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ABSTRACT
The cross-national investigation of immigrant subjective well-being remains an understudied field, especially with regard to the link between institutional settings and individual outcomes. We approach this gap by investigating the role of policies regulating immigrant integration for life satisfaction. Immigrants’ status and life chances depend on the inclusiveness of integration policies in forms of rights given to immigrants in the receiving country. These policies differentiate immigrants from natives: exclusionary integration policies understood as social boundaries should result in lower levels of well-being. We also consider an alternative policy type (i.e. multicultural policies) as well as symbolic boundaries (i.e. natives’ attitudes towards immigrants). We distinguish between national citizens, EU citizens and third-country nationals (TCNs). Results based on up to five rounds of data from the European Social Survey indicate that in terms of life satisfaction only TCNs profit from inclusive integration policies. Furthermore, while political multiculturalism does not play a role, we find that EU migrants appear more susceptible to the negative impact of natives’ anti-immigrant attitudes. Policy-making is more important for TCNs, while a migrant-friendly opinion climate is more important for EU migrants. These findings are robust to controlling for unobserved time-constant country heterogeneity via country fixed effects.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Throughout the article we mean ‘immigrant’ to include both first and second generation immigrants for reasons of readability.
2 Livability theory (Veenhoven Citation2014) makes similar arguments, especially with regard to the assumption that certain needs are universal and that the institutional framework is assumed to influence well-being to a great extent.
3 One might also argue for using immigrant group size as a control variable. However, segmented assimilation theory provides arguments that a large co-ethnic group may be beneficial, whereas there is no clear rationale how immigrant group size per se may be important. Therefore, one would need to calculate a large number of different immigrant group sizes in each country, and this would not address the issue of the respective social position of the respective immigrant group and the potential divergent mechanisms at work for the native group. Analyses concerning the presence of many/few immigrants require theorising beyond the scope of our article, since this cannot be feasibly and convincingly done without dealing with the diversity of immigrant groups.
4 http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/about/ (last accessed 09-05-2017).
5 http://www.queensu.ca/mcp/ (last accessed 09-05-2017).
6 The 25 countries are those that participated at least once during ESS rounds 5–7 and that have a MIPEX index for the corresponding field phase years. An overview over all participant countries in the ESS is available at http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/data/country_index.html (last accessed 09-05-2017). Because some countries are surveyed more often than others, the sample is not balanced on that analytical level, which is commonly the case in cross-national longitudinal research. This is remedied by the multilevel methodology we perform here.
7 The items used include the following: ‘Allow many/few immigrants of same race/ethnic group as majority’, ‘Allow many/few immigrants of different race/ethnic group from majority’, ‘Allow many/few immigrants from poorer countries outside Europe’, ‘Immigration bad or good for country’s economy’, ‘Country’s cultural life undermined or enriched by immigrants’, ‘Immigrants make country worse or better place to live’. These variables have been fielded in each of the ESS waves and have been used in a number of studies on anti-immigrant attitudes.
8 www.mipex.eu (last accessed 09-05-2017).
9 Not that while this variable is somewhat skewed (see ), the residuals from our models are essentially symmetric, indicating that the corresponding regression assumption is not violated.
10 We are interested in the processes generating life satisfaction for immigrants and natives and not in the gaps between immigrants and natives. We therefore do not run a joint model since that model could be based only on predictors that apply to both types of respondents, limiting our analytical possibilities while complicating the model due to numerous additional two- and three-way interaction terms this would necessitate.
11 [(0.002+0.014)*47]
12 A model controlling only for age, gender, generation and GDP (not shown) reveals a MIPEX effect for non-EU migrants with a 1.02 point difference between high- and low-MIPEX countries. This suggests that material differences (e.g., in labour market integration of the immigrant populations) only explain about one-quarter of the relationship between integration policies and life satisfaction, while most of the correlation can be seen as an outcome of bright versus blurred boundaries between natives and these immigrants.
13 Note that these findings remain virtually the same when we use only those 16 countries in which the MCP index is available, with the exception of the direct effect of Native Anti-Immigrant Attitudes turning significant with the reduced country base.