Immigration in Ireland: just how tolerant are we?

The recent comments by the (now former) Mayor of Naas brought to the fore the issue of racism in Ireland. There was an understandable furore over the remarks and the media was alive with responses and reactions, much of it anecdotal.

So what do we actually know? There is actually some quite good data on Irish people’s attitudes to immigrants and immigration generally courtesy of the European Social Survey (ESS), a population representative survey carried out every two years since 2002. There are 4 waves currently available – the 2010 data for Ireland should be available soon.

The ESS asked respondents six questions about immigrants, three about how many immigrants should be allowed in (depending on race, country of origin etc) and three more general questions about whether the respondents thought immigration were good for the country in different domains. Using these six questions I created an overall measure of whether people were for or against immigrants/ immigration using factor analysis. This ignores variation between questions, of course, but the idea is that there is some underlying latent variable to which the answers to these questions are realizations of. This may not do justice to the complexity of the issues and to people’s attitudes but for the present purposes, it seems a reasonable start.

Using this, one can ask what is the trend in Irish people’s attitudes to immigrants and what sort of people are more or less sympathetic to immigrants. In some cases the answers might be unsurprising (though always good to know) but I was surprised by some.

Technical issue: the measure (let’s call it “xenophobia” for simplicity) is normalized to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. I use linear multiple regression to see what factors predict this variable, holding the other factors constant. Using this large representative sample of nearly 6000 individuals allows us to examine a range of factors with some precision.

First question: what is the trend? There was a significant downward trend with xenophobia lower in 2004 and lower still in 2006. However this was reversed by almost the same degree in 2008. My conjecture is that we will see this reversal continued when the 2010 data becomes available.

Second question: what sort of people are less sympathetic to immigrants? Well women are for start: their “xenophobia” is higher by .17 of a standard deviation – the same size as the rise that was observed in 2008 as it happens. I had no prior about this but I have been told that this is contrary to the conventional wisdom. Let’s hear for the guys. Younger people are also very slightly more xenophobic. The very religious, by contrast, are less xenophobic (by .07 of a standard deviation). Bless ‘em.

Those who are more educated have a lower level of xenophobia (.07 of a standard deviation for each year of education). The same is true of those parents who were more educated, particularly if they were graduates. There are a number of explanations for the first of these two associations: I draw your attention to interesting work on this topic by Kevin O’ Rourke & Richard Sinnott who use trade theory to predict how attitudes to immigrants may depend on skill levels. To the extent that many immigrants are low skilled, one would expect low skilled natives to be less welcoming about the competition. An alternative explanation is that education makes people more liberal or open-minded. I suspect that it is a bit of both.

Further light on this question is thrown by an interesting question in the ESS which asks people how well they are coping financially. Those who report that they are finding it difficult to cope financially, report a higher level of “xenophobia”: by about .2 of a standard deviation. Given that the numbers in this category must have risen dramatically since 2008 it is reasonable to extrapolate that there will be increasing antipathy to immigrants, driven by greater financial anxiety.

This is not an exhaustive investigation of what predicts our attitudes to immigrants. I haven’t reported some of the other factors that I found to be significant – or any of the ones that were not significant. But it shows up, I think, some interesting patterns which deserve more thorough study. One would also need to explore the degree to which “Race” and “immigration” are distinct issues (the data permits this).

The Changing Faces of Ireland

Steve Song (formerly of Geary and now with George Fox University, Oregon), Merike Darmody (ESRI) and Naomi Tyrrell (Plymouth) are the editors of a new book on immigration in Ireland.

The Changing Faces of Ireland: Exploring the Lives of Immigrant and Ethnic Minority Children

“Before the economic boom of the 1990s, Ireland was known as a nation of emigrants. The past fifteen years, however, have seen the transformation of Ireland from a country of net emigration to one of net immigration, on a scale and at a pace unprecedented in comparative context. As a result, Irish society has become more diverse in terms of nationality, language, ethnicity and religious affiliation; and these changes are now clearly reflected in the composition of both primary and secondary schools, presenting these with challenges as well as opportunities. Despite the increased number of ethnically-diverse immigrant children and young people in the Ireland, currently there is a paucity of information about aspects of their lives in Ireland. This book is aimed at contributing to this gap in knowledge.

This edited collection will be of interest to researchers in the fields of migration studies, childhood studies, education studies, human geography, sociology, applied social studies, social work, health studies and psychology. It will also be a useful resource to educators, social workers, youth workers and community members working with (or preparing to work with) children with immigrant and ethnic minority backgrounds in Ireland.”

More details.

