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The Effect of 9/11 on Immigrants' Ethnic Identity and Employment: Evidence from Germany
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Abstract
A growing concern in Western countries is the fact that immigrants might adopt oppositional identities. Although identity is expected to affect the economic outcomes of immigrants, little is known about the factors that influence the identity choice of the migrants and thus, their employment outcomes. This study investigates the effect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the process of identity formation and the employment outcomes of Turkish immigrants in Germany. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this study relies on a difference-in-differences strategy to compare the outcomes of Turks with non-Turks before and after the attacks. The results show that Turks have adopted more extreme identities after 9/11 compared to non-Turks: they are more likely to feel completely German; they are less likely to feel in some respects Turkish whereas they are more likely to feel mostly Turkish. There is no significant impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Turks’ employment outcomes relative to non-Turks.
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We study the effect that a series of Islamist terrorist attacks across Europe in 2004–2005 had on the integration of Muslim immigrants. Using unique panel data that oversamples immigrants in the Netherlands, we show that, shortly after the attacks, Muslim immigrants’ attitudes toward integration worsened significantly compared to those of non-Muslim immigrants, with no evidence of a negative trend in the attitudes of Muslims prior to the attacks. While, in particular, low-educated Muslims became more geographically segregated and unemployed after the attacks, high-educated Muslims were affected most negatively in terms of their perceived integration. This decline in perceived integration is associated with a higher intention to permanently re-migrate to the country of origin.
We present a basic theoretical framework of ethnic identity, i.e., the level of immigrant's commitment to his or her host society as well as the immigrant's commitment to his or her home society. Our model can explain the emerging empirical literature which studies the effect of the immigrants' characteristics, such as age, gender, education, religion, age at arrival, stock of immigrants in the host country, etc., on their ethnic identity (such as the Ethnosizer ). In addition, this paper can be used as a basis for future empirical and theoretical research on this topic.
JEL classification: F22, J15, Z13.
There is a lot of evidence that identity matters for behaviour. There is a widespread belief that societies will function better if they manage to establish a common sense of identity among the population and contemporary fears in many countries that this common identity is threatened. This paper presents a simple framework for the determinants of identity and uses it to inform an empirical investigation of the correlates of national identity in Britain. Our main conclusions are that people who feel they are treated with respect and who feel tolerated are the most likely to identify with feeling part of Britain.
We analyze the assimilation patterns of Muslim immigrants in Western countries with a unique identification strategy. Survey and experimental data collected in France in 2009 suggest that Muslims and rooted French are locked in a suboptimal equilibrium whereby (i) rooted French exhibit taste-based discrimination against those they are able to identify as Muslims and (ii) Muslims perceive French institutions as systematically discriminatory against them. This equilibrium is sustained because Muslims, perceiving discrimination as institutionalized, are reluctant to assimilate and rooted French, who are able to identify Muslims as such due to their lower assimilation, reveal their distaste for Muslims.
Islamophobic sentiments in the Western world have gained scientific attention, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. However, the effects of religious stigma on Muslim minorities’ identity formation have rarely been studied. Using structural equation modeling, this cross-sectional study examined direct and indirect effects of different forms of religious stigma on the national affiliation of 210 Norwegian-Pakistani and 216 German-Turkish Muslims. Furthermore, the study examined the mediator role of religious identity. Our results suggest that being a Muslim in Norway is more reconcilable with affiliating with the nation than being a Muslim in Germany. However, across the samples, the results indicated that various forms of religious stigma affected Muslims’ national identity and engagement in the public and private sphere in distinct ways. These effects were both positive and negative, differed between the two samples, and in Germany, were mediated by the participants’ religious identity. The findings indicated that the ways in which religious stigma influences Muslims’ national affiliation is context and culture bound.
The oppositional culture explanation for racial disparities in school performance posits that individuals from historically oppressed groups (involuntary minorities) signify their antagonism toward the dominant group by resisting school goals. In contrast, individuals from the dominant group and groups that migrated freely to the host country (immigrant minorities) maintain optimistic views of their chances for educational and occupational success. Because of its historical and cross-cultural appeal, this explanation has been well-received by academics, although key implications of the theory have not been carefully tested. Proponents have failed to systematically compare perceptions of occupational opportunity and resistance to school across involuntary, dominant and immigrant groups. Using a large sample of African American, Asian American, and non-Hispanic white high school sophomores from the first follow-up of the National Education Longitudinal Study, we provide the first rigorous test of the oppositional culture explanation. Upon close scrutiny, its key predictions fail.
