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We examine the penalties faced by veiled and unveiled Muslim women when applying for jobs in three European labour markets: Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. We rely on recent literature comparing public opposition towards Muslims in general and opposition to Muslims’ religious practices, such as the wearing of the hijab. Based on a cross-nationally harmonized field experiment on hiring discrimination, we use two different signals of Muslimness (volunteering activities in a Muslim community centre or wearing the Muslim headscarf) to identify whether employers discriminate against Muslims as a group or against Muslims adhering to specific Muslim practices—in this case, wearing the headscarf. We present robust evidence that veiled Muslim women are discriminated against in Germany and the Netherlands, but only when applying for jobs that require a high level of customer contact. In Spain, however, the level of discrimination against veiled Muslim women is much smaller than in the other two countries. The high level of discrimination we found in the Netherlands, where the institutional context has traditionally been open to the accommodation of religious minority rights, is particularly surprising and points to the possibly stigmatizing effect of recent policies geared towards the cultural assimilation of immigrants.

Relationships with parents have been identified as a major factor in shaping adolescents’ well-being and cognitive development. Compared to adolescents in native families, immigrant children face multiple stressors associated with international migration that may cause the relationship with their parents to be more conflictive or emotionally distant. In this paper, we compare the levels of mother–child conflict and emotional intimacy among Latino immigrant and Spanish native families living in Spain. Our analysis shows that Latino adolescents do not describe the relationship with their mothers as more conflictive than natives do. However, they report more emotional distance with their mothers than native adolescents. This differential with natives cannot be fully attributed to migration-related factors like physical separation from parents due to staggered family migration, to the lower life satisfaction of Latino mothers’ in their new destination or to an acculturation gap between mother and child. However, the fact that immigrant mothers spend less time doing activities with their children, probably due to their harder working conditions, explains part of the differential in emotional intimacy with native families. Finally, our analyses clearly establish an equally negative relationship between conflict and emotional intimacy for both native and Latino immigrant families.

This is the first harmonised correspondence study on the recruitment behaviour of employers in the US and in Spain. By comparing the call-back rates of Latino minority and majority group applicants, we measure the labour market discrimination that Latinos experience in these two national contexts. Due to their proximity in terms of culture and language, Latinos are expected to experience less discrimination in Spain than in the US. This is supported by our findings, as the level of discrimination against Latinos in the US is high and statistically significant, while we find no evidence of statistically significant discrimination against Latinos in Spain. In line with research on the intersection between ethnicity and gender in stereotyping, we find gender differences regarding discrimination in both countries, though in opposite directions. While Latino males are more discriminated than Latino females in the US, Latino females experience more discrimination than their male counterparts in Spain, who are not treated differently from Spanish native men. Our results indicate that ethnic group stereotypes are country-specific and different for males and females of the same ethnicity. Moreover, we find partial evidence that ethnic group stereotypes can be counteracted when favourable information on warmth and competence is provided.

This article examines the labour market outcomes of immigrants in Spain, a country that has become a migration destination only since the end of the 1990s. Differentiating between first and second generation of immigrant descent, we compare the labour market involvement of the main ethnic groups with the majority group. One particular focus is to understand which minorities have been hit the hardest by the Great Recession. To this end, we use data from the European Union Labour Force Survey for the years 2008 and 2014, and more specifically the two ad-hoc modules on the labour market situation of migrants. Analysing men and women separately, we run a set of multivariate logistic regression models to control for compositional differences. In this way, we examine ethnic gaps not only in labour force participation but also in the degree of underutilisation of human capital, measured as workers’ level of over-education as well as the incidence of involuntary part-time employment. Our results show that while most origin groups do not show significantly lower employment participation than the majority group, the employment quality of immigrants in terms of involuntary part-time work and over-education is substantially worse, especially since the crisis.

This article examines the labour market outcomes of immigrants in Spain, a country that has become a migration destination only since the end of the 1990s. Differentiating between first and second generation of immigrant descent, we compare the labour market involvement of the main ethnic groups with the majority group. One particular focus is to understand which minorities have been hit the hardest by the Great Recession. To this end, we use data from the European Union Labour Force Survey for the years 2008 and 2014, and more specifically the two ad-hoc modules on the labour market situation of migrants. Analysing men and women separately, we run a set of multivariate logistic regression models to control for compositional differences. In this way, we examine ethnic gaps not only in labour force participation but also in the degree of underutilisation of human capital, measured as workers’ level of over-education as well as the incidence of involuntary part-time employment. Our results show that while most origin groups do not show significantly lower employment participation than the majority group, the employment quality of immigrants in terms of involuntary part-time work and over-education is substantially worse, especially since the crisis.

Migration scholars often assume migrants are the most ambitious and motivated individuals of their home countries. Yet research on motivational selectivity is scant. We present the first systematic cross-national analysis of migrants' selectivity on achievement-related motivational orientations (ARMOs). We measure ARMOs using a validated scale that combines orientations towards socio-economic success, risk, and money. Matching the European Social Survey and the World Value Survey cumulative data sets, we examine whether international migrants recently arrived in Europe are more achievement-oriented than those observational equivalents that do not migrate. We focus on migrants from nine different origins (France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Morocco, Brazil, and Andean countries) sampled at different European destinations varying in gross domestic product, type of welfare state, and linguistic distance. Our findings seem to contradict the arguments about a common migrant personality put forward by social psychologists, as well as most of the predictions of standard economic models. We do find, however, some support for the welfare magnet hypothesis, as well as for the expectation that gender traditionalism favours negative selectivity of migrant women. We show that reported estimates are not driven by educational selectivity and are unlikely to be biased by destination effects.

This report provides the technical underpinning to the report by the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s Report1 laid before Parliament in December 2022. That report was in response to the Home Office request that she set out ‘the gaps in evidence available to the Home Office on support for Migrant Victims of Domestic Abuse, by establishing the number of victims and survivors of domestic abuse who have no recourse to public funds, the cost of supporting those who need support, and the cost benefit of such interventions.2’ LSE was asked by the Commissioner to provide a detailed technical analysis to underpin her response. This LSE report provides our views on relevant evidence but no policy recommendations. Such recommendations are made in the Commissioner’s report, having considered our evidence alongside the evidence of other stakeholders and people she has consulted. Our analysis required us to make strong assumptions, and there is significant uncertainty around many of them. There is considerable uncertainty in published validated statistics about the numbers of migrants in the UK with each visa status, and even more uncertainty about numbers of undocumented migrants and of ‘visitors’. There is also uncertainty about how many of these migrants currently experience domestic abuse, and an added and independent uncertainty about the proportion of those people who would present at services. We have also had to make various assumptions which affect the costs and benefits. We address and mitigate these and other uncertainties through our sensitivity analysis and additional modelling in this report. In addition, an accompanying Excel workbook sets out in detail our assumptions and how they underpin our conclusions, which allows for further sensitivity analysis and modelling to be done.