Paths to integration: earnings, skill investments, and outmigration across immigrant admission categories

Labor market integration raises welfare in the absence of distortions. This paper examines labor and goods market integration in a general‐equilibrium model with social capital. The findings are: (i) labor market integration has an ambiguous impact on welfare, and raises it if the goods and labor skills are sufficiently different; (ii) compared to Pareto optimum, labor mobility (social capital) is excessively large (depleted); (iii) trade is superior to labor market integration if trading costs are no higher than private migration costs, otherwise the outcome is ambiguous; and (iv) the creation of new institutions in response to labor market integration has an ambiguous impact on welfare.

Abstract: Previous studies come to contradictory conclusions regarding the relationship between immigrants’ social contacts and their labor market integration. This paper tackles this impasse by exploring the short and long-term effects of social contacts on immigrant labor market outcomes using data collected in the Swedish Level-of-Living survey in 2010. Results from Cox and OLS regressions show that social contacts provide meaningful resources in the initial transition period, but loose importance over time in the host country. The findings moreover reveal substantial heterogeneity by reason for migration. Social contacts provide family related migrants and labor migrants with significant resources in their job search, while social contacts are not able to facilitate labor market entry among refugees. Regarding longer-term integration, earnings differences by social contacts are small. However, compared to other migrants, labor migrants continue to experience an advantage in the labor market. The implications of these findings are that distinguishing between short and long-term integration contributes to our understanding of the association between immigrants’ social contacts and their labor market integration. Moreover, information provided by social contacts assists family related migrants and labor migrants in their job search.

I analyse the importance of national migration policy and labour market institutions for immigrants’ labour market integration. Results indicate that the sending country structure of immigrants to a country, its ethnic diversity and its wage bargaining institutions as well as product market regulation are the most important national institutions impacting immigrants’ labour market integration. Variables related to the generosity of the welfare state and tax progressivity are, by contrast, only important in selecting migrants with high employment probabilities and migration policy variables remain unimportant altogether. Countries with more centralized wage bargaining, stricter product market regulation and countries with a higher union density, have worse labour market outcomes for their immigrants relative to natives even after controlling for compositional effects. Immigrants with better chances for labour market integration on account of observable characteristics self-select to countries with more centralised wage bargaining and higher minimum wages but a lower coverage rate by collective agreements. Liberal product market regulation, less centralised wage bargaining and ensuring inclusive trade unions thus assist the integration of immigrants in host countries’ labour markets most strongly.

Organizational practices of migrants' labour market integration have by and large been overlooked in favour of research on societal‐level/macrolevel factors, policies, rules and regulations and their impacts on migrants' positions and perspectives on the labour market in the host country. Organizations are conceptualized as key sites that can open doors for meaningful employment and career progression or close them by way of producing inequalities. This change of focus, which we advocate, has a potential to not only increase our understanding of how migrants' labour market integration is organized and practiced at the organizational level, but also shed light on migrants' own mobilizations and agency in these processes. Research on organizational practices of workplace integration of migrants is also relevant as economic and political migration is still high on the agenda in many European countries, particularly since the so‐called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, when hundreds of thousands of refugees made their way to Europe. Unfortunately, the war in Ukraine in 2022 reminds us of the heightened importance of this issue. In this article, we start by outlining what has motivated this Special Section. Next, we briefly review the relevant literature that directly or indirectly focuses on practices of organizing migrants' labour market integration in European host countries. We then introduce the two contributions to this Special Section, presenting and discussing their main lines of reasoning and how each of them answer our call for papers. We conclude by elaborating what is, from our point of view, still missing and suggest possible avenues for future research.

We analyze the impacts of labor market integration and migration on skill formation, wage structures, and per capita GDP of host and source countries. To do so, we propose a model in which heterogeneous agents invest in the acquisition of skills, and in which final good production exhibits increasing returns to scale in the range of available skills. Labor market integration, by allowing for migration in response to wage differentials, changes the wage structures and, therefore, the incentives to become skilled in both host and source countries. We show that our model can largely replicate the empirical evidence concerning international migration, the widening international income dispersion, the narrowing national income dispersion, and the divergence in the rates of skill formation in host and source countries.

Districts are investing more in school leadership, including the implementation of residency training programs for aspiring principals. There is limited evidence about the district return on these investments, and none in the context in which principal hiring is decentralized at the school level. This paper develops a model highlighting the conditions under which districts benefit from investments in general leadership skills and examines the residency program in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). The event-study analysis that addresses treatment effect heterogeneity finds that principals who complete a residency are significantly more effective at raising achievement. Although the leadership skills gained through the residency are likely to make a principal more valuable to districts outside of CPS, the large majority of residents remain in CPS despite the absence of salary premia for completion of a residency or high performance. These findings suggest the presence of transition costs that enable CPS to retain more effective, residency-trained principals without having to increase pay, thereby realizing some of the return on the investment in general skills.

