It is apparent from the foregoing section that if strength of connection to the labour market is measured in terms of rate of employment, then the connection was relatively weak for non-Western immigrants. It may be difficult to see to what extent this was due to an increasing number of new immigrants, who often tended to have a rather limited connection to the labour market at the outset of their stay in Denmark, and to what extent it was due to differences in how well people arriving in Denmark at different points in time succeeded on the labour market. However, Denmark possesses register data covering a long period, and
this can be used to elucidate this issue. One method of doing this is exemplified in Figure 5.3, which shows the rates of participation in the labour market according to the number of years immigrants have resided in Denmark.
Figure 5.3. Rates of participation in the labour market for men aged 16-66 (inclusive) from non-Western countries according to date of immigration to Denmark and duration of residence.
20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
Number of years in Denmark
1973-1975 1978-1980 1983-1985 1988-1990 1993-1995 1998-2000 2001-2003
Source: Own calculations based on register data from Statistics Denmark.
The reason for showing the rate of participation in the labour market rather than the rate of employment is that the rate of employment is very sensitive to the business cycle. A comparison of the degrees of attachment to the labour market for various cohorts of immigrants identified by year of entry to Denmark therefore requires the rate of employment to be viewed in relation to the general level of employment for Danes for each year. This can be achieved in an almost equivalent way by keeping the unemployment rate out of the picture and examining the level of participation in the labour force.
Calculations were made of the rate of participation in the labour market for immigrants who arrived in Denmark during the period 1973-75 from their 5th to their 33rd years after arrival, using data from the period 1980-2007. The calculations were based on data for all immigrants who were between the ages of 16 and 66 during the relevant years. In the case of the cohorts of immigrants arriving from 1978 to 1980, calculations were made from the 1st to the 29th years after arrival.
The figure shows that non-Western male immigrants who came to Denmark in the period 1973-75 had a high level of participation in the labour market from their fifth to their thirty-third years of residence, after which the rate slowly declined. This fall may simply be age related, in that the average age in the group aged between 16 and 66 rose from 33 early in the period to almost 50 at
the end of it. Men who arrived in the period 1978-80 also had a high level of participation in the labour market, this being at over 80% from their fifth to their fourteenth years after arrival in Denmark.
The rate of participation in the labour market for male non-Western immigrants who arrived in Denmark between 1983 and 1985 was very different from that of the earlier arrivals. While the non-Western men who immigrated to Denmark between 1978 and 1980 had a high level of participation in the labour market from as early as the first year after their arrival, those who immigrated between 1983 and 1985 took significantly longer to find their feet as members of the workforce. Only after nine years in Denmark did the rate of participation in the labour market rise just above 70%. For any given duration of residence in the country, the rate was lower than for those who arrived in 1978-80.
A very similar pattern can be observed for men from non-Western countries who arrived in Denmark between 1988 and 1990, in that even after 18 years their rate of participation in the labour market remained lower than that for male immigrants who arrived in the period 1978-1985. This trend continued among male immigrants who arrived in 1993-95; after 13 years in Denmark, they still had a lower rate of participation in the labour market than those who arrived in 1988-1990.
Over the short period that it has been possible to observe the two subsequent cohorts of immigrants, the results suggest that the trend towards an ever- declining level of participation in the labour market among the most recently arrived immigrants has been halted. Explanations for this apparent change in the pattern may lie in the upswing in the business cycle and the decline in the number of immigrants from non-Western countries arriving in Denmark after 2002. In addition, there have been more intensive efforts by politicians to get immigrants out into the labour market.
Nevertheless, there remains a large gap between the rate of participation in the labour market for the recently arrived cohorts and that of the non-Western male immigrants who arrived in Denmark in the 1970s. The level of participation in the labour market among non-Western males who arrived in 2001-2003 was actually 12 percentage points lower after six years of residence than for those who arrived in 1973-75 after the same length of time.
An equivalent study of non-Western women shows that the rate of participation in the labour market was lower for women than for men, but that for women as well as men the immigrants who arrived earliest in Denmark had the highest rate of participation in the labour market. Moreover, the trend towards a declining level of participation again seems to have been halted with the more recent arrivals.
The correlation found between the rate of participation in the labour market and the duration of residence for non-Western immigrants is not altered to any significant degree depending on whether the 12 new EU countries from Eastern and Southern Europe are counted as Western or non-Western countries.
5.4. Distribution of employment categories among immigrants from