CHAPTER 12: A Model of Factors Thought to Influence Unfair Discrimination Against Immigrants in Organizations

Many industrialized countries (e.g., Europe, Japan, US) need immigrants today because they have low population growth, and face shortages of workers for specialized and non-specialized jobs. In spite of these needs, immigrants experience unfair discrimination in the employment process, and have difficulty gaining or maintaining jobs. Thus, we present a model of the factors thought to affect unfair discrimination against immigrants to ensure that individuals have fair employment opportunities. Our model is based on an integration of the Social Cognition Framework (Miller & Brewer, 1984), and the Theory of Intergroup Conflict (Stephan & Stephan, 1995). It predicts that immigrants are typically assigned to a category, and this categorization elicits stereotypes, perceptions of threat, anxiety, negative job expectancies and unfavorable employment decisions. It also argues that three factors affect the categorization process including the (a) attributes of immigrants, (b) attributes of raters, and the (c) nature of the job, and these factors interact to influence employment decisions. Based on our model, we offer hypotheses to guide future research on unfair discrimination against immigrants, and present several strategies that organizations might use to overcome biases against them.