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Immigration and Occupational Mobility of Native Workers in Spain. A Gender Perspective

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Abstract

This paper studies the economic effect of immigration on native working conditions, focusing on the impact of the inflow of immigrant labour on occupational mobility among native workers. Basing on a gender-segmented labour market, we propose an extension of the model presented by Peri and Sparber American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 1(3), 135-169, (2009). The model controls for gender and time in order to check for potential differences in immigration effects associated with gender or immigrant length of residence. This research reveals the existence of such differences, by showing that female immigrant inflow has a greater positive short-term impact on occupational mobility among female unskilled native workers. In addition, the long-term study discloses a slight occupational assimilation of male immigrants towards employment patterns of male native workers and a permanent confinement of female immigrants in a few “niche jobs”.

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Notes

  1. Low-skilled workers are considered as those who do not have a university degree.

  2. Under the assumption that competition between native and immigrant workers occurs in low-skilled jobs, the model focuses, for the sake of simplicity, on goods requiring only low-skilled factors of production. This leads to the implicit assumption that goods requiring high-skilled factors of production are produced by highly qualified native workers. For this reason, capital is not included in the production function.

  3. Given that the INE replaced CNO-94 with CNO-11 in the first quarter of 2011, we decided to convert the data for 2011 into CNO-94, using the conversion table provided by the same source, and thus enable comparison of our results for the 3 years of the sample period.

  4. These are incorporated by means of dummy variables. Age takes a value of 1 when the average age for the province is higher than the national average. Educational attainment is included by means of a dummy variable based on provincial percentages of workers without a university degree, which takes a value of 1 if there is a higher percentage than the national average. The expected sign of the coefficient of these two dummies is negative for the first and positive for the second. Thus, a provincial working population that is older and more highly educated than the national average brings about a reduction in the proportion of native workers employed in manual jobs.

  5. Note that \( Ln{\left(\frac{M}{NM}\right)}_{N, it}\kern0.5em =Ln{\left(\frac{\frac{M}{N+NM}}{\frac{NM}{N+NM}}\right)}_{N, it}\kern0.5em =Ln{\left(\frac{N}{N+NM}\right)}_{N, it}-Ln{\left(\frac{N}{N+NM}\right)}_{N, it} \); therefore, it should be the case that β = β M − β NM.

  6. Besides, we have tested previously whether the fixed effects model proves more suitable than a pooled panel data one, and it has been verified that the specification of the model is improved if heterogeneity among provinces and periods is taken into account. Both effects, individual and temporal, are significant. Heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation and normality are also tested. Results suggest that errors have a normal distribution and they are not correlated. Heteroscedasticity is detected in panel data analysis, so heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors are used.

  7. With a view to analyzing the robustness of these results, we also estimated Eq. (5). We confirmed that the relative provision of non-manual tasks by native workers, both male and female, increases as the proportion of immigrant workers increases. The results are not shown here for reasons of space but they are available on request to the authors.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (EHU14/46). We also would like to thank Felipe Serrano and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and helpful suggestions.

Compliance with Ethical Standards

ᅟ

Funding

The study was funded by Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (EHU14/46).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Economics V, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Lehendakari Agirre, 83, 48015, Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain

    Leire Aldaz Odriozola & Begoña Eguía Peña

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  1. Leire Aldaz Odriozola
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  2. Begoña Eguía Peña
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Correspondence to Leire Aldaz Odriozola.

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Aldaz Odriozola, L., Eguía Peña, B. Immigration and Occupational Mobility of Native Workers in Spain. A Gender Perspective. Int. Migration & Integration 17, 1181–1193 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-015-0459-4

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