Immigrant Naturalisation, Employment and Occupational Status in Western Europe

Rezart Hoxhaj,Tijana Prokic-Breuer,Maarten Vink

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3337679

Abstract

Does citizenship facilitate access to employment and higher status jobs? Existing case studies have produced mixed results across mostly single case studies in Europe and North America. To investigate whether this heterogeneity depends on varying institutional and socio-economic conditions, in this paper we analyse the labour market outcomes of immigrants who have naturalised in 13 West European countries. Our empirical analysis draws on data from the 2014 European Labour Force Survey Ad Hoc Module on immigrants. In order to cope with the selective nature of the naturalisation process, we employ a bivariate probit model that accounts for unobserved characteristics of naturalising immigrants. Our main results show a positive relationship across these destination countries between citizenship and the probability of employment for both immigrant men and women, as well as between citizenship and occupational status for men. Liberalising the access to citizenship does not diminish the positive returns on employment from naturalisation. For immigrant men there is evidence of a trade-off between easier access to citizenship and the returns on occupational status.

Highlights

Citizenship acquisition is often viewed as a vehicle for the labour market integration of migrants
In order to cope with the selective nature of the naturalisation process, we employ in this paper a recursive bivariate probit model and the treatment effect method that account for unobserved characteristics of naturalising immigrants
The former type of immigrants is less relevant for the purpose of this analysis because the reasons to naturalise are often unrelated to the labour market (Vink et al, 2013)

Summary

Introduction

Citizenship acquisition is often viewed as a vehicle for the labour market integration of migrants. It is hard to draw general conclusions from these studies, given that there is considerable variation in terms of national context, the dependent variable and the type of data available 17, 18), there has been surprisingly little systematic attention to the question to what extent this heterogeneity is due to differences in contexts of study. While the variability of the effect of citizenship acquisition on labour market outcomes has often been noted

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