Abstract
Much has been written about the labour market outcomes for immigrants in their host countries, particularly with regard to earnings, employment and occupational attainment. However, much less attention has been paid to the question of whether immigrants are as likely to receive employer-provided training relative to comparable natives. As such training should be crucial in determining the labour market success of immigrants in the long run it is a critically important question. Using data from a large-scale survey of employees in Ireland, we find that immigrants are less likely to receive training from employers, with immigrants from the New Member States of the EU experiencing a particular disadvantage. The immigrant training disadvantage arises in part from a failure on the part of immigrants to get employed by training-oriented firms. However, they also experience a training disadvantage relative to natives within firms where less training is provided.
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Notes
For example, as return migration is a common phenomenon, employers may think that there is a significant probability that immigrant workers will eventually return home.
We go on to explicitly test for the relative importance of these two effects.
We are grateful to the Editor for pointing this out.
While the NES survey was of enterprises with 3 plus employees, the results were calibrated to the Quarterly National Household Survey (QNHS) employment data for employees (excluding agriculture, forestry and fishing), which covers all employees.
Only employers with more than three employees were surveyed and the data were collected at the enterprise level.
This refers to the 10 countries which joined the EU on 1 May 2004. Citizens of these countries had full access to Ireland’s labour market from the date of accession.
Fuller descriptions of the variables are given in Appendix Table 15.
This relates to participating in broad training and/or any of five other measures of training.
Both sector and occupation were controlled for by the inclusion of dummy variables generated using 1 digit codes based on the NACE (sector) and UKSOC (occupation) classification systems.
As is the case with dummy variables related to sector etc. which will not vary within firms, the model drops at least one firm-level dummy to allow the estimation of other firm-level invariant effects such as firm-size and sector.
As indicated by the magnitude of the pseudo R squared statistics.
We should note that while these may be non-English speaking countries, the immigrants from them may well be good English speakers.
Central Statistics Office (2009) shows, for example, that of the social security numbers issued to immigrants from the NMS in 2005, almost a half of these numbers were “inactive” by 2008, where inactive means that no taxes were being paid or welfare claimed.
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We would like to acknowledge the funding provided by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences under the Government of Ireland Thematic Research Project Grants Scheme. We would also like to acknowledge helpful comments from two anonymous referees and the Editor. The usual disclaimer applies. Any views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily of the ESRI or CBI
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Barrett, A., McGuinness, S., O’Brien, M. et al. Immigrants and Employer-provided Training. J Labor Res 34, 52–78 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12122-012-9148-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12122-012-9148-7