Abstract
This article examines the labour market outcomes of immigrants in Spain, a country that has become a migration destination only since the end of the 1990s. Differentiating between first and second generation of immigrant descent, we compare the labour market involvement of the main ethnic groups with the majority group. One particular focus is to understand which minorities have been hit the hardest by the Great Recession. To this end, we use data from the European Union Labour Force Survey for the years 2008 and 2014, and more specifically the two ad-hoc modules on the labour market situation of migrants. Analysing men and women separately, we run a set of multivariate logistic regression models to control for compositional differences. In this way, we examine ethnic gaps not only in labour force participation but also in the degree of underutilisation of human capital, measured as workers’ level of over-education as well as the incidence of involuntary part-time employment. Our results show that while most origin groups do not show significantly lower employment participation than the majority group, the employment quality of immigrants in terms of involuntary part-time work and over-education is substantially worse, especially since the crisis.
Highlights
Over the last two decades, Spain has received an unprecedented inflow of migrants, from Latin America and Eastern Europe
We focus on three outcome measures: (1) participation in paid employment, (2) in involuntary part-time work, and (3) level of over-education
Compared to the majority group we do not find significant differences in the risk of over-education among immigrants who acquire their highest educational degree in Spain or those who managed to recognize their foreign degree. It seems that in Spain, contrary to other countries, the origin of human capital and the recognition of the foreign qualification is the most prominent determinant of over-education and has a larger impact than language difficulties. These results suggest that the difficulties that immigrants face to use their human capital acquired abroad in the Spanish labour market are attributable to the crisis but rather a structural problem
Summary
Over the last two decades, Spain has received an unprecedented inflow of migrants, from Latin America and Eastern Europe. As argued in the introduction to this thematic issue, the themes of economic integration and returns to human capital have been discussed to understand the socioeconomic situation of immigrants In this regard, we consider measures of employment quality that speak to the degree of integration of immigrants beyond the minimum threshold of holding a paid job. We consider measures of employment quality that speak to the degree of integration of immigrants beyond the minimum threshold of holding a paid job In this vein, the second labour market outcome examined in this article is involuntary part-time work, that is, working under a part-time contract due to the impossibility of finding a full-time job.
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