The state has played a critical role in defining the form and character of the labour market through its regulation of immigration. This paper considers the implications of the waves of migrant labour as driven by the state, with a special focus on overseas-qualified professionals. 1 Emerging from this discussion is an assessment of the immigration and settlement policies which have established, reinforced and also reflected the dominant cultural milieu in the broader Australian society and the labour market. Following this is an exploration of the implications of the policy rhetoric on the labour market entry of overseas-qualified professionals, with a focus on overseas-trained doctors as a case in point. The paper seeks to answer the following question: How, if at all, have labour market practices—including accreditation and labour market entry—relating to overseas-qualified professionals been influenced by the shift in the official rhetoric dominating migrant settlement and labour market integration as driven by the changing nature of migration? To explore this question, this paper is divided into two sections. Part one examines the state-driven socio-cultural policy trends throughout the post World War II period and how and why these shifts in policy have directly shaped the labour market experience of skilled migrant labour. Following the examination of the dominant sociocultural paradigm, part two explores the effect of the major state-driven policy shifts on overseas-qualified professionals—with a specific focus on overseas-trained doctors. The conclusion drawn is that the medical profession strictly directs the registration and labour market access of overseas-trained doctors based on factors that contravene the broader state policy, raising calls for a more active approach to monitoring professional practice by the state and related institutional bodies.

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of increased use of online discussion forums by newcomers to Canada to access labour market knowledge. Drawing on extant literature on social support, knowledge exchange, and online technology affordances, I examine the role of online discussion forums in newcomers' labour market integration, through an inductive content analysis of 574 discussion threads. Results of this study suggest that the role of online discussion forums is to provide knowledge resources, in the form of information and advice support, which help newcomers make migration decisions and manage their expectations and preparedness, which in turn has the potential to help newcomers with adjustment and labour market integration in the new country. This dissertation contributes to literature on newcomers' adjustment and labour market integration by describing the online discussion forum system and showing that it facilitates access to and exchange of online social support that can help newcomers with adjustment and integration in the new country's labour market. It also expands our understanding of the theory of knowledge exchange and the optimal matching model by examining them in the context of online discussion forums and newcomers' labour market integration. The findings also question the way we think of newcomers' labour market integration and newcomers' knowledge needs at different stages of settlement and suggest that we also need to include and focus more on the pre-arrival stage of migration and better understand online sources of social support. Moreover, I argue that advice support should be recognized as a separate type of social support. This research also makes practical contributions by expanding our understanding of newcomers' interactions in online discussion forums which can inform government and community organizations tasked with supporting newcomers integrate in the labour market. The findings highlight the importance of pre-arrival training and support to migrants and the potential of better utilizing online technologies to reach future migrants and accelerate their adjustment and integration process. Pre-arrival online support facilitates preparation and more accurate expectations prior to migration, which in turn has the potential to facilitate migrants' adjustment and labour market integration.

Economic growth and the riskiness of investment in firm-specific skills

How do refugees use their social capital for successful labor market integration? An exploratory analysis in Germany

PurposeThe authors provide a novel interpretation of the relationship between skill demand and labour market concentration based on the training rationale.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use a novel data set on Italian online job vacancies during 2013–2018 to analyse the relationship between labour market concentration and employers' skill demand. The authors construct measures of market concentration and skill intensity in the local labour market. The authors regress the measures of skill demand on market concentration, controlling for sector, occupations and other features of the labour market. The authors also use the Hausman–Nevo instrument for market concentration.FindingsThe authors show that employers in a highly concentrated labour market demand competencies associated with the ability of workers to learn faster (e.g. social skills) rather than actual knowledge. They also require less experience but higher education. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that employers in more concentrated labour markets are more prone to train their employees. Instead of looking for workers who already have job-specific skills, they look for workers who can acquire them faster and efficiently. The authors provide a theoretical framework within which to analyse these aspects as well as providing a test for the relevant hypotheses.Practical implicationsIn addition to cross-countries differences in labour market regulations, the authors' findings suggest that policy authorities should consider the local labour market structure when studying workforce development programmes aimed at bridging the skill gap of displaced workers. Moreover, the authors show that market concentration can have relevant implications for human resource (HR) managers by affecting their recruitment behaviour through the demand for skills. In fact, concentrated markets tend to favour firms' collusion and anti-competitive behaviour that could strongly affect HR management practices.Originality/valueThe authors' paper innovates on the literature in a number of ways. First, the authors provide evidence of local labour market concentration in Italy. Second, the authors provide evidence of skill demand at the local level using a detailed skill taxonomy that goes beyond the classical distinction between high and low skills. Third, and most importantly, the authors provide evidence of the relationship between skill demand and labour market concentration. By analysing detailed skills and competencies, the authors take one step beyond understanding the features of labour demand in monopsonistic markets.