Tolerance

People's attitudes towards others, particularly those who differ in some way, can be quite revealing. Ireland has had a great deal of migration in recent years and the question of our tolerance towards foreign nationals is a topical one.
So whats the evidence? The ESS asked people whether they thought immigrants made the country better or worse. On a scale of 0 to 10 (10 being better) we average about 5.5, hardly a ringing endorsement. Here is the geographical distribution: the Midlands and the West lag behind the rest of the country. People's anwers to the question may depend on whether they perceive their own situation to be threatened by the presence of immigrants for example through competition by foreign workers.
So what about a group who, arguably, pose no threat so that there is no question of a vested interest?Respondents were also asked whether they thought homosexuals should be free to live their life as they wish. About 80% agreed with the statement but there are some interesting regional differences with the West and South-West lagging behind.

Immigrants and accents

Immigrants tend to underperform in the labour market i.e. they are paid less than one might expect. This could be for several reasons. Prejudice is a possibility or their human capital may not be sufficiently valued if there is uncertainty about the quality of their education. The paper below documents another angle, namely that their accent may put them at a disadvantage. After all, foreigners talk funny, y'all know what I mean?

Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility
S Levi-Ari, B.Keysar
Non-native speech is harder to understand than native speech. We demonstrate that this “processing difficulty” causes non-native speakers to sound less credible. People judged trivia statements such as “Ants don't sleep” as less true when spoken by a non-native than a native speaker. When people were made aware of the source of their difficulty they were able to correct when the accent was mild but not when it was heavy. This effect was not due to stereotypes of prejudice against foreigners because it occurred even though speakers were merely reciting statements provided by a native speaker. Such reduction of credibility may have an insidious impact on millions of people, who routinely communicate in a language which is not their native tongue.

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46(6), 2010, 1093-1096

Colbert on Immigration

Via Greg Mankiw, this is good. Includes the great line "Because my great-grandfather did not travel 4,000 miles of the Atlantic ocean to see this country overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland. That's the rumour..I don't know if that is true...I'd like that stricken from the record".

Immigration and the economy

Immigration is an important issue for the Irish economy and a relatively new one at that. It is also quite a sensitive one with people taking quite partisan approaches. So its important to keep an eye on what the evidence actually shows. See this paper for the US by G Peri:

Abstract
We present three main findings, two of which are quite new in this literature. First, we confirm that immigrants do not crowd-out employment of (or hours worked by) natives but simply add to total employment. Second, we find that they increase total factor productivity significantly and, third, that such efficiency gains are unskilled-biased—larger, that is, for less educated workers.

http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gperi/Papers/peri_accounting_sept_09.pdf

The 'Incidence' and 'Wage Effects' of Mismatch among Immigrant and Ethnic Minority Graduates

A new ESRI working paper by Delma Byrne and Seamus McGuinness looks at mismatch in the graduate labour market among immigrants and second-generation ethnic minority groups. As in other studies of a similar nature (some of which have been discussed on this blog before: Bender and Heywood; 2006 (and Robst; 2007); Nordin/Persson/Rooth; 2008; Budria and Moro-Egido; 2004), the focus is to estimate the incidence and wage effects of over-education and overskilling.

In the Byrne and McGuinness paper, the graduates come from UK universities. The results show that immigrant and second-generation ethnic minority graduates are no more likely to experience education or skill mismatch relative to their native counterparts. Furthermore, graduates from immigrant and ethnic minority backgrounds incur overeducation and overskilling wage penalties that lie well below the level incurred by native graduates.

The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels

James J. Heckman and Paul A. LaFontaine: Geary WP/28/2008. The authors establish that:

(a) the true high school graduation rate is substantially lower than widely used measures;
(b) the U.S. graduation rate peaked in the early 1970s;
(c) majority/minority differentials are substantial and have not converged over the past 35 years;
(d) lower post-1970 rates are not solely due to increasing immigrant and minority populations;
(e) their findings explain part of the slowdown in college attendance and the rise in college wage premiums;
(f) growing high school graduation differentials by gender help explain increasing male-female college attendance gaps.

Card on Immigration and Inequality

I'm just after finishing reading David Card's recent paper on immigration and wage inequality in the US between 1980 and 2000.

Card uses time-series data from the 1980, 1990 and 2000 US censuses to measure the impact of immigration on the growing inequality between high and low skilled workers. The paper concludes that immigration accounts for only a small share of the increase in US wage inequalities during this period (5%).

It would be quite interesting to see how or even if Card's research could be extended to Ireland, in particular the conclusion that "workers with less than a high school education are perfect substitutes for those with a high school education."