Policies Erode Benefits Gained by Marriage for Foreign-Born Individuals

According to new research by ILR Assistant Professor Tristan Ivory, intermarriage between foreign-born and native-born citizens provides clear labor market benefits for the foreign-born partner that change depending on the reception of immigrants in the host country. These findings are in line with a separate body of literature that illustrates that societies that have more welcoming immigration policies tend to lead to better outcomes for foreign-born individuals.

In his latest paper, Labor of Love: Immigrant–Native Intermarriage and Labor Force Outcomes Across European Union Member States, Ivory and his co-author, Chuling Adam Huang, Ph.D. ’26, used several data sources to examine whether a country’s policies affect the value of a foreign-born individual’s marriage to a native-born individual and, if so, to what degree. 

“We saw thousands of cases where negative immigration policies eroded the value of intermarriage,” Ivory said. “As countries became more hostile to outsiders, the value of being married to a native-born person decreased. It’s very directly tied.”

The authors analyzed substantive changes in immigrant occupational attainment across 20 European Union countries from 2008 to 2018 using individual-level, cross-sectional data from the European Union Labor Force Survey on occupational attainment, as well as country-level data from the European Social Survey on attitudes toward outsiders and the Migrant Integration Policy Index on integration policies. 

Their findings show that the association between intermarriage and an immigrant’s occupation status – the social and economic standing of a person based on their job or profession – is stronger in countries with more welcoming policies. Likewise, they found that individual attitudes toward outsiders had no significant effect on policy. 

“It’s not about attitudes, which is quite counterintuitive,” Ivory said. “The lay person would say, ‘If an immigrant has to interact with hostile people, that will limit their life chances,’ but individual opinions weren’t connected at all with the outcomes. It’s the policies that are important.”

Using occupational status, along with the moderating effect of policy, provided further evidence that closed societies impede immigrant integration while deepening immigrant marginalization.

“My hope is that this paper will serve as one tool in the toolkit for people to argue more forcefully for policies that would actually help to protect the interests of foreign-born people in an environment in which their rights are going to be under threat,” Ivory said. “This research shows that policy really matters in terms of deciding whether or not foreign-born people are going to have an equal shot at having a nice life. 

“That's something we should all take seriously.”