The effects of international migration on the well-being of native populations in Europe

Abstract

Very little is understood about how immigrants affect the happiness, or subjective well-being of natives. We use the European Social Survey to analyze the effects of aggregate immigration flows on the subjective well-being of native-born populations in a panel of 26 countries between 2002 and 2010. We find that recent immigrant flows have a nonlinear, yet overall positive impact on the well-being of natives, with the largest effects coming from immigrant flows arriving in the previous year. Our results are small in magnitude and in practical application; only large immigrant flows would affect native well-being significantly. JEL codes: F22, I31, O15

Local-level immigration and life satisfaction: The EU enlargement experience in England and Wales

“…This subsection provides a brief overview of its main extant contributions. Betz and Simpson (2013) Importantly, the results are driven by the younger and mid-age respondent groups, while no statistically significant relationship between immigrant diversity and subjective wellbeing is found for older respondents (age 50+).…”

“…Since the BHPS follows the same people over time, we can estimate fixed effects regression models that take account of the potentially confounding impact of time-invariant individual characteristics. Our paper contributes to the nascent literature on the effects of immigration and diversity on the subjective well-being of native populations (Betz and Simpson, 2013;Longhi, 2014;Akay at al., 2014;Akay et al, 2017), the detailed review of which we provide in the next section, as well as to the broader, rapidly growing literature on subjective well-being and migration. 6 We also add to the literature studying the relative importance of individual and 6 See Simpson (2013) for an overview, Ivlevs (2015) for a review of the effects of subjective well-being on the emigration decision, Nikolova and Graham (2015) for a review of the effects of international migration on regional variation in subjective well-being, as well as the regional and local-level determinants of it.…”

Cultural diversity and subjective well-being

“…Finally, rather than restricting the analysis on the impact that diversity has on natives, this paper also analyses the impact that diversity has on ethnic minorities and foreign born people since it is possible that people belonging to a minority perceive the costs and benefits of diversity differently than people belonging to the majority. This paper is related to research by Betz and Simpson (2013) and Akay et al (2012). Betz and Simpson (2013) use cross-section data from the European Social Survey to analyse the impact of immigration on well-being of natives across European countries.…”

“…This paper is related to research by Betz and Simpson (2013) and Akay et al (2012). Betz and Simpson (2013) use cross-section data from the European Social Survey to analyse the impact of immigration on well-being of natives across European countries. They find that immigration, and especially recent immigrants, have a positive but very small impact on well-being of natives.…”

Emigration, remittances, and the subjective well-being of those staying behind

“…Second, we contribute to the broader literature exploring the links between migration and subjective well-being (typically measured with life satisfaction and happiness). 6 While existing studies have examined the relationship between immigration and the subjective well-being of migrantreceiving populations (Akay et al 2014a, 2017a, Betz and Simpson, 2013Ivlevs and Veliziotis 2018;Longhi 2014), the impact of home-country conditions on migrants' happiness abroad (Akay et al 2017b), migration's consequences for migrants' subjective well-being , as well as the effects of subjective wellbeing on the decision to emigrate (Cai et al 2014;Graham and Markowitz 2011;Ivlevs 2015;Otrachshenko and Popova 2014), we add to this literature by looking at the effects of emigration on the well-being of those staying behind in the countries of origin.…”