Labour Market Discrimination against Migrants and their Children

This open access book investigates the labour market discrimination faced by migrants and their children in hiring and occupational attainment. It explores the drivers and mechanisms behind the discrimination, seeking to answer why applicants and employees with a migration background become the objects of “othering” in the first place, how this is enacted, and what can be done to prevent it. The volume builds on relevant literature on nationalism and racism, presenting findings from six Dutch public organisations to create an explanatory framework on the drivers that produce labour market discrimination. The book uses a triangulation of data, methods, and a comparison of the experiences of applicants, selectors, employees, and supervisors, both with and without a migration background. The book uses an intersectional perspective to discuss secondary and class-based drivers of discrimination based on personal attributes and communicative behaviour selection and assessment that allow nationalist ethnicization to become operational. It argues that experiences of ethnicization undermine the self-confidence of people with a migration background and thus they perform less on these criteria, which limits their hiring and occupational attainment chances in the eyes of selectors and supervisors. Findings reveal that professionalization of assessment and selection criteria and procedures works to counter discrimination. The volume concludes by advocating for reform of migration and integration policies and discourses that feed ethnicization. While empirical findings and recommendations are particularly valid for the Dutch context, they may guide and inspire future research in other contexts.