In Bordering Georgie Wemyss and colleagues highlight how the task of enforcing immigration policies in the UK has been passed down to various civilian stakeholders who are often both uninterested and ill-equipped to perform such a role. These include teachers, healthcare staff, employers, and landlords, each of whom is required to check the immigration status of the people they engage with.

The problematic nature of this request was underlined by a recent study from the University of Gothenburg, which highlighted that people with foreign-sounding names received fewer callbacks to housing ads than people with Swedish-sounding names.

Biased response

The researchers sent various fictitious applications to real housing ads and the findings reinforced the feeling that discrimination is common in Sweden, especially for people with Arab/Muslim-sounding names, who previous research has shown are also discriminated against in the labor market.

In total they sent a randomly selected pair of fake rental applications to around 620 randomly selected ads for apartments. Each of the applications gave an impression of the applicant as being both well-behaved and highly educated, with the only difference being the name of the fictitious male applicant. Sometimes the applicant was made to appear Eastern European, other times, East Asian, Arab/Muslim, or Swedish.

The researchers then monitored the callbacks received for each application, whether through an offer of the apartment or at least an interest in doing so. When the researchers performed statistical analysis of the callback rates, it emerged that applicants with so-called Swedish names received significantly more callbacks than applicants with foreign-sounding names.

Among these names, those appearing to be either Asian or Eastern European received a similar number of callbacks to each other, with those appearing to represent an Arabic or Muslim individual receiving the fewest callbacks.

The results suggest that little has really changed in the past decade in terms of general fairness and lack of discrimination in the market, and it further underlines the folly of “outsourcing” immigration decisions to people who are not only ill-equipped to do such tasks but are also likely to harbor considerable discrimination in how they behave.

“Eastern European-, East Asian-, and especially Arab/Muslim-sounding names yielded significantly lower callback rates than names signaling membership of the dominant ethnic group—ethnic Swedes,” the authors conclude. “Comparisons with the Ahmed et al. (2010) paper show that the situation for a male person with an Arabic/Muslim-sounding name has not improved in Sweden over the past decade.”