Immigrant volunteering: A way out of labour market discrimination?

- We study whether volunteering by migrants lowers hiring discrimination against them.
- Fictitious job applications are sent to real vacancies in Belgium.
- Migration background and volunteering are randomly assigned to these applications.
- Our results indicate that volunteering fosters migrants' labour market integration.
- No unequal treatment is found between volunteering natives and volunteering migrants.

Many governments encourage migrants to participate in volunteer activities as a stepping stone to labour market integration. In the present study, we investigate whether this prosocial engagement lowers the hiring discrimination against them. To this end, we use unique data from a field experiment in which fictitious job applications are sent in response to real vacancies in Belgium. Ethnic origin and volunteer activities are randomly assigned to these applications. While non-volunteering native candidates receive more than twice as many job interview invitations as non-volunteering migrants, no unequal treatment is found between natives and migrants when they reveal volunteer activities.