This paper investigates whether the 9/11 attacks will have a long-term impact by altering the fertility and assimilation rate of immigrants from Muslim countries in the United States. Terror attacks by Islamic groups are likely to induce a backlash against the Muslim community, and therefore, tend to raise the costs of assimilation for Muslims in the West. We test this hypothesis by exploiting variation across states in the number of hate crimes against Muslims in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Our results show that Muslim immigrants living in states which experienced the sharpest increase in hate crimes also exhibit: (i) greater chances of marrying within their own ethnic group; (ii) higher fertility; (iii) lower female labor force participation; and (iv) lower English proficiency. Importantly, the state-level increase in hate crimes against Muslims after the 9/11 attacks was not correlated with the pre-existing state-level trend in any of these assimilation outcomes. Moreover, we do not find similar effects for any other immigrant group after the 9/11 attacks. Overall, our results show that the backlash induced by the 9/11 attacks increased the ethnic identity and demographic strength of the Muslim immigrant community in the U.S. These findings shed light on the increasing use of terror attacks on Western countries, with the concurrent rise in social and political tensions surrounding the assimilation of Muslim immigrants in several European countries.
This study investigates perceptions of workplace discrimination among racial minorities in Canada. Specifically, the study
examines how objective experiences of disadvantage and expectations for equity influence racial minorities’ perceptions of
discrimination. The results indicate that while both of these factors affect perceptions of discrimination, expectations for
equity may be especially important. Although new immigrants are among the most disadvantaged groups in the Canadian labor
market, they are less likely to perceive discrimination than longer term immigrants, who may have higher expectations for
equitable treatment. Education also increases the perception of discrimination among immigrants, perhaps due to the higher
expectations of educated immigrants. Lastly, objective income inequity is not found to be related to perceived discrimination.
We compare the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Britain with other ethnic minorities to ask the questions ‘are Muslims
different?’ and ‘is their behaviour changing over time?’. We look at the gender gap in education, age at marriage, marriage
from the source country and female employment. In all these dimensions we find that Muslim communities are different but also
that there is a convergence in behaviour. This is because those born in Britain generally differ markedly in behaviours from
those born in the country of origin, but also because there is change within both the UK- and foreign-born communities.
KeywordsImmigration–Assimilation
This study uses evolutionary game theory to model the relationship between racial identity formation and inter-racial disparities in economic and non-economic outcomes. Starting with a fixed population of persons who are easily identified according to an exogenous criterion, for example, phenotype, we then allow individuals to pursue either a racialist or an individualist identity strategy in social interactions. The formation of identity norms imposes both positive and negative externalities on each person's identity actions. There are forces in the model that might push society toward racialism, individualism, or a mixed identity equilibrium, depending on matching assumptions, dynamic assumptions, parameter values, and initial conditions.
This article investigates the extent and determinants of British identity among those living in Britain, a source of considerable contemporary angst. We find no evidence for a culture clash in general, and one connected with Muslims in particular. The vast majority of those born in Britain, of whatever ethnicity or religion, think of themselves as British. Newly arrived immigrants almost never think of themselves as British but the longer they remain in the UK, the more likely it is that they do. This process of assimilation is faster for those from poorer and less democratic countries. Copyright © The Author(s). Journal compilation © Royal Economic Society 2010.
With globalization, the size of migration and the value of ethnicity is rising. Also Cyprus undergoes a strong process of change while experiencing large inflows of migration. The paper investigates the challenges and the potentials of migration from a European Union perspective. It advocates for a new concept to measure the ethnic identity of migrants, models its determinants and explores its explanatory power for various types of economic performance. The ethnosizer, a measure of ethnic identity, classifies migrants into four states: integration, assimilation, separation and marginalization. Empirical evidence supports its relevance for economic outcomes.
The paper explores the evolution of ethnic identities of two important and distinct immigrant religious groups. Using data from Germany, a large European country with many immigrants, we study the adaptation processes of Muslims and Christians. Individual data on language, culture, societal interactions, history of migration and ethnic self-identification are used to compose linear measures of the process of cultural adaptation. Two-dimensional variants measure integration, assimilation, separation and marginalization. Christians adapt more easily to the German society than Muslims. Immigrants with schooling in the home country and with older age at entry as well as female Muslims remain stronger attached to the country of origin. Female Muslims integrate and assimilate less and separate more than Muslim men, while there is no difference between male and female Christians. Christians who were young at entry are best integrated or assimilated, exhibiting lower separation and marginalization in the later years, while for Muslims a similar pattern is observed only for assimilation and separation. Christian immigrants with college or higher education in the home country integrate well, but Muslims do not. For both religious groups, school education in the home country leads to slower assimilation and causes more separation than no education at home. While school education has no impact on integration efforts for Muslim, it affects similar attempts of Christians negatively.
