Brexit at the Workplace: EU Nationals More Severely Discriminated by Employers in Regions with a Stronger Support for Leave in the Referendum

On 23 June 2016, more than 17 million voters cast their preference for the UK to leave the European Union (EU). The desire to take back control over immigration was a key issue in the public debate leading to the ‘Brexit’ referendum, which was won by the Leave campaign by a slim margin. The British Government, at the time led by Theresa May, pledged that EU nationals lawfully residing in the country would be granted the right to stay and offered an easy route to settlement. However, administrative and legal uncertainty remained about how to formally regulate their status. Alarmingly, a sharp rise in racially or religiously aggravated hate crimes was observed in Britain around the time of the referendum (Home Office 2017). Next to evidence from police records, qualitative studies of EU nationals pointed to episodes of bullying, harassment, verbal abuse and name-calling in several life domains, including access to employment. Moreover, EU nationals trying to gain long-term residence rights encountered a generally hostile environment when dealing with the UK Immigration Service. In this study, we examine whether EU nationals face a similarly hostile environment when applying for jobs. We draw on a field experiment on hiring discrimination conducted in Britain in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum, between August 2016 and December 2017. We sent fictitious applications to employers and randomly assigned either British-sounding or foreign-sounding names to the applications. As the applications were otherwise identical in terms of skills, qualifications and job-related characteristics, we interpret differences in the responses (callbacks) received by White British applicants and those received by applicants of European ancestry as evidence of discrimination. We restrict our analysis to England: this is where Leave registered the most sizeable advantage. Our contribution to the literature is twofold. First, we add to an emerging line of research on the impact of Brexit on the (subjective and objective) vulnerability experienced by EU nationals in the aftermath of the referendum. We provide causal evidence that both applicants from EU12 countries and applicants from Eastern Europe are less likely to receive a callback than White British applicants. Second, our findings confirm evidence from previous studies, so far conducted in Sweden only (Carlsson and Eriksson 2017; Carlsson and Rooth 2012), of a link between public opinion on immigrants (here proxied by the referendum vote) and the ethnic discrimination recorded in field experiments. We show that employers were more likely to discriminate against EU nationals in regions where support for Leave was stronger. Importantly, our analysis reveals that EU12 nationals, but not Eastern Europeans, were treated on par with the White British group in the Greater London Area, where support for Leave was at its lowest. The difference in treatment experienced by EU nationals facing the same administrative and legal uncertainty rules out the possibility that employers were refraining from calling back EU nationals merely out of concerns over their settlement status. Taste-based theories of hiring discrimination likely provide a more fitting explanation for the patterns we observe.