published in: Swedish Economic Policy Review, 2000, 7 (2), 11-53
As in the U.S. and Canada, migration is a controversial issue in Europe. This paper explores the possibility that immigration policy may affect the labor market assimilation of immigrants and hence natives’ sentiments towards immigrants. It first reviews the assimilation literature in economics and the policy approaches taken in Europe and among the traditional immigration countries. Second, a new analysis of individual data from the OECD countries studies sentiments concerning immigration and the determinants of these sentiments is presented. Natives in countries that receive predominantly refugee migrants are relatively more concerned with immigrations impact on social issues such as crime than on the employment effects. Natives in countries with mostly economic migrants are relatively more concerned about loosing jobs to immigrants. However, the results also suggest that natives may view immigration more favorably if immigrants are selected according to the needs of the labor markets. Possible benefits of such a policy are that it may moderate social tensions in regards to migration and contribute to a better economic performance of the respective countries.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.