Molly Dondero
Research Project
Work and Well-Being Among Immigrants in Europe : a life-course perspective
Project Abstract
As the share of Europe’s elderly—already one-fifth of the population—continues to increase, international migration is often invoked as a way to offset population decline due to aging by bringing in younger workers to fill labor force voids left by retired native-born workers. However, increasing proportions of immigrants across Europe are now themselves middle- and older-aged, posing questions about healthy aging for this population.
Work, a central social institution in modern life and a core “pull” factor for economic migrants, represents a critical context for understanding immigrants’ health and well-being. In addition to the financial benefits of employment, work also confers physical and psychosocial advantages and disadvantages that can affect one’s health and well-being. Moreover, for immigrants, work carries broader symbolic significance because it represents a form of institutional integration and belonging in the host country. Yet, despite a large literature linking work to health outcomes, work has been underexplored as a source of health disparities, especially for immigrant populations in high-income countries.
Across high-income immigrant-receiving countries, entrenched occupational segregation disproportionately funnels immigrants—especially from low-income countries— into riskier jobs with higher rates of illnesses, injuries, and fatalities and jobs that entail “dirty, demeaning, or dangerous” work, with implications for individual health and well-being and population-level health disparities, especially in middle and older age. Intersectional stratification processes further compound occupational segregation among immigrants, leading to different occupational experiences by gender, race/ethnicity, and other characteristics.
In addition, a growing body of research has shown various direct and indirect ways in which national and subnational immigrant integration policies affect immigrants’ well-being. Yet, considerably less research has examined whether and how restrictive or inclusive immigrant integration policies shape the occupational experiences of immigrants in ways that might affect their health and well-being. Moreover, little research has situated this topic in a life course perspective by considering how temporal factors such as age at migration and duration of residence in the host country might matter for occupational trajectories.
Project aims
With these motivations, my project examines the linkage between work and well-being among aging immigrants in Europe and the role that polices can play in reducing or exacerbating nativity disparities in exposure to physical and psychosocial occupational hazards.
Integrating life course theory with theories of immigrant integration, my project centers work as a critical well-being context for the growing population of middle- and older-aged immigrants in Europe by providing a cross-national perspective of immigrants’ occupational segregation by sociodemographic, life course, and country-level factors in 28 European countries. Specifically, my project uses quantitative survey data to examine 1) associations between nativity and adverse physical and psychosocial occupational conditions and 2) variation in these associations by gender, country of origin, life course factors, and national-level immigrant integration policies.
Results will advance knowledge about work as a social determinant of (un)healthy aging among immigrants and of the potential impacts of the aging immigrant population on host countries.
Biography
Molly Dondero is Associate Professor of Sociology at American University in Washington. D.C. She is a sociologist and social demographer whose research examines how population-level inequality in health and well-being emerges along three key axes of stratification—immigration, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status—in highly racially diverse societies. She has developed this broad focus through two lines of research over the past decade: 1) the consequences of immigration for health and well-being throughout the life course, and 2) racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in health and well-being. Her work research makes use of large-scale quantitative data sources to examine emerging and enduring social problems and articulate the complex structural forces that create and maintain inequality.
Current projects include a study of the association between state-level immigration policies and institutional integration among U.S. immigrants and their children, a study of how family, school, and neighborhood contexts shape the dietary behavior of Mexican children of immigrants in the U.S., and a study examining the social patterning of reproductive health consequences of the Zika epidemic and Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. Her work has been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Russell Sage Foundation. Prior to joining the faculty at American University, she was a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development postdoctoral fellow at the Population Research Institute at the Pennsylvania State University.
