Barriers to immigrants’ integration into the labor market: Modes and coping

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate similarities and particularities of barriers encountered by different immigrant groups when entering the labor market, to define the modes of how immigrants deal with barriers and to detect determinants influencing these modes, comparing two groups of immigrants to Israel. On the basis of twofold criteria (number of barriers and coping with barriers) we created modes classifying the ways in which immigrants deal with barriers: “the easy going”, encountered few barriers and showed high coping; “the fighters”, – many barriers and high coping; “the incapable”, – few barriers and low coping, and “the disadvantaged”, – many barriers and low coping. Whereas the majority of the Ethiopian immigrants were dispersed between the “disadvantaged” and “fighters” modes, the majority of Former Soviet Union (FSU) immigrants were positioned in the “fighters” mode. The results reveal that FSU immigrants encountered different barriers than immigrants from Ethiopia and coped with them better. Human capital characteristics of immigrants explain the distribution of immigrants between the modes.