The Invisible Second Generation? Statistical Discrimination and Immigrant Stereotypes in Employment Processes in Norway

AbstractAlthough children of immigrants usually have acquired fluency in the majority language as well as domestic educational qualifications and work experience, recent quantitative and experimental studies indicate that the ‘second generation’ experiences discrimination in accessing entry-level jobs in Europe. In this article, I take as my point of departure a field experiment documenting that descendants of Pakistani immigrants indeed face discrimination in the Norwegian labour market, and use data from in-depth interviews with 42 of the employers subjected to research in the experiment to explore the decision-making processes leading to the disadvantages observed. The qualitative material suggests that stereotypes associated with immigrants are inferred from ethnically distinct names by employers, and that negative experiences are generalised between ethnic groups and across generations. The implications for the employment opportunities of children of immigrants are potentially severe. Instead of experiencing equal access to the labour market, they encounter attitudes and stereotypes attached to their parents' generation, making their domestic educational qualifications and linguistic fluency ‘invisible’ in the eyes of employers.Keywords: Ethnic DiscriminationSecond Generation ImmigrantsField ExperimentEmployer InterviewsStereotypes AcknowledgementsThis article is the result of a research project conducted at the Institute for Social Research, Oslo and funded by the Ministry of Children, Equality and Social Inclusion in Norway. Jon Rogstad was the head of the project and developed the research design. I wish to thank Devah Pager, Grete Brochmann and two anonymous referees for valuable comments on an earlier draft of the article, Karen Levy for editorial assistance and Idunn Brekke, Erika B. Sterri and Ida Kvittingen for research assistance in collecting the experimental data.Notes1 Following Alba and Waters (Citation2011), Portes and Rumbaut (Citation2005) and Thomson and Crul (Citation2007), I use a broad definition of the second generation in this article, to include both individuals born in their immigrant parents' destination country and individuals that immigrated before adolescence in the definition.2 In 2009, children of Pakistani immigrants constituted 34.3% of the second generation in Norway, followed by children of immigrants from Vietnam (12.1%), Turkey (9.5%) and India (6.4%) (Statistics Norway Citation2011, 11).3 See Petersen (Citation2008) and Tetlock and Mitchell (Citation2008) for important critique of theories of unconscious or implicit discrimination.4 Pakistani names were chosen to operationalise ‘ethnic minority background’ in the field experiment because individuals with Pakistani origin constitute the largest and oldest group among children of immigrants in Norway and currently are entering the labour market.