IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/joimai/v18y2017i2d10.1007_s12134-016-0482-0.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Employment in a “Land of Opportunity?” Immigrants’ Experiences of Racism and Discrimination in the Australian Workplace

Author

Listed:
  • Agnieszka Kosny

    (University of Toronto
    Monash University
    Institute for Work & Health)

  • Iracema Santos

    (University of Western Australia)

  • Alison Reid

    (Curtin University)

Abstract

Immigrants are an important part of the Australian labor force and constitute a major source of net labor force growth. Immigrants arriving in Australia, however, face a number of barriers finding employment that is commensurate with their training and education (Reid, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 36:120-125, 2012) and can end up in poor-quality jobs. Through a series of interviews and focus groups with newcomers, our study examined immigrants’ experience of finding employment and their working conditions in Australia. In this manuscript, we specifically explore how discrimination shaped workers’ experiences and the strategies workers used to overcome and deal with the barriers they encountered. We end with a discussion of how racism and its consequences can impact quality of work and worker health and safety.

Suggested Citation

  • Agnieszka Kosny & Iracema Santos & Alison Reid, 2017. "Employment in a “Land of Opportunity?” Immigrants’ Experiences of Racism and Discrimination in the Australian Workplace," Journal of International Migration and Integration, Springer, vol. 18(2), pages 483-497, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:joimai:v:18:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s12134-016-0482-0
    DOI: 10.1007/s12134-016-0482-0
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12134-016-0482-0
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s12134-016-0482-0?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Booth, Alison L. & Leigh, Andrew & Varganova, Elena, 2010. "Does Racial and Ethnic Discrimination Vary Across Minority Groups? Evidence from a Field Experiment," IZA Discussion Papers 4947, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Loomis, D. & Richardson, D., 1998. "Race and the risk of fatal injury at work," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 88(1), pages 40-44.
    3. M. Loosemore & D. W. Chau, 2002. "Racial discrimination towards Asian operatives in the Australian construction industry," Construction Management and Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(1), pages 91-102.
    4. P. N. Junankar & Satya Paul & Wahida Yasmeen, 2010. "Are Asian Migrants Discriminated Against In The Labor Market? A Case Study Of Australia," The Singapore Economic Review (SER), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 55(04), pages 619-646.
    5. Alison L. Booth & Andrew Leigh & Elena Varganova, 2012. "Does Ethnic Discrimination Vary Across Minority Groups? Evidence from a Field Experiment," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 74(4), pages 547-573, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Akshay Vij & Lynette Washington & Sally Weller & Jacob Irving & Ilke Onur, 2024. "Labour Market Preferences of Retrenched Australian Auto Industry Workers for Job Quality and Meaningful Work," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 100(329), pages 209-233, June.
    2. Agnieszka Kosny & Basak Yanar & Momtaz Begum & Dina Al-khooly & Stephanie Premji & Morgan A. Lay & Peter M. Smith, 2020. "Safe Employment Integration of Recent Immigrants and Refugees," Journal of International Migration and Integration, Springer, vol. 21(3), pages 807-827, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mujcic, Redzo & Frijters, Paul, 2013. "Still Not Allowed on the Bus: It Matters If You're Black or White!," IZA Discussion Papers 7300, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Anthony Edo & Nicolas Jacquemet & Constantine Yannelis, 2019. "Language skills and homophilous hiring discrimination: Evidence from gender and racially differentiated applications," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 17(1), pages 349-376, March.
    3. Jacquemet, Nicolas & Yannelis, Constantine, 2012. "Indiscriminate discrimination: A correspondence test for ethnic homophily in the Chicago labor market," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(6), pages 824-832.
    4. Brit Grosskopf & Graeme Pearce, 2020. "Do You Mind Me Paying Less? Measuring Other-Regarding Preferences in the Market for Taxis," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 66(11), pages 5059-5074, November.
    5. David Neumark, 2018. "Experimental Research on Labor Market Discrimination," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 56(3), pages 799-866, September.
    6. Mladen Adamovic & Andreas Leibbrandt, 2024. "Is there a glass ceiling for ethnic minorities to enter leadership positions? Evidence from a large-scale field experiment with over 12,000 job applications," Monash Economics Working Papers 2024-06, Monash University, Department of Economics.
    7. Tjaden, Jasper Dag & Schwemmer, Carsten & Khadjavi, Menusch, 2018. "Ride with Me - Ethnic Discrimination, Social Markets and the Sharing Economy," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 34(4), pages 418-432.
    8. Siddharth Shirodkar & Boyd Hunter, 2019. "Factors underlying the likelihood of being in business for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians," Australian Journal of Labour Economics (AJLE), Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre (BCEC), Curtin Business School, vol. 22(1), pages 5-27.
    9. Adermon, Adrian & Hensvik, Lena, 2022. "Gig-jobs: Stepping stones or dead ends?," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 76(C).
    10. Mahmoud Abubaker & Christopher Adam Bagley, 2017. "Methodology of Correspondence Testing for Employment Discrimination Involving Ethnic Minority Applications: Dutch and English Case Studies of Muslim Applicants for Employment," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 6(4), pages 1-9, September.
    11. Maitreyi Bordia Das, 2016. "All in my Head? The Play of Exclusion and Discrimination in the Labor Market," Journal of International Commerce, Economics and Policy (JICEP), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 7(02), pages 1-20, June.
    12. Eva Zschirnt, 2020. "Evidence of Hiring Discrimination Against the Second Generation: Results from a Correspondence Test in the Swiss Labour Market," Journal of International Migration and Integration, Springer, vol. 21(2), pages 563-585, June.
    13. Valfort, Marie-Anne, 2020. "Anti-Muslim discrimination in France: Evidence from a field experiment," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 135(C).
    14. Eva O. Arceo-Gomez & Raymundo M. Campos-Vazquez, 2014. "Race and Marriage in the Labor Market: A Discrimination Correspondence Study in a Developing Country," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(5), pages 376-380, May.
    15. Booth, Alison & Leigh, Andrew, 2010. "Do employers discriminate by gender? A field experiment in female-dominated occupations," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 107(2), pages 236-238, May.
    16. Baert, Stijn & Norga, Jennifer & Thuy, Yannick & Van Hecke, Marieke, 2016. "Getting grey hairs in the labour market. An alternative experiment on age discrimination," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 86-101.
    17. Gaddis, S. Michael, 2018. "An Introduction to Audit Studies in the Social Sciences," SocArXiv e5hfc, Center for Open Science.
    18. Veit, Susanne & Thijsen, Lex, 2019. "Almost identical but still treated differently: hiring discrimination against foreign-born and domestic-born minorities," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 47(6), pages 1285-1304.
    19. Doris Weichselbaumer, 2017. "Discrimination Against Migrant Job Applicants in Austria: An Experimental Study," German Economic Review, Verein für Socialpolitik, vol. 18(2), pages 237-265, May.
    20. repec:hal:pseose:hal-00745109 is not listed on IDEAS
    21. Silva Goncalves, Juliana & van Veldhuizen, Roel, 2020. "Subjective Judgment and Gender Bias in Advice: Evidence from the Laboratory," Working Papers 2020:27, Lund University, Department of Economics.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:joimai:v:18:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s12134-016-0482-0. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.