Fare differently, feel differently: mental well-being of UK-born and foreign-born working men during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Despite numerous studies that have demonstrated widening social inequalities during the COVID-19 pandemic, we do not yet see research on whether the surge in social inequalities would also have unequal consequences for people’s subjective experience. By linking the countrywide Understanding Society COVID-19 longitudinal survey with the latest wave of the main-stage survey, we examine whether and how the psychological costs of economic lockdowns are unevenly distributed between UK-born and foreign-born working men. Findings provide direct evidence for a widening gap in mental well-being resulting from the widening socioeconomic gap between immigrant and native-born working men, during COVID-19 lockdowns. Employment disruption does not necessarily hurt mental well-being of the native-born, as long as their income is protected. For immigrants, however, work hour reduction is generally accompanied by psychological costs, with greater mental suffering among immigrant men who experience work hour reduction without income protection – particularly in the extreme scenario of reduction to no work hours.

KEYWORDS:

• distress
• COVID-19 lockdown
• foreign-born
• UK-born
• working men
• mental well-being

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There is an assumption about stable work hours between Wave 9 and January/February 2020, if one’s employment status does not change. Although, admittedly, exceptions do exist, we consider that the existence of those exceptions does not bias our model estimations. This is first because they are in very small number, and second, more importantly, also because there is no evidence to show that those exceptions are unevenly distributed between native-born and immigrant working men.

2 This group also includes respondents who reported reduced work hours without income reduction, e.g. hours were reduced because working from home saved time on commute.

3 Some employers have gone beyond those funds, paying their employees their full salaries.

4 We refrain from further distinguishing this group between ‘with' and ‘without income protection', because (1) the sample size of this group is very small, particularly for the immigrant subgroup (see Table A1 in the Appendix) and (2) income loss is not the main reason for one’s worsening mental state, particularly among immigrants (Shen and Kogan 2020).

5 The relevant measurement in the longitudinal wave (Wave 9) is slightly different from those in the COVID-19 surveys, by asking ‘pensionable age' (65+) rather than 70+. However, this inconsistency makes little differences in our analyses, particularly because this variable has no significant effect on SWB, as shown in the following results section.

6 According to APS (Annual Population Survey) estimations, about 17% of men, aged 16 to 84 (the age range covered by the sample of male workers in our longitudinal data) are foreign born, with a confidence interval of [16%, 18%], and this proportion remains stable from 2016 to 2018 (with only negligible changes). In our sample, by contrast, 12% of men in the same age range are foreign born. As shown in Table A1, this lower percentage of the subsample of immigrant men is mainly because of a big drop in the number of immigrant respondents in the second wave of the COVID-19 survey in May. Considering those undergoing life challenges are more likely to drop out of the survey, we think it is reasonable to assume that those dropped immigrants are likely to be the most disadvantaged. Thus, the under-representative immigrant sample used in our analysis does not change our argument at all. If anything, the GHQ gap between native-born and foreign-born working men might be even larger than that presented in our analysis. Moreover, although APS estimations show a stable composition between native-born and foreign-born working men in the UK from 2016 to 2018, work-related immigration to the UK has been declining since 2016 (Office for National Statistics 2020), and its impact on the population composition might have started to become visible only recently. This might also contribute to a lower percentage of immigrant working men in our longitudinal data spanning from 2017 through 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jing Shen

Jing Shen is currently employed as a researcher and project director at Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) affiliated to the University of Mannheim. Her research interests include integration of immigrants in both socioeconomic and subjective dimensions, labour market inequality, and social capital. She obtained her PhD from the University of Toronto.

David Bartram

David Bartram is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Leicester. His research focuses on subjective well-being and international migration – for example, investigating the idea that migration to a wealthy country is advantageous to the migrants themselves. He has held a grant (with colleagues at Leicester) from the UK Economic and Social Research Council to investigate the ‘UK citizenship process’, as well as awards from Leverhulme and the Nuffield Foundation. He has published two books: Key Concepts in Migration (SAGE, with Maritsa Poros and Pierre Monforte) and International Labor Migration: Foreign Workers and Public Policy (Palgrave). He is co-editor of the Journal of Happiness Studies and President of RC31, the section on the Sociology of Migration of the International Sociological Association. He holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a BA from Kenyon College.