Abstract
This paper examines why some Western European countries are more successful in integrating immigrants into the labour market than others. Using data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), we show how the country-specific immigrant composition and context of reception contribute to immigrants’ disadvantages across receiving countries. Because the data provide extensive information about relevant characteristics that were often considered unobservable, we can comprehensively model the immigrant composition in receiving countries. We find considerable cross-country differences in immigrants’ disadvantages, both in terms of employment and occupational status. Multivariate analyses highlight that a large part of this variation is explained by differences in immigrant compositions, whereas we find little evidence for context effects. Counterfactual simulations corroborate that the extent to which countries succeed with integrating immigrants into the labour market strongly depends on the composition of the immigrants that they receive.
Highlights
Europe receives almost one-third of the world’s immigrants
The coefficients obtained from model 1 show that immigrant men in Northwestern Europe face severe gross disadvantages in occupational status compared with natives
The aim of this study is to scrutinize why the incorporation of immigrants into the labour market is more successful in some Western European countries than in others
Summary
Europe receives almost one-third of the world’s immigrants. In total, the immigrant population in European countries amounts to a remarkable 78 million (United Nations, 2017). The new immigrant countries in Southern Europe have a large low-skilled sector and underground economy that supposedly provide immigrants with accessible, yet unfavourable jobs (Reyneri & Fullin, 2011) Given these differences in the context of reception, immigrants in the UK should have lower disadvantages than immigrants in Northwestern Europe, whereas in Southern Europe, immigrants should have relatively high chances of accessing employment but at the cost of lower occupational status. In addition to extensive background information, the survey includes direct measures of respondents’ cognitive skills These data make it possible to model the country-specific composition of immigrants with respect to their level of education, cognitive abilities, readiness to learn, host language usage, and years since migration. Juxtaposing these outcomes with those of natives yields immigrants’ counterfactual disadvantages
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