The 9/11 terror attacks are likely to have induced an increase in anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiments, not only among US residents but also beyond US borders. Using unique longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and exploiting exogenous variation in interview timing throughout 2001, I find that the 9/11 events caused an immediate shift of around 40 percent of one within-standard deviation to more negative attitudes toward immigration and resulted in a considerable decrease in concerns over xenophobic hostility among the German population. The quasi-experiment 9/11 provides evidence on the relevance of non-economic factors in attitude formation and the role of education in moderating the negative terrorism shock. Additional descriptive analysis suggests that the effects have also been persistent in the years after the attacks.
Identity Economics provides an important and compelling new way to understand human behavior, revealing how our identities--and not just economic incentives--influence our decisions. In 1995, economist Rachel Kranton wrote future Nobel Prize-winner George Akerlof a letter insisting that his most recent paper was wrong. Identity, she argued, was the missing element that would help to explain why people--facing the same economic circumstances--would make different choices. This was the beginning of a fourteen-year collaboration--and of Identity Economics. The authors explain how our conception of who we are and who we want to be may shape our economic lives more than any other factor, affecting how hard we work, and how we learn, spend, and save. Identity economics is a new way to understand people's decisions--at work, at school, and at home. With it, we can better appreciate why incentives like stock options work or don't; why some schools succeed and others don't; why some cities and towns don't invest in their futures--and much, much more.
The concepts of cultural diversity and cultural identity are at the forefront of the political debate in many western societies. In Europe, the discussion is stimulated by the political pressures associated with immigration flows, which are increasing in many European countries. The imperatives that current immigration trends impose on European democracies bring to light a number of issues that need to be addressed. What are the patterns and dynamics of cultural integration? How do they differ across immigrants of different ethnic groups and religious faiths? How do they differ across host societies? What are the implications and consequences for market outcomes and public policy? Which kind of institutional contexts are more or less likely to accommodate the cultural integration of immigrants? All these questions are crucial for policy makers and await answers. This book aims to provide a stepping stone to the debate. Taking an economic perspective, this edited book presents a current, comparative picture of the process of cultural integration of immigrants across Europe. It documents the main economic debates on the causes and consequences of cultural integration of immigrants, and provides detailed descriptions of the cultural and economic integration process in seven main European countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. It also compares the European context with the integration of immigrants in the United States.
This article asks what happened to racially motivated hate crimes in the wake of the 7/7 terror attack that hit London in July 2005 and the 9/11 terror attack that hit the United States in September 2001. There is anecdotal and descriptive evidence of an increase in bias-motivated crimes since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, but little quantitative research on the issue. This study offers empirical evidence on the effects of 7/7 and 9/11 on hate crime using rich data from four police force areas in England with sizable Asian/Arab populations. We find significant increases in hate crimes against Asians and Arabs that occurred almost immediately in the wake of both terror attacks, which subsequently decayed, but remained at higher than pre-attack levels a year later. We argue that this demonstrates a significant link between terror attacks and subsequent increases in hate crime and hypothesize that attitudinal changes resulting from media framing and coverage may act as a conduit linking terror attacks and hate crimes.
Difference-in-differences estimates of the effects of the September 11th attacks on labour market outcomes of Muslims are generated using 2001 and 2006 Canadian Census data. Little evidence of negative, significant impacts on employment, hours, weeks-worked or wages is found.
We develop a dynamic model of identity formation that explains why ethnic minorities may choose to adopt oppositional identities (i.e. some individuals may reject or not the dominant culture) and why this behavior may persist over time. We first show that the prevalence of an oppositional culture in the minority group cannot always be sustained in equilibrium. Indeed, because the size of the majority group is larger, there is an "imposed" process of exposition to role models from the majority group that favors the diffusion of mainstream values in the minority community. In spite of this, an oppositional culture in the minority group can nevertheless be sustained in steady-state if there is enough cultural segmentation in terms of role models, or if the size of the minority group is large enough, or if the degree of oppositional identity it implies is high enough. We also demonstrate that the higher the level of harassment and the number of racist individuals in the society, the more likely an oppositional minority culture will emerge. We finally show that ethnic identity and socialization effort can be more intense in mixed rather than segregated neighborhoods.
