Abstract
This article examines the occupational mobility of immigrants between their countries of origin and Spain on the basis of one of the few surveys available internationally with longitudinal information on immigrant employment in home and host countries. The evidence shows that the occupational status of immigrants in the Spanish labour market is, in general, substantially worse than in their countries of origin. The severe loss of occupational status experienced by immigrants is explained by the combined effect of the intense initial downgrading they experience when entering the Spanish labour market and their very slow occupational progress during their stay in Spain. These findings are more in line with the segmented assimilation theory, which suggests a limited or blocked immigrant occupational mobility, than with the assimilation theory, which predicts a U shaped evolution in the occupational status of immigrants between their home and host countries. As a result, the Spanish case contrasts sharply with previous evidence for other advanced countries, which tends to support the assimilation perspective. Finally, the empirical evidence suggests that one of the elements impeding the occupational mobility of immigrants in Spain is the significant size of the secondary segment of the labour market, which restricts immigrants’ opportunities mainly to low-status occupations.
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Notes
In 2006, skilled occupations represented 32 % of the total employment in Spain, semi-skilled occupations represented 54 % of the total employment and unskilled occupations represented 15 %. These values are far from the usual structure in developed countries: for the OECD average, skilled occupations represented 40 % of total employment, semi-skilled occupations represented 51 % and unskilled occupations represented 9 % (OECD 2008a).
The literature on immigrant assimilation reports the limited transferability of human capital acquired by immigrants in their country of origin (Chiswick 1978; Borjas 1985, 1995; Friedberg 2000). One basic reason for the low valuation of immigrant human capital lies in an insufficient command of the language of the new country that conditions the productivity of the rest of the immigrant’s skills. Additionally, the education system in the country of origin may suffer from shortcomings that translate into a lower quality of education acquired in origin by immigrants, while the work experience gained in origin might mean that the human capital acquired is specific to that country. As a result, the human capital imported by immigrants is comparatively less productive and job market opportunities and wages are worse than those for natives with similar levels of human capital.
There are several theories that explain the existence of discrimination in the labour market against collectives as immigrants: the taste for discrimination model (Becker 1957), the statistical theory of discrimination (Phelps 1972), and the crowding-out hypothesis (Bergmann 1974). Discriminatory practices both by employers and institutions in the case of immigrants may exist particularly if they are visibly distinct from the native population (Burstein 1994). Evidence documenting discrimination in the labour market against immigrants can be found in Zegers de Beijl (2000) and Siniver (2011).
From a different perspective, Simón et al. (2008) observed that occupational segregation is one of the main reasons for the significant gap in average earnings between immigrants and natives.
More detailed information on the contents of the ENI, the sample design and the data collection procedure used is available at the web page of the Spanish National Statistics Institute (www.ine.es).
The final sample included 15,465 interviews from a theoretical sample size of 17,700 households. The contact rate of the survey was approximately 88 %, and the cooperation rate was nearly 55 % (thus, 32,541 households were visited to obtain the mentioned number of interviews, giving a response rate of 48 %, which is a usual value in voluntary household surveys). Moreover, it is important to highlight that the comparison of the results provided by the ENI and other sources like the Labour Force Survey, and the Municipal Population Register shows no significant differences in relation to the characteristics of immigrant population.
It must be noted that in the case of the ENI, in which the occupational breakdown covers 20 occupations, it takes values between 16 and 70. More details on the occupational breakdowns used in the empirical analysis and the values of the status of occupations according to the ISEI scale can be found in Table 11 of the “Appendix”.
Despite these advantages, this international index of occupational status has barely been used previously for the examination of occupational mobility of immigrants. To our knowledge, the only precedent is Akresh (2008).
Developed countries include the European Union-15 countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom), Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Cyprus, Malta, the small European principalities, the United States, Canada, Israel, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. All other countries have been considered developing countries.
The corresponding dichotomous variable reflects, in particular, whether immigrants have any of the following documents: permanent residency authorisation; temporary residency authorisation; European Union residence permit (except in the case of Romanian and Bulgarian workers who, despite being European Union citizens, could not become legally contracted workers in Spain temporarily at the time of the survey); refugee status or asylum application. This category also includes immigrants whose nationality is Spanish but who come from other European Union member states (excluding Bulgaria and Romania) or from non-European Union members of the European Free Trade Association (i.e. Liechtenstein, Iceland, Switzerland and Norway), given the free mobility of workers among these countries.
Reher et al. (2008) provides a complete description of immigrants according to the ENI survey.
We follow here the terminology of OECD (2008a) on the types of occupations in terms of their skill level. Note that with the occupational breakdown in the ENI, there is a particular occupation for which is not possible to assign a specific level of qualification.
We thank an anonymous referee for the suggestion of exploiting heterogeneity in the size of the secondary segment for Spanish regions.
Although comparisons between the native population and the migrants can be distorting, given their plausibly different characteristics in terms of age, gender and education, this result is consistent with the evidence in Dustmann and Frattini (2011). These authors use the ISEI to compare the occupational status of natives and immigrants in European Union-15 countries and find that, even after controlling for the observed characteristics of both groups in terms of gender, regional distribution, age and education, the occupational disadvantage of immigrants in Spain is comparatively high.
Note that when the variable years of residence in Spain is included in the model, the variable related to the age approximates the effect of potential experience in the country of origin.
These models have been estimated only for immigrants changing their job during their stay in Spain.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support received from the Spanish Ministries of Science and of Economy and Competitiveness through the projects ECO2010-16006, ECO2010-16934 and CSO2011-29943-C03-02 and from the Catalan Government through the project 2010 ARF1 00044.
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Simón, H., Ramos, R. & Sanromá, E. Immigrant Occupational Mobility: Longitudinal Evidence from Spain. Eur J Population 30, 223–255 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-014-9313-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-014-9313-1