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.