While available evidence suggests that the events of September 11th negatively influenced the relative earnings of employees with Arab background in the US, it is not clear that they had similar effects in other countries. Our study for Germany provides evidence that the events also affected the relative earnings of Muslims outside the US. However, the results show that there was no uniform effect on all types of Muslims across all types of firms. Accounting for moderating factors, a significantly negative effect can only be found for low-skilled Muslims employed in small- and medium-sized firms. This conforms to theoretical expectations. Moreover, we demonstrate that defining appropriate treatment and control groups is crucial for identifying the effects.
This paper considers two questions on the labour market discrimination against Arab or Muslim men after the recent terrorist attacks. First, I consider for the first time the impact of the September 11 attacks on the wages and working hours of Arabs in Europe. Second, I test whether the fact that a country was the direct target of terrorist attacks influences discrimination using the Madrid train bombings on 11 March 2004 and the London bombings on 7 July 2005 as quasi-experimental events. The results indicate that the wages, hours worked and employment probabilities of Arab men were unchanged by the attacks. Copyright (c) 2010 The Author. Scottish Journal of Political Economy (c) 2010 Scottish Economic Society.
I use the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia to examine whether the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (9/11) led to changes in perceptions of discrimination among Muslim immigrants and immigrants who fit the Muslim-Arab stereotype. I adopt a difference in differences approach and exploit the timing of interviews to identify the causal effect of 9/11 on perceptions. I find that consequent to 9/11, Muslim men and those who look like Muslims increasingly reported religious and racial intolerance and discrimination relative to other immigrants.
We study the relationship between ethnic identity and labour market outcomes of non-EU immigrants in Europe. Using the European Social Survey, we find that there is a penalty to be paid for immigrants with a strong identity. Being a first generation immigrant leads to a penalty of about 17% while second-generation immigrants have a probability of being employed that is not statistically different from that of natives. However, when they have a strong identity, second-generation immigrants have a lower chance of finding a job than natives. Our analysis also reveals that the relationship between ethnic identity and employment prospects may depend on the type of integration and labour market policies implemented in the country where the immigrant lives. More flexible labour markets help immigrants to access the labour market but do not protect those who have a strong ethnic identity.
--- Alberto Bisin, Eleonora Patacchini, Thierry Verdier and Yves Zenou
Migration flows are shaped by a complex combination of self-selection and out-selection mechanisms. In this paper, the authors analyze how existing diasporas (the stock of people born in a country and living in another one) affect the size and human-capital structure of current migration flows. The analysis exploits a bilateral data set on international migration by educational attainment from 195 countries to 30 developed countries in 1990 and 2000. Based on simple micro-foundations and controlling for various determinants of migration, the analysis finds that diasporas increase migration flows, lower the average educational level and lead to higher concentration of low-skill migrants. Interestingly, diasporas explain the majority of the variability of migration flows and selection. This suggests that, without changing the generosity of family reunion programs, education-based selection rules are likely to have a moderate impact. The results are highly robust to the econometric techniques, accounting for the large proportion of zeros and endogeneity problems.
Where a community or group is socially excluded from a dominant group, some individuals of that group may identify with the dominant culture and others may reject that culture. The aim of this paper is to investigate this issue by empirically analyzing the potential trade-off for ethnic minorities between sticking to their own roots and labour market success. We find that the social environment of individuals and attachments to culture of origin has a strong association with identity choice. Our results also suggest that those non-whites who have preferences that accord with being oppositional do experience an employment penalty.
This paper formalizes a widely discussed peer effect titled “acting White.” “Acting White” is modeled as a two-audience signaling
quandary: signals that induce high wages can be signals that induce peer group rejection. Without peer effects, equilibria
involve all ability types choosing different levels of education. “Acting White” alters the equilibrium dramatically: the
(possibly empty) set of lowest ability individuals and the set of highest ability individuals continue to reveal their type
through investments in education; ability types in the middle interval pool on a common education level. Only those in the
lower intervals are accepted by the group. The model's predictions fit many stylized facts in the anthropology and sociology
literatures regarding social interactions among minority group members.
Using the UK Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities, we document differences in integration patterns between Muslims and non-Muslims. We find that Muslims integrate less and more slowly than non-Muslims. In terms of estimated probability of having a strong religious identity, a Muslim born in the UK and having spent there more than 30 years is comparable with a non-Muslim just arrived in the country. Moreover, higher levels of income as well as higher on-the-job qualifications seem to be associated with a stronger religious identity for Muslim immigrants only. Finally, we find no evidence that segregated neighborhoods breed intense religious and cultural identities for ethnic minorities, in general, and, in particular, for Muslims. (JEL: A14, J15) (c) 2008 by the European Economic Association.
