This article contributes to previous research on immigrant integration by examining how religiosity and gender roles in European countries influence immigrant women’s labor market outcomes. Moreover, we extend theoretical work on the importance of the receiving country’s norms and values by hypothesizing and testing whether receiving countries’ influence varies with immigrant women’s religiosity and gender-role attitudes. Using the European Social Survey data and multilevel regression models, we find that religious immigrant women participate less in the labor market and work fewer hours than nonreligious immigrant women. Immigrant women’s traditional gender-role attitudes partly explain the negative relationship between individual religiosity and labor market outcomes. While the receiving country’s religiosity is negatively related to immigrant women’s labor market outcomes, this negative relationship is significantly weaker for religious and gender-traditional immigrant women than for nonreligious and gender-egalitarian women. These findings suggest that the economic benefits of residing in countries that support female employment are limited to immigrant women who are ready and positioned to embrace gender-egalitarian norms and values.

This article investigates European majority members’ perceptions of the prevalence of ethnic discrimination. We use individual-level data from the Eurobarometer ‘Discrimination in the EU’ series, covering 26 European countries and six years (2006, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2015, and 2019), enriched with contextual information on political elite discourses from the Comparative Manifesto Project. We shed light on significant and substantive cross-country and cross-temporal variations in these perceptions. Next, we explore how these variations are related to national political elite discourses by employing multilevel models. By disentangling between and within country variations, we find that particularly changes in political elite discourses within countries over time are associated with variations in majority members’ beliefs about the prevalence of ethnic discrimination in their society. Exclusive discourses, which emphasize nationalistic ideas and demarcate strong boundaries between ethnic groups, are associated with majority members thinking that ethnic discrimination is less widespread in their country. The reverse holds for inclusive discourses: when political elites underline the importance of cultural diversity and multiculturalism, majorities perceive more ethnic discrimination. While these discourses are only related to within country variations, our descriptive and multilevel results show that the national context matters for majorities’ perceptions of the prevalence of ethnic discrimination.