We also find that, contrary to the common expectation, employers were
more, rather than less, likely to be anti-immigration than the rest in sec-
tors where foreign workers were highly present, such as household activities,
construction, wholesale, hotels and restaurants. We speculate that small em-
ployers were responsible for the higher probability of being restrictive among
employers than the others in these sectors. Employers are less likely to ben-
efit from access to cheap labor if they are not hiring many workers. But
since large employers can benefit from it, small employers would become less
competitive in the output market. Thus, immigration might hurt small em-
ployers indirectly by making large employers more competitive. However,
by using ESS Round 1, we did not find any pattern that depends on the size
of employer in terms of the number of employees.
One major weakness of the analysis is that we did not have a reliable
measure of the employability of immigrant labor at the sector level in each
country. We suspect the main reason why we did not obtain any clear
pattern regarding employer × isb across the countries is that isb measures
the employability of immigrant labor in some sectors/countries but not in
others because immigration policy of each country would distort the flow of
foreign labor. Further investigation is necessary with a better measure of
the sectoral employability of migrant workers.
In conclusion, it is inappropriate to assume without careful analysis that
employers are pro-immigration because of potential benefits which economic
theory predicts them to receive. An investigation of the reasons why some
employers are more anti-immigration than the others is left for future re-
search.
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