With approximately 19 million children across Europe born of immigrant parents, there is an understandable desire across the continent to ensure that this new generation of citizens is successfully integrated into their host community.  In Spain, for instance, it’s estimated that 25% of young people have foreign-born parents, so it’s vital to understand how these young people fare in the labor market, and whether they’re treated the same as native-born youngsters.

The GEMM (Growth, Equal Opportunities, Migration & Markets) Project aims to explore how how young people who are descendants from immigrants have been able to access the labor market in the UK, Germany, Spain, Norway and the Netherlands.

Market access

The researchers assessed the responses received by candidates to various job adverts, with the CVs containing identical features in a bid to understand how children of migrants compared next to those of native-born adults.

The researchers believe that the scope of their work represents one of the most ambitious analyses of discrimination in the labor market thus far undertaken in Europe.

Sadly, the initial results suggest there is significant discrimination facing young people from migrant backgrounds as they attempt to enter the workforce across Europe, with the highest discrimination seen in the UK and Norway.

By contrast, Germany and Spain showed the lowest levels of discrimination, and the authors believe that the Spanish data is especially important as not only has the country suffered economically in recent years, but they also had a high influx of migrants into the country at the same time.  This could have easily led to high levels of discrimination, but happily, this does not appear to be the case.

The researchers hope that their findings shed light on the nature of discrimination facing young people in Europe today, and help us to understand the decision-making processes that sit behind the discrimination seen in the data.

“It seems that the mechanism behind discrimination is not lack of information, but rather the prejudicial attitudes and stereotypes held by employers, or perhaps their unconscious discriminatory behaviours,” the team conclude.