Abstract
What are the migration policy lessons that can be learned from the Spanish case? Unlike countries with a large tradition of receiving immigrants, in Spain having a high-school degree does not give immigrants an advantage in terms wage or occupational assimilation (relative to their native counterparts). This paper discusses the potential explanations behind this result and analyzes the consequences of this result in terms of migration policy recommendations. J15, J24, J61, J62
Highlights
Much of the literature on immigrants’ assimilation has focused on countries with a long tradition of receiving immigrants1
Southern European countries have recently experienced a preponderance of migrants in their territory (Reher and Silvestre, 2009)
It would be interesting to explore whether the earlier results suggesting that a high-school degree does not do much in terms migrants' occupational assimilation in Spain holds when instead of occupational assimilation we study wage assimilation
Summary
Much of the literature on immigrants’ assimilation has focused on countries with a long tradition of receiving immigrants. Borjas, 1992