Language proficiency and immigrants’ employment outcomes in Spain

Abstract

This paper analyses the impact of Spanish proficiency on first generation immigrants’ employment outcomes, based on the Spanish Labour Force Survey 2014 ad hoc module on “labour market situation of migrants and their immediate descendants”. Proficiency in Spanish enhances immigrants’ employability, particularly for immigrants from non-Spanish-speaking countries, as well as on occupation prestige, measured via ISEI (International Socio-Economic Index). This latter result is often less clear because of occupational segregation in the Spanish labour market amongst workers from different regions of the world, but it turns significant when endogeneity in language skills is taken into account via simultaneous equation models.