This article investigates the factors influencing the labour market performance and social integration of Eastern European migrants in two regions within Scotland and Portugal. Given the potential links between these outcomes, measures of labour market success and integration into the host community are examined from a multi-dimensional perspective, including by modelling these jointly within a statistical framework. The main findings indicate the importance of a range of factors for labour market and social integration, which change with time and cannot be limited to any definable set of goals. In particular, proficiency in the host country’s language plays a key role in obtaining a highly paid job and social integration, but not for the probability of employment. Further, maintaining family links and cultural identity often outweigh the importance of being integrated into host communities. Other human capital factors, especially whether the job matches skills and qualifications, strongly influence some labour market outcomes, whilst migrant network variables are important for integration more widely. Focus on the immediate earnings and having a job tends to be prioritised over career progression, which can lead to better integration. Drawing on the insights from economics and human geography, this paper stresses that these findings hold both in the separate and joint modelling approaches. The effect of the influences is also found to be generally similar in Scotland and Portugal. However, some significant differences are detected between the host communities with regards to the impact of previous migration and friendship on social integration and age on employment.

This paper investigates to what extent self-rated job-specific and generic skills and different types of educational signals are positively related to the labor market integration process of Dutch graduates, 18 months after finishing upper secondary vocational education. Our contributions to the current literature are that of simultaneously investigating these different types of skills and (a more extensive concept of) educational signals, and moreover examining to what extent the impact of self-rated specific skills and educational signals differ between the four labor market outcomes under investigation. We analyzed secondary survey data from the VET survey collected in the Netherlands in 2015. Results indicate that (1) self-rated specific skills—acquired either in education or on the job—are more positively related to favorable labor market outcomes than self-rated generic skills in the first 18 months of graduates’ integration process, (2) only certain educational signals positively impact labor market integration, and (3) the positive impact of self-rated specific skills and signals varies between different labor market outcomes.

Based on the theory of labor market segmentation, this study uses the ‘relative price method’ to estimate the labor market integration of 31 provinces and cities in China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) from 2007 to 2019, and then empirically examines the nonlinear relationship between labor market integration and tourism development. The results show that, from the spatial and temporal distribution characteristics, the development level of tourism shows an upward trend, while the integration of labor market shows a ‘fluctuating’ upward trend. This shows that with the continuous advancement of the factor marketization policy, the segmentation of the labor market is gradually broken. At the same time, there is a U-shaped relationship between labor market integration and tourism development. When the labor market integration is lower than 19.3, it reduces the tourism development level. However, when the labor market integration exceeds the threshold of 19.3, with the deepening of labor market integration, the development level of tourism is improved. Further research shows that the U-shaped relationship between labor market integration and tourism development is different due to different environmental governance, geographical location and location. Therefore, the relevant departments should take precise measures according to the time and place.

This article focuses on the refugees’ labor market integration in the immediate host countries. Drawing from the experience of Syrian refugees in Jordan, it describes how the integration in labor market depends on the alignment of four perspectives: (1) host state perspective, materialized through legal regulations about refugee employment; (2) refugee perspective that refers to refugees’ access to labor market and challenges they face; (3) host community perspective that implies to the recognition, approval, or reactions of host communities to the refugee employment; and (4) donor perspective that appears with the intervention of international actors through development aid or general support to refugees’ working rights. To explore these diverging perspectives and their implications about the labor market integration of Syrian refugees in Jordan, the data is gathered from ethnographic policy analysis and stakeholder interviews in urban areas and camps. We argue that the refugees’ legal right to work is one of the most contentious policy issues not only for Jordanian state but also for its relations with Jordanian citizens, refugees, and donors. From the perspective of donors, ensuring Syrians’ legal access to labor market in the immediate host countries, like Jordan, is a policy tool for keeping refugees in the origin region. At the host community level, the issue appears as a source of dilemma; because refugee employment is a critical domain for refugees’ self-reliance and local integration on the one hand, it is perceived as the source of competition for already scarce job opportunities on the other hand. For refugees themselves, an access to labor market and getting support are ways of gaining sustainable livelihood opportunities, self-reliance, and dignity. However, this access is marked by severe conditions of exploitation, vulnerability, and discrimination in working places as well as the anti-refugee rhetoric of local host communities. Programming in refugee employment necessitates taking all these four perspectives into account.