“It Wasn’t My Idea to Come Here”: Young Women Lack Ownership of the Idea to Immigrate

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Together with getting married and buying a house, the decision to immigrate is one of the most important decisions that a person can make.  So, it’s important that immigrants feel that they have satisfactory input into the process of deciding whether or not to migrate.  In some recent research, I looked at a very early stage of this decision-making process: ownership of the idea to immigrate.

I analysed survey data from 1,702 married immigrants to Australia. Each immigrant was asked “whose idea was it to emigrate to Australia?” Responses were coded as indicating either sole ownership (“It was my idea”), joint ownership with spouse or partner (“We thought of the idea together”), or no ownership (“It was my husband or wife’s idea”).

Surprisingly, I found gender, age, and cross-cultural differences on this very simple, early-stage measure of decision-making. Women were significantly less likely than men to claim ownership of the idea to immigrate, and this lack of ownership went on to predict women’s lack of satisfaction following their move to Australia.

In addition, young women and nonWestern women were less likely than older women and Western women to claim ownership of the idea to immigrate. This pattern of results may reflect a lack of power experienced by young and nonWestern women in their marriages.

The present findings do not imply that young or female immigrants were in any way forced or coerced to migrate to Australia.  However, they do provide some cause for concern, especially given that ownership of the idea to immigrate appears to predict subsequent satisfaction in the new country.

This research has been officially accepted for publication in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, which is a top quality journal, ranked in the top third of sociology journals. For further information, please see the following article: 

Rubin, M. (2013). “It wasn’t my idea to come here!”: Ownership of the idea to immigrate as a function of gender, age, and culture International Journal of Intercultural Relations DOI: 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2013.02.001

Note: The views expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Australian Government's Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

Prejudice Against Migrants: Is It Because They're Too Hard to Think About?

In some recent research, my colleagues and I showed that bias against migrants is related to how easy people find it to think about migrants.

We asked research participants to imagine a situation in which people were randomly divided into two very abstract social groups called “Group A” and “Group B”. Participants then imagined that, through a process of random selection, some people stayed in their original group (i.e., non-migrant individuals) and some people changed to the other group (i.e., migrants). Surprisingly, even under these artificial conditions, participants were biased against people who changed groups. They rated migrants as possessing fewer positive qualities (e.g., honest, attractive, friendly) and more negative qualities (e.g., unintelligent, aggressive, rude) than people who stayed in their original group. In addition, people who found it difficult to think about migrants showed a stronger bias than people who found it easy to think about migrants. These findings suggest that migrant bias may be related to the ease or difficulty that people have in thinking about migrants: People may not like migrants, in part, because they find them more difficult to process cognitively.

For example, consider a Mexican man who is living in Mexico and who then moves to live in America (although it could be anyone who moves from their home country to go to live in another country). To begin with, the Mexican is located in a predictive context – Mexico– and so people find him easy to think about or cognitively process. However, after he has moved to America, he becomes a migrant and his residence in America puts him in a nonpredictive context which makes him relatively difficult to process.

Our research suggests that these sorts of differences in cognitive processing fluency may be at least partly responsible for bias against migrants: People may dislike migrants partly because they find them more difficult to process. This area of research is in its infancy, and an obvious next step is to investigate whether our results generalize from abstract, laboratory-based migrants to migrants in the real world.

For further information, please see the following journal article: Rubin, M., Paolini, S., & Crisp, R. (2010). A processing fluency explanation of bias against migrants Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46 (1), 21-28 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2009.09.006

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project DP0556908). However, the views expressed above are not necessarily those of the Australian Research Council.