Access to parenting leaves for recent immigrants: a cross-national view of policy architecture in Europe

Abstract

Parenting leaves play a crucial part in supporting women’s labour force participation as well as men’s participation in infant care. A major question is who has access to such leave policies and earlier research has pointed out large variations in eligibility. This article focuses on the leaves that are available to recently arrived immigrants, parents who are in a specific situation of being in transition between systems. Using information from the database of leave policies, the International Review of Leave Policies and Research 2021 (leavenetwork.org), we map eligibility and entitlements in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the UK, all countries with tiered systems of parenting leave entitlement as well as relatively large recent immigrant populations. Our findings indicate that the leave policies available to recent immigrants can be patchwork in nature and of a very different generosity to the benefits available to many other parents. In addition, the benefits available to this group are often (even) more gendered and perhaps suggest a fall back to a policy logic of maternalism. We discuss how parenting leave may facilitate (or not) an exit from the early vulnerable stage that many immigrant parents face during the first few years in a new country.