Céad Míle Fáilte: Attitude towards immigrants and experience of skilled non-nationals with integration into Irish labour market

Aim. Globalisation has opened the door to the international recruitment process that due to the lack of local human capital is run through immigration. This research investigates two key factors that influence successful incorporation of educated and skilled immigrants, the attitude of nationals and the integration of immigrants into the Irish working environment. The period of interest was 2002 – 2018. Methodology. In the quantitative part, research analysed secondary statistical data taken from the European Social Survey (ESS) and looked into factors influencing the attitude towards immigrants in Ireland. Identified factors such as affiliation to a minority ethnic group, gender, age, household income and satisfaction with the economic situation were explored and relations outlined. In the second qualitative part, research investigated the subjective experiences of highly skilled non-nationals, living and working in Ireland for at least ten years. For this purpose, we used semi-structured interviews to gather primary data and to investigate the experience of respondents with identified factors that helped immigrants to settle into the culture of a new home country. Findings. As expected, the attitude towards immigrants showed significant difference and was more positive for the group of non-nationals belonging to the ethnic group. Surprisingly but in alignment with previously proven data, men report more favourable attitudes to immigrants than women. In addition, age proved to be a significant factor affecting attitude and the most positive behaviour towards non-nationals was shown by participants in the age range 25-44. Both findings can be related to the achieved level of education, as those with an average higher education, men and young people, show more positive results. Two other analysed factors were feeling about the household income and satisfaction with the state of the economy. Examined data confirmed that with higher income and satisfaction with the current state of economy, the attitude improves. Our assumption was that the attitude directly influences the immigrant’s integration process. During the interview sessions with highly educated immigrants coming from less developed European countries, we discussed identified factors that directly influenced integration. The interview highlighted and discussed the main topics: the motivation and potential reasons for immigration, the experience with attitude towards immigrants, the immigration challenges and factors that helped immigrants to settle in, the influence of education and knowledge of language spoken locally on the integration process and the satisfaction with the employment terms and conditions. From the gathered immigrant’s subjective experiences and narrative content, the analysis of qualitative material showed importance of employment and income, the new home country and its economy but also the positive attitude towards immigrants. Conclusions and Recommendations. Despite extending the research over a longer time period and including expectance to uncover different and more subtle effects on migration, implication of findings, showed no significant difference and generally proved already existing data. In the recommendation section, researchers advised on implementing the best practices to the existing immigration policies and procedures on the country and company levels. It was acknowledged that many of these efforts has been already done, however following trends and improvements on a regular basis is highly recommended.