Loneliness is a growing problem for all of society, but it carries obvious risks for immigrants who are moving to a new country and face various barriers to meeting new people. Research from the University of Bath highlights how their wellbeing significantly improves when they devote their income to tackling this problem.

Loneliness among migrants can often be compounded by the sometimes “hostile” atmosphere with which migrants can be greeted in their new homes. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has been commonplace in both the media and the political spheres for some time now, while Covid brought well-documented cases of discrimination and hostility towards certain ethnic groups.

Sense of isolation

This can lead to a sense of real isolation and social exclusion for many migrants. Indeed, a recent report found that 58% of migrants in the UK thought that isolation was the biggest challenge they faced.

The Bath research highlights how difficult many migrants find making friends, with many reporting that their accent and even appearance mark them out as different from natives.

As such, helping people to address these challenges is important, but also far from straightforward. The researchers argue that how migrants spend their money is crucial. For instance, while this is true for most of us, it’s especially important for migrants to choose experiential purchases rather than material purchases.

Such purchases are not only well known to provide more enduring satisfaction, but they also help us to meet and connect with other people. Sadly, the researchers found that migrants often spend their money on material things rather than experiential things. What’s more, they do this because they think it will help them to integrate into the culture of their host country.

Fostering materialism

They suggest that the very act of social exclusion itself can often foster materialism as we treat things as a kind of pick-me-up to try and combat loneliness.

More experiential purchases could be a more effective remedy, as could so-called “prosocial purchases”, which are when we spend money on others rather than on ourselves. These not only can make others happy but they can also help to connect us to them.

These prosocial purchases can also prompt a feeling of us having a beneficial impact on others, which helps to boost our sense of inclusion and therefore makes us feel more positively about ourselves. Indeed, the authors believe that prosocial purchases may be even more beneficial than experiential purchases.

While this is by no means straightforward during a cost of living crisis, it’s perhaps food for thought for migrants who wish to foster greater inclusion with the community in their new home.