Immigration and the cost of ethnic subordination: the case of Israeli society

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on earnings disadvantages experienced by three ethnic groups of Jewish immigrants in Israel. Data were obtained from the 2011 Income Survey gathered by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. The findings reveal that when compared to Israeli-born, all ethnic groups are disadvantaged in earnings attainment in the first generation. The earnings disadvantages of immigrants as compared to Israeli-born decrease with the passage of time and become negligible in the second generation. To disentangle the impact on earnings penalty of ethnic origin from that of immigrant status, a procedure for decomposing mean differences between groups is introduced. The analysis reveals that earnings disadvantage among Ashkenazim and Soviet immigrants can be attributed to immigrant status but not to ethnicity. By contrast, earnings penalties among Sephardim immigrants can be attributed to both ethnicity and immigrant status. The implications of the long-lasting effect of ethnicity versus the short-term effect of immigrant status are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Earnings inequality
• labour market
• ethnicity
• immigration
• Israel
• stratification

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. However, it is reasonable to expect that Jewish immigrants arriving from highly developed countries (with egalitarian economic systems) are more likely to be positively selected than immigrants arriving from less developed economies.

2. It is important to note that about 20% of the Israeli population is composed of Arabs who are citizens of the state. Israeli Arabs can be viewed as Indigenous populations that are not included in the present study.

3. It should be noted that at the same time about 100, 000 Ethiopian immigrants also arrived in Israel. More specifically, in 1991, Israel actively rescued more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews (following a rescue operation of 18,000 Ethiopian Jews in the mid-1980s) from refugee camps in Ethiopia and Sudan. Immigration from Ethiopia has continued thereafter. In addition to immigrants arriving under the auspices of the Law of Return, Israel has become an important destination for non-Jewish labour migrants. Most labour migrants arrive from South East Asia (Thailand, Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka and China) to work in agriculture, construction and long-term care (Raijman and Kemp, 2010). Other global migrants come from African and Latin American countries. Unfortunately, because we cannot identify Ethiopians in the Income Surveys and due to a lack of comparable information for labour migrants in Israel, we were not able to include these groups in the analysis.

4. We did not include language proficiency because, unfortunately, the Israeli Income Surveys do not collect this information.

5. Year of immigration a is a grouped variable in the Income Survey. Therefore we computed middle points for each interval to calculate years since migration.

6. The index is computed as a linear combination of average earnings and average education of employees in each occupation (at the two-digit classification level) estimated through principal component factor analysis procedure. High scores indicate occupations of high socio-economic position.

7. The Income Survey does not provide information on ancestry for those born in Israel to Israeli-born parents.

8. It is worth noting that we examined whether the impact of ‘years since migration’ (YSM) and the impact of ‘academic education’ on earnings vary across groups (by adding interaction terms between immigrant group and YSM and immigrant group and academic education in the regression equations). The data reveal no significant differences between groups in the effect of YSM and no significant effect for the interaction between immigrant group and academic education, with only one exception. Women who immigrated from the FSU are less successful than other immigrant groups in converting their academic education to earnings.