The Wellbeing of Immigrants in Great Britain: Mechanisms in the Relationship between Attitudes towards Immigrants and Their Wellbeing

Michaela Šedovic , London School of Economics and Political Science

This paper employs non-migrants attitudes towards immigrants (ATI) as a potential under-researched driver of the effect of contact on migrants’ wellbeing. Using different levels of area-measures to aggregate ATI, I ask how immigrants’ wellbeing is associated with them and what are the mechanisms behind this association. Using individual data from the UK Understanding society (wave 9) matched to data on ATI derived from the European Values Study 2018, I focus on attitudes aggregated to local (NUTS3) and regional (NUTS1) area levels in Great Britain. Controlling for contextual- and individual-level characteristics, I estimate the relationship between ATI and self-reported life-satisfaction and test moderating effect of potential mechanisms (i.e., the ethnic composition of areas, interethnic friendships, social cohesion measures). The association is estimated in three series of nested OLS models successively employing local ATI, regional ATI, and both levels together. This allows me to compare variation in the association for various migrant groups and different spatial scales of migrants’ lived environments. The results show migrants’ wellbeing is sensitive to the exposure to non-migrants’ negative ATI on the higher level, other things being equal. In comparison, the second generation’s wellbeing is significantly associated with ATI in a smaller geographical area, suggesting a stronger association between negative attitudes in their local areas and wellbeing. The local ethnic composition and neighbourhood cohesion moderate the latter, which contributes to disentangling causal pathways in the relationship between migrants’ wellbeing and the context of their lived-environment. My paper has implications for integration policies implemented on the municipal level.

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 Presented in Session 4. Migrant Populations: attitudes and contextual factors