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The effects of international migration on well-being of natives and immigrants: evidence from Germany, Switzerland and the UK

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Abstract

International migration, especially in recent years, has reached the top of the national and global political agendas because of its significant economic, social, and cultural implications in both sending and receiving countries. However, little is known about the impact of migration on migrants’ well-being. In this study, we aim to investigate the effect of net migration rates on the objective and subjective well-being of both natives and immigrants. The empirical analysis relies on micro-level data derived from household surveys in Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. We estimate various regression models, and we perform the estimates across gender, education and moving status, and between natives and first-generation migrants. The results are mixed and vary by country. In particular, we find a positive impact of migration on both native’s and migrants’ well-being in Germany, while a negative effect on life satisfaction of Swiss natives is revealed. Immigrants in Switzerland are happier, while migration has no impact on natives’ and immigrants’ well-being in the UK. However, the results vary according to the education and population density of immigrants in an area. Moreover, after some point, additional increases in net migration rates may negatively affect the well-being of respondents in Germany. The findings have social and economic implications highlighting the importance of economic infrastructure and people’s perceptions of migration, where migration flows may benefit host societies up to some degree. Moreover, the findings may provide insights into migration policies and their impact on the economic and socio-cultural integration of migrants into the host society.

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Fig. 1

Source: EUROSTAT Statistics and Authors’ calculations in STATA

Fig. 2

Source: EUROSTAT Statistics and Authors’ calculations in STATA

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Availability of data and material

Germany: The data used in this publication were made available to us by the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Berlin. We would like to thank Philipp Kaminsky – Alisa Fränkel at the SOEP Hotline for their support and for providing us with the data. Switzerland: The authors would like to thank Denise Bloch at FORS, Bureau 5614 Quartier UNIL‐Mouline Bâtiment Géopolis 1015 Lausanne for providing us with access to the Swiss Household Panel Survey Data (SHP) Waves 1–15, 2000–2017. United Kingdom: The empirical analysis for the UK was based on data from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS), Waves 1–7, 2009–2017 produced by the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and supplied by the UK Data Archive. The data are the copyright of ISER. The use of the data in this work does not imply the endorsement of ISER, ESRC or the UK Data Archive in relation to the interpretation or analysis of the data.

Code availability

The STATA do files are available upon request from the author.

Notes

  1. For Switzerland, the statistics are available at https://www.bfs.admin.ch/, while for the UK, the data can be found at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity.

  2. For additional description and more details on how to obtain the data you can see https://www.diw.de/en/soep; Wagner et al. (2007).

  3. For more details you can see https://forscenter.ch/projects/swiss-household-panel/

  4. Due to word and space limitation we present more details and further discussion on the results in the supplementary material.

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Acknowledgements

This study was presented in the 34th Eurasia Business and Economic (EBES) Conference on 7th January in Athens. The author would like to thank the participants for their valuable comments and feedback that improved the quality of the paper. Any remaining errors or omissions remain the responsibility of the author.

Funding

This paper has been produced benefiting from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action 2236 Co-Funded Brain Circulation Scheme2 (CoCirculation2) of TÜBİTAK (Project No: 119C017), which has been funded under the FP7-PEOPLE-2011-COFUND call of the 7th Framework Programme. The author is grateful for the financial support received. However, the entire responsibility of the paper belongs to the owner of the paper. The financial support received from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) does not mean that the context of the paper is approved in a scientific sense by TÜBİTAK.

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  1. Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Department of International Trade and Business, Izmir Bakircay University, Menemen, İzmir, Turkey

    Eleftherios Giovanis

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Correspondence to Eleftherios Giovanis.

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Informed consent was not sought and not required for the present study because the analysis is based on secondary data, as described above.

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Giovanis, E. The effects of international migration on well-being of natives and immigrants: evidence from Germany, Switzerland and the UK. SN Bus Econ 2, 45 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43546-022-00230-5

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