Abstract
PurposeThis article deals with the impact of ethnic origin on individual employability, focussing on the first stage of the hiring process. Deeply, the authors’ goal is to fathom whether there is a preference for native job candidates over immigrants, decomposing the discrimination against minority groups into its statistical and taste-based components by means of a new approach.Design/methodology/approachThe authors built up a data set by means of an ad hoc field experiment, conducted by sending equivalent fictitious CVs in response to 1000 real online job openings in Italy. The authors developed the discrimination decomposition index using first- and second-generation immigrants.FindingsThe authors’ main result is that both first- and second-generation immigrants are discriminated compared to Italians. In between the two categories, second-generation candidates are discriminated especially if their ethnicities are morphologically different from those of natives (i.e. Chinese and Moroccans). This last finding is a clear symptom of discrimination connected to taste-based reasons. On the other hand, first-generation immigrants of all nationalities but Germans are preferred for hard-work jobs.Originality/valueThe authors develop the discrimination decomposition index to measure the proportion of the two kinds of discrimination (statistical and taste-based) over the total one and apply a probit model to test the statistical significance of the difference in treatment between the three groups of natives, first-generation and second-generation immigrants.
Highlights
One of the most important factors to define the success of immigrants’ integration is their participation in the labour market
While discrimination against first-generation immigrants may be determined by productivity-related factors, discrimination against second-generation ones is more likely to come from taste-based reasons, with them being Italian mother tongue individuals who always lived in Italy
We construct a new discrimination decomposition index (DDI), which considers the relative difference between Italian and second-generation candidates to be connected to taste-based reasons and the one between second- and first-generation ones to be a sign of statistical discrimination
Summary
One of the most important factors to define the success of immigrants’ integration is their participation in the labour market. The results from the Istat’s (2015) “Quarterly Labour Force Survey” suggest that the main difficulties in entering the labour market reside in poor knowledge of Italian language, nonrecognition of qualifications from abroad and socio-cultural reasons Are these the only reasons why firms discriminate against immigrants?. Taste-based discrimination is often connected to stereotypical characteristics such as race In this respect, Knowles et al (2001) proposed a test to separate statistical and tastebased discrimination in the context of disparities in motor vehicle searches by the American police. While discrimination against first-generation immigrants may be determined by productivity-related factors (e.g. different skills and/or linguistic gaps, due to the different education received and so it can be considered connected to statistical reasons), discrimination against second-generation ones is more likely to come from taste-based reasons, with them being Italian mother tongue individuals who always lived in Italy. We construct a new discrimination decomposition index (DDI), which considers the relative difference between Italian and second-generation candidates to be connected to taste-based reasons and the one between second- and first-generation ones to be a sign of statistical discrimination
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