How Are ‘the Others’ Doing? Highly Skilled Latin American Immigrants and Economic Crisis in the US and Spain

Abstract

There is a tendency in the media to portray immigrants as a group of poor, low skilled people with little knowledge of the receiving country’s language or customs. While this general image might increase the natives’ awareness of the plight and problems of immigrants, it also leads to fear that immigrants profit from the financial resources of a country rather than contributing to the general wellbeing of the host society. One problem with this narrative is that it leaves aside an important part of the immigrant group, namely the highly skilled, a group that hardly can be described as using the resources rather than contributing to the welfare of the receiving country. In this chapter, we analyze the effects the 2008 economic crisis had on a subgroup of the highly skilled immigrants, namely Latin Americans in the United States and Spain. The general question that we want to answer is: what happens with this specific group of foreign born, with high human capital, during times of economic downturn? How affected are their unemployment and labor force participation rates by the Great Recession? Does the recession lead to marginalization or further marginalization of these immigrants? This paper is divided into three parts. In the first part, we introduce the topic and review the literature, focusing on the two dimensions of interest: human capital and context of reception. We use Iredale’s (2001) definition of high-skilled immigrants as those having at least a bachelor degree The second part presents and discusses the data on the labor force characteristics in the US and Spain and the third part includes the conclusion.