We develop a model in which non-white individuals are defined with respect to their social environment (family, friends, neighbors) and their attachments to their culture of origin (religion, language), and in which jobs are mainly found through social networks. We find that, depending on how strong peer pressures are, nonwhites choose to adopt oppositional identities since some individuals may identify with the dominant culture and others may reject that culture, even if it implies adverse labor market outcomes.
Using public-use microdata samples from the American Community Survey, we find that Middle Eastern Arab men and Afghan, Iranian,
and Pakistani men experienced a significant earnings decline relative to non-Hispanic whites between 2000 and 2002. Further
analyses based on the Juhn–Murphy–Pierce wage decomposition technique as well as quantile regression indicate that this earnings
decline is not explained by changes in the structure of wages or in observable characteristics beyond ethnicity. Our interpretation
is that the unanticipated events of September 11th, 2001 negatively affected the labor-market income of the groups most closely
associated with the ethnicity of the terrorists.
We investigated whether the September 11, 2001 terrorists’ attacks had any effect on employment, earnings, and residential mobility of first- and second-generation Arab and Muslim men in the United States. We find that September 11th did not significantly affect employment and hours of work of Arab and Muslim men, but was associated with a 9-11 percent decline in their real wage and weekly earnings, with some evidence that this decline was temporary. The adverse earnings effects were strongly linked to hate crime incidence. Estimates also suggest that the terrorists’ attacks reduced intrastate migration of Arab and Muslim men.
This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection as well as empirical evidence on the effects of patent rights. Then, the second part considers the international aspects of IPR protection. In summary, this paper draws the following conclusions from the literature. Firstly, different patent policy instruments have different effects on R&D and growth. Secondly, there is empirical evidence supporting a positive relationship between IPR protection and innovation, but the evidence is stronger for developed countries than for developing countries. Thirdly, the optimal level of IPR protection should tradeoff the social benefits of enhanced innovation against the social costs of multiple distortions and income inequality. Finally, in an open economy, achieving the globally optimal level of protection requires an international coordination (rather than the harmonization) of IPR protection.
We analyse the effect of strong and weak ties on the individual probability of finding a job. Using the dynamic model of Calvó-Armengol and Jackson (2004), two results are put forward: (i) the individual probability of finding a job is increasing in the number of strong and weak ties; (ii) the longer the length of ties, the lower is this effect. We approximate the social space by the geographical space. Ethnicity is the chosen dimension along which agents’ social contacts develop and, as a result, we use ethnic population density to capture social interactions within the given ethnic group. Using a panel of local authority-level data in England between 1993 and 2003, we find that (i) the higher the percentage of a given ethnic group living nearby, the higher the employment rate of this ethnic group; (ii) this effect decays very rapidly with distance, losing significance beyond approximately 90 minutes travel time.
The difference-in-differences (DID) estimator is one of the most popular tools for applied research in economics to evaluate
the effects of public interventions and other treatments of interest on some relevant outcome variables. However, it is well
known that the DID estimator is based on strong identifying assumptions. In particular, the conventional DID estimator requires
that, in the absence of the treatment, the average outcomes for the treated and control groups would have followed parallel
paths over time. This assumption may be implausible if pre-treatment characteristics that are thought to be associated with
the dynamics of the outcome variable are unbalanced between the treated and the untreated. That would be the case, for example,
if selection for treatment is influenced by individual-transitory shocks on past outcomes (Ashenfelter's dip). This article
considers the case in which differences in observed characteristics create non-parallel outcome dynamics between treated and
controls. It is shown that, in such a case, a simple two-step strategy can be used to estimate the average effect of the treatment
for the treated. In addition, the estimation framework proposed in this article allows the use of covariates to describe how
the average effect of the treatment varies with changes in observed characteristics.
Education, language and identity
- Irma Clots-Figueras
- Paolo Masella
Clots-Figueras, Irma and Paolo Masella. 2013. "Education, language and identity." The
Economic Journal 123 (570): F332-F357.
Social diversity and bridging identity". No. 1802. School of Economics Discussion Papers
- María García-Alonso
- Zaki Dc
- Wahhaj
García-Alonso, María DC and Zaki Wahhaj. 2018. "Social diversity and bridging identity".
No. 1802. School of Economics Discussion Papers.