assimilation of immigrant women in Sweden: evidence from longitudinal data

This paper analyzes the role of source country culture on gender roles for labor market assimilation of immigrant women in Sweden. Sweden ranks as one of the world’s most gender-equal countries and at the same time a recipient of many immigrants from countries with more traditional views on gender roles and gender equality. I find that the labor force participation of immigrant women in Sweden is related to their source country culture, in the sense that women from countries where women’s labor market participation is low (high) also have low (high) participation in the Swedish labor market. However, all immigrant women assimilate towards, but do not reach parity with, the participation rate of native women, and the difference between women from high- and low-participation countries diminishes with length of residence in Sweden. This indicates that source country culture on gender roles does not have a persistent effect on immigrant women’s labor market participation in Sweden. Furthermore, the results highlight the importance of taking into account unobservable time-constant individual and source country factors when estimating the relationship between source country culture and immigrants’ labor market outcomes. Neglecting to control for these factors could lead researchers to misrepresent the rate of assimilation and overstate the effect of source country culture.     

Ethnic Enclaves,Networks and Self‐Employment among Middle Eastern Immigrants in Sweden

The proportion of immigrants from countries in the Middle East living in Sweden has increased since the 1970s, and it is a well‐known fact that immigrants from the Middle East suffer from low earnings and high rates of unemployment on the Swedish labour market. There are often great hopes that self‐employment will enable immigrants to improve their labour market situation. Further, in Sweden as in many other countries, the question of whether the existence of ethnic enclaves are good or bad for immigrants’ earnings and employment opportunities has also been widely debated. This paper presents a study of the extent to which Middle Eastern ethnic enclaves and networks in Sweden enhance or hinder immigrants’ self‐employment. The results show that the presence of ethnic enclaves increases the propensity for self‐employment. Thus, immigrants in ethnic enclaves provide their co‐ethnics with goods and services that Swedish natives are not able to provide. The results also show that ethnic networks seem to be an obstacle to immigrant self‐employment. One explanation is that an increase in network size implies increased competition for customers among self‐employed immigrants. The question of whether ethnic enclaves are good or bad for the integration of immigrants into the labour market has been widely debated. The results of this paper provide us with information about the integration puzzle. Ethnic enclaves seem to enhance self‐employment propensities among Middle Eastern immigrants in Sweden.     

The economic role of immigrant wives in Hong Kong

The objectives of this study were to compare the employment pattern of immigrant wives with native-born wives in Hong Kong, to examine the independent influences of sociodemographic characteristics and the assimilation experience on employment behavior of immigrant wives, and to establish the extent to which immigrant wives' employment is affected by social and demographic factors and conditioned on the assimilation strategy adopted by their families. Data of the 1986 census were used, based on a 1% sample of currently married women 20-44 years old. 5478 women were identified by place of birth and length of residence in Hong Kong and 3214 native-born women were used as a comparison group. Of this 5478, 2018 women were earlier immigrants from mainland China who had lived in Hong Kong for more than 5 years and 246 were recent Chinese immigrants. Labor force participation of the native born was 51.87% and that of China born was 48.89%, however, early immigrants had a rate of participation of 46.84% and recent immigrants had 66.81%. The labor market incorporation of early immigrants showed that 10.28% were self-employed and 13.13% were outworkers, which was in contrast to the native-born, who were more represented in employee occupations. 79.12% of native-born were wage employees compared 69.58% of early immigrants. Immigrant wives were disadvantaged regarding education and vocational training; their wages were substantially lower than those of the native-born women. Immigrant families had an average of 2.2 children, compared to 1.7 for natives. Logit analysis showed that age had a negative relationship with labor force participation, while education had a positive effect, and recent immigrants had a significantly higher labor force participation. Multinominal logit analysis found that more educated and better skilled women were significantly more likely to engage in wage employment. Children in the family restricted women's participation in wage employment.     

Self-employed immigrants and their employees: evidence from Swedish employer-employee data

We present a study of the employees of self-employed immigrants with unincorporated firms in Sweden using matched employer-employee data from 2014. Non-European immigrants are more likely than natives to have employees in their firms. Furthermore, immigrants, especially non-European immigrants, are more likely than natives to employ immigrants in their firms, and non-European immigrants are most likely to employ recently arrived non-European immigrants with low education in their firms. Males are more likely than females to have employees in their firms, but self-employed females are more likely than self-employed males to have female employees. This is the case for all immigrant groups as well as for natives. We conclude that self-employed immigrants play a role in the labour market integration process since they create employment opportunities for immigrant groups that have difficulty entering the labour market.

     

Laboring Underground: The Employment Patterns of Hispanic Immigrant Men in Durham, NC

The dramatic increase in Hispanic immigration to the United States in recent decades has been coterminous with fundamental shifts in the labor market towards heightened flexibility, instability, and informality. As a result, the low-wage labor market is increasingly occupied by Hispanic immigrants, many of whom are undocumented. While numerous studies examine the implications for natives' employment prospects, our understanding of low-wage immigrants themselves remains underdeveloped. Drawing on original data collected in Durham, North Carolina, this article provides a more holistic account of immigrant Hispanic's labor market experiences, examining not only wages but also employment instability and benefit coverage. The analysis evaluates the role of human capital and immigration characteristics, including legal status, in shaping compensation outcomes, as well as the influence of other employment characteristics. Findings highlight the salience of nonstandard work arrangements such as subcontracting and informal employment to the labor market experiences of immigrant Hispanic men, and describe the constellation of risk factors that powerfully bound immigrant employment outcomes. Keywords: Hispanic; immigration; wages; low-wage labor market; employment relations.     

Stepping from Illegality to Legality and Advancing towards Integration: The Case of Immigrants in Greece1

This paper highlights how the social and economic situation of immigrants changes after their formal legalization and discusses what they nave to go through for their complete integration. Legalization can hardly solve the problem of immigrant employment, nor can it pull all immigrants out of the underground labor market and integrate them into the Greek economy ana society. The process towards complete integration is painful and involves a series of successive phases of various durations. During this period, apart from economic conditions, various institutional and cultural factors can hinder or delay integration. With respect to economic integration, immigrants seem to fare rather well. Their official unemployment rate is only slightly higher than the Greek unemployment rate, the two rates converging over time. This suggests increasing relative opportunities for immigrant employment, precarious or stable as it might be. Immigrant jobs come as a result of their flexible adjustment to the needs of the labor market ‐ official or underground ‐ compared to the inflexibility in the supply of Greek workers, due to labor mismatches and relatively high reservation wages. Wages of immigrants are generally lower, but are approaching the wages of their Greek counterparts. Educated immigrants much more than educated Greeks are forced by the circumstances to exercise jobs not measuring up to their qualifications.     

Do Pathways Matter? Linking Early Immigrant Employment Sequences and Later Economic Outcomes: Evidence from Canada

Employment mobility is a critical feature of immigrants’ settlement experiences and longer‐term life chances. While current research typically treats mobility as a singular outcome, becoming established in a new labor market is a complex process that can entail multiple transitions in and out of employment and between different types of jobs over time. This article advances understanding of the process of immigrant labor market incorporation by engaging with its potentially multidimensional, cumulative, and path‐dependent aspects. Using data from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, I test the impact of an empirically derived typology of month‐by‐month immigrant employment trajectories on the odds of occupational degradation and on weekly wages. I find that the pathways immigrants take through the labor market in their first four years constitute a distinct and important mechanism shaping later employment outcomes.     

The quantity and quality of new immigrants to the US

Since immigration to the US began to accelerate in the 1970s, economic and social policy issues surrounding immigration frequently raise concern and generate debate. These policy debates often aim to mitigate the costs of immigration and augment the benefits. Key to this is understanding the characteristics of immigrants, especially those related to economic success and integration. A commonly accepted finding in the economic literature regards the declining economic “quality” of successive immigrant cohorts as measured by differences in entry wages across cohorts. In this paper, I refine our understanding of immigrant cohort quality. I show that increasing competition in the labor market among immigrants can explain a significant portion of declining “quality”. This result suggests that labor market interactions are as important to immigrant economic integration as their inherent “quality”.     

Exploring Social and Geographical Trajectories of Latin Americans in Sweden

Close to 20 percent of the Swedish population are of immigrant origin; one in eight is foreign‐born. About 45 percent of all immigrants originate from outside Europe and most of these have entered the country as refugees or relatives of refugees. Issues connected to immigration, including the number of immigrants, settlement patterns and level of social integration of ethnic minorities, have been much discussed in Sweden in recent decades. This paper focuses on the integration of Latin American immigrants in Sweden. It compares the level of integration – measured as educational achievement, labour market participation, income and housing – experienced by first and second generation migrants. I use register information allowing me to include all 1^st and 2^nd generation Latin Americans that have lived in Sweden between 1990 and 2006 (in total 127,000 individuals). Data are longitudinal, which means that individuals can be followed over time. I make use of the longitudinal material in order to study changes in residential patterns and in attempts to explain educational and employment outcomes for second generation Latin Americans. The general conclusion of the paper is that in terms of integration, LAC immigrants have an intermediate position compared to other immigrant categories; they are often better off than people from Africa and the Middle East but clearly below the level experienced by some other migrants, especially those from Western Europe. This cannot be explained by level of education. The average level of education is high for first generation immigrants from LA countries. For many people, the level of labour market participation and income increase over time but one important result of this analysis is that second generation Latin Americans seem to do less well in Sweden compared to many other second generation migrants.     

The Changing Effect of Education on Asian Immigrants' Self‐Employment

This article examines whether the post‐1990 Asian immigrants have a lower likelihood of being self‐employed than their counterparts in the 1970s–1980s immigrant cohort. More important, it investigates whether the relationship between education and self‐employment changes across the two immigrant cohorts. The authors framed these questions in the context of the changing U.S. immigration policy and used the ethnic and class recourses thesis and the thesis emphasizing immigrants' disadvantages for employment in the general labor market as two major theoretical orientations. Data come from the 1990 Census 5 percent sample and the 2007–2011 American Community Survey 5‐year sample. Findings from logistic regression analyses show that the second‐cohort Chinese, Asian Indian, and Korean immigrants have a lower likelihood of being self‐employed than their first‐cohort counterparts. Findings further show that education has a positive effect on the likelihood of self‐employment for the first‐cohort Asian Indian, Filipino, and Korean immigrants. For the second cohort, education has a negative effect on the likelihood of self‐employment for all Asian immigrant groups. The authors discussed the implications of these findings and concluded that well‐educated second‐cohort Asian immigrants face fewer disadvantages in finding their occupations commensurate with their educational level in the general labor market than their first‐cohort counterparts.     

The effect of ethnic identity on the employment of immigrants

This study evaluates the effect of ethnic identity on the employment level of immigrants in Greece. Treating ethnic identity as a composite of key cultural elements the estimations suggest that employment is positively associated with assimilation and integration and negatively associated with separation and marginalization. In all cases, assimilation provides the highest employment returns, whilst, marginalization provides the highest employment losses. This study adds to the literature by setting up hypotheses, and directly measuring immigrants’ ethnic identity commitments. The current results have potentially important implications for post-immigration policies indicating that assimilation and integration policies may be beneficial in terms of labor market outcomes.     

Cultural Influences on Immigrant Women's Labor Force Participation: The Arab‐American Case1

Research on the economic activity of immigrant women has flourished in recent years. The current study extends this literature to examine the labor force activity of Arab‐American women, a group whose labor market experiences provide an exception to hitherto accepted theoretical explanations. The employment rates of Arab immigrant women rank among the lowest of any immigrant group, while the rates of native‐born Arab‐American women resemble those of U.S.‐born white women. This study examines potential explanations for these differences using data from the U.S. Census and a national mail survey of Arab‐American women. Contrary to findings for other immigrant groups, differences among Arab‐American women cannot be explained by their human capital characteristics or family resources, but are almost entirely due to traditional cultural norms that prioritize women's family obligations over their economic activity, and to ethnic and religious social networks that encourage the maintenance of traditional gender roles. This study concludes by underscoring the need for additional research on the impact of culture on immigrant women's employment.     

The Second Generation in Europe

The study of integration processes has now reached a crucial stage in most Western European countries with the emergence of the second generation. The oldest children born to postwar immigrants on European soil have recently entered the job market, and we can now investigate their performance in both education and employment. This opens a unique opportunity to compare the situations of second generation migrants across countries. Ostensibly the children all have the same starting position, being born in the country of settlement. The intriguing question is how differences between immigrant groups, and also differences in national contexts, work to the benefit or detriment of the second generation. We discuss the first issue briefly, confining ourselves here to Turkish and Moroccan immigrants. In addressing the issue of national contexts, we focus primarily on policies and practices rather than on broad‐reaching national integration models. We examine in detail the integration process itself in the context of vital institutional arrangements such as the education system and the mechanisms for transition to the labor market. How do such arrangements differ between countries, and how do they affect the outcomes for the second generation?     

Immigrants in the Old‐Age Pension System: The Case of Sweden

The article investigates incomes and especially state pensions 2008 among elderly immigrants who arrived in Sweden before 1970. At age 70 and above, the level of state old‐age pension for immigrant men was nearly the same and for immigrant women somewhat higher than for natives with similar characteristics. At age 65–66 the state pension was lower for immigrants than for their native counterparts. The differences in pensions for immigrants of different ages are probably due to changed rules in the Swedish state old‐age pension system from 2003. The new rules have hit different age groups in different ways. The gaps are partially levelled out when other incomes are included. The extent to which levelling occurs varies greatly between different immigrant groups. For immigrants who have arrived during the last decades, the future state old‐age pension outcomes are expected to be worse.

Policy Implications

• The Swedish Pensions Agency should set up a register of pensions from abroad. This will tell us to what extent old‐age pensions from the home country compensate for low old‐age pensions from the Swedish system.
• Better integration on the labour market is a powerful measure for reducing the risk of future low pensions among immigrants. This is a challenge for Swedish integration policy.
• To what extent can other parts of the Swedish welfare system in the future compensate individuals with low old‐age pensions?

     

Institutional Structure and Immigrant Integration: A Comparative Study of Immigrants' Labor Market Attainment in Canada and Israel1

The present study focuses on the incorporation of immigrants from the former Soviet Union in two receiving societies, Israel and Canada, during the first half of the 1990s. Both countries conducted national censuses in 1995 (Israel) and 1996 (Canada), making it possible to identify a large enough sample of immigrants and provide information on their demographic characteristics and their labor market activity. While both Canada and Israel are immigrant societies, their institutional contexts of immigrant reception differ considerably. Israel maintains no economic selection of the Jewish immigrants and provides substantial support for newcomers, who are viewed as a returning Diaspora. Canada employs multiple criteria for selecting immigrants, and the immigrants' social and economic incorporation is patterned primarily by market forces. The analysis first examines the characteristics of immigrants who arrived in the two countries and evaluates the extent of selectivity. Consistent with our hypotheses, Russian immigrants to Canada were more immediately suitable for the labor market, but experienced greater difficulty finding and maintaining employment. Nevertheless, immigrants to Canada attained higher‐status occupations and higher earnings than their compatriots in Israel did, although the Israeli labor market was more likely to reward their investments in education.     

Economic achievement of immigrants in Japan: Examining the role of country-of-origin and host-country-specific human capital in an inflexible labor market

The economic integration of immigrants is a salient social issue in Japan. Although the US immigration literature has stressed the importance of host-country-specific human capital over country-of-origin human capital for immigrants, previous studies in Japan have shown mixed results about the effects of these two types of human capital on the economic integration of immigrants. The mixed results might be because previous studies focused on only specific immigrant groups (with regard to nationalities, cities, and visa status), human capital variables, and dimensions of economic achievements in the Japanese labor market. The segmented nature of the Japanese labor market structure and immigration policies create different pathways to “economic achievements” of immigrants depending on the dimension of “economic achievements” studied. By conducting a nationally representative social survey of Japanese immigrants, we examined the association between the two types of human capital (i.e., country-of-origin and host-country-specific) and the three indicators of labor market success: employment status and firm size, occupational status, and income. Our results indicate that host-country-specific human capital in the form of higher education and language proficiency is important for all three indicators of economic achievement in Japan, while country-of-origin human capital in the form of higher education and vocational skills is transferable to some extent. Our results suggest that the significance of human capital in immigrants' economic success is determined not only by the structure of the labor market but also by immigration policies.     

‘Survival Employment’: Gender and Deskilling among African Immigrants in Canada

Recent research points to a growing gap between immigrant and native‐born outcomes in the Canadian labour market at the same time as selection processes emphasize recruiting highly educated newcomers. Drawing on interviews with well‐educated men and women who migrated from countries in sub‐Saharan Africa, this paper explores the gendered processes that produce weak economic integration in Canada. Three‐quarters of research participants experienced downward occupational mobility, with the majority employed in low‐skilled, low‐wage, insecure forms of “survival employment”. In a gendered labour market, where common demands for “Canadian experience”, “Canadian credentials” and “Canadian accents” were uneven across different sectors of the labour market, women faced particular difficulties finding “survival employment”; in the long run, however, women’s greater investment in additional post‐secondary education within Canada placed them in a somewhat better position than men. The policy implications of this study are fourfold: first, we raise questions about the efficacy of Canadian immigration policies that prioritize the recruitment of well‐educated immigrants without addressing the multiple barriers that result in deskillling; second, we question government policies and settlement practices that undermine more equitable economic integration of immigrants; third, we address the importance of tackling the “everyday racism” that immigrants experience in the Canadian labour market; and finally, we suggest the need to re‐think narrowly defined notions of economic integration in light of the gendered nature of contemporary labour markets, and immigrants’ own definitions of what constitutes meaningful integration.     

Identity Crisis and Integration: The Divergent Attitudes of Iranian Immigrant Men and Women towards Integration into Swedish Society

The main objective of this article is to show the divergent attitudes of Iranian immigrant men and women towards integration into Swedish society.
As several studies have shown, Iranian women have a better chance of adjusting to Western societies than Iranian men. This article discusses the notion that one of the important reasons for this is the determining role of professional position in the life of Iranian immigrants in Sweden.
As a result of the improvement in their work status and therefore an improvement in their social position, Iranian immigrant women now have greater possibilities than Iranian immigrant men to overcome the identity crisis which ordinarily makes ethnic groups and cultural minorities lose their sense of fitting into their new social reality.
This results, in its turn, in the women having a positive attitude towards the new society and increases the extent of their desire for integration into the new society.