Integration and Subjective Well-being of Immigrants in the UK

The thesis comprises three research papers. The first paper examines the social and economic integration of immigrants (i.e., foreign-born) compared to the native-born in the UK. The findings for social integration suggest that immigrants have lower neighbourhood embeddedness (i.e., regular interactions and attachment to the neighbourhood), smaller social network size, and lower community involvement in terms of volunteering and charitable behaviour than natives. For economic integration, the findings show that immigrants have a higher probability of unemployment and lower probability of employment, homeownership, job security and work autonomy than natives. Additional analysis reveals that the differences between immigrants and natives across most indicators of social and economic integration are larger for non-white immigrants and those that have stayed for less than 10 years in the UK.
The second paper studies the subjective well-being of immigrants and natives. The findings show that immigrants have lower subjective well-being than natives and that the identified well-being gaps are higher for non-white immigrants and those with a longer length of stay. We find that some of the well-being gaps can be explained by the disadvantaged position of immigrants across the indicators of social and economic integration.
Finally, the third paper investigates the subjective well-being of immigrants during Covid-19. We find that the pandemic has negatively impacted the life satisfaction of immigrants more strongly than that of natives. Our findings also show that immigrants with low pre-pandemic neighbourhood embeddedness and small social networks suffered a larger decline in life satisfaction than natives while those with high neighbourhood embeddedness and large social network size remained relatively resilient to the adverse impact of Covid-19.
Overall, our empirical analysis contributes by building a representative picture of immigrants’ integration into multiple aspects of social and economic life in the UK. We add to existing research by showing how various aspects of social and economic integration help to explain some of the well-being gaps between immigrants and natives. Lastly, the thesis establishes that social integration may help to mitigate the adverse impact of crises like the Covid-19 pandemic on the subjective well-being of immigrants.