Regional ethnic concentrations and ethnic discrimination in hiring: field experimental evidence from the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

As a result of global migration processes, Western societies have become increasingly ethnically diverse. Yet not all regions are equally affected by these immigration processes. The current study investigates whether and how ethnic discrimination in hiring is linked with the regional concentration of ethnic minorities, using original data of a large-scale field experiment on ethnic discrimination (N = 4.211) and detailed regional data in the Netherlands. The results show that greater exposure to ethnic minorities in a region is not clearly related with decreased (indicative of positive intergroup contact) or increased (indicative of group threat) ethnic discrimination in hiring. Rather, the findings provide more support for the familiarisation hypothesis: regional concentrations of ethnic minorities are positively associated with ethnic discrimination, however, this effect levels off and turns negative at high concentrations of ethnic minorities. This result holds particularly for minorities with non-Western migrant origins and minorities with Muslim migrant origins.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic discrimination
• familiarization hypothesis
• field experiment
• group threat theory
• intergroup contact theory
• outgroup size

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 NUTS3-regions are standardised with regard to population size and consist of approximately 150,000 to 800,000 inhabitants (Eurostat 2018). As such, these regions are smaller than provinces (also known as NUTS2-regions) but larger than municipalities in the Netherlands.

2 As pointed out by one of the reviewers, Blalock (1967) proposed two mechanisms as to why outgroup size would be linked with ethnic discrimination – that is, the fear of competition-mechanism and the fear of power threat-mechanism. Only combined these two mechanisms would produce a linear positive effect between outgroup size and discrimination. In the current article, however, I am not able to disentangle these (or other) underlying mechanisms directly e.g., because I lack detailed employer-data. Theoretically, however, it could be true that employers experience both fear of competition between job seekers of the ingroup and those of the outgroup and experience more political/cultural group threat (i.e., threats to their group’s ways of life). Therefore, I think it is reasonable to assume a positive association between outgroup size and discrimination. This hypothesis is also consistent with previous research investigating the role of outgroup size on interethnic relations (Kaufmann and Goodwin 2018; Pottie-Sherman and Wilkes 2017; Quillian 1996; Savelkoul et al. 2011).

3 Importantly, consultations with real HR managers indicated that these ethnicity-signals are not particularly noticeable or considered to be highly unrealistic.

4 In a way, I analyse a (very large) subset of the GEMM-experiment as I excluded all observations with the headscarf-manipulation. I did so because the headscarf-manipulation probably has a strong effect on callback rates and is not orthogonal (please see also Lancee et al. 2019a, 2019b). Therefore, the percentage of job applicants with e.g., Moroccan and Turkish origins is lower than 12.5, as indicated in the technical report/codebook.

5 These definitions of Statistics Netherlands have been criticised (see also Bovens et al. 2016; Jennissen et al. 2018). However, it is important to note that these definitions are still regularly used in policy and public debates in the Netherlands. Therefore, it seems highly plausible to assume that employers are aware of and might act upon these regional statistics.

6 This region is one of the least populated areas of the Netherlands (approximately 35,000 inhabitants in 2015) and one with relatively few employment opportunities (total unemployment rate is 8 percent; youth unemployment rate is 13.1 percent).

7 Extended models are presented in Table S7 to S10 in the Supplemental Appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Horizon 2020 Framework Programme: [Grant Number H2020 649255].