Hiring Coworkers From Your Country Backfires for Immigrant Workers
A new study of German labor records reveals that immigrants hired into jobs with many coworkers from their home country face significantly worse long-term employment prospects. The finding challenges the assumption that ethnic networks in the workplace help newcomers integrate, with implications for how companies approach diversity hiring and immigrant integration policy.
Originaltitel: Workplace segregation and the labour market performance of immigrants
<p>This paper studies the effect of conational coworkers in an immigrant's first job on subsequent labour market outcomes using German register data. I instrument for the conational share using idiosyncratic variation infirm hiring in the local labour market where the immigrant searches for work. A ten percentage point increase in the initial conational share lowers employment by around 3 percentage points in the long-run. Survey evidence suggests that a higher conational share leads to higher self-employment and unemployment, rather than re- migration. Furthermore, both differential host country-specific human capital accumulation and changes in job search outcomes contribute to the employment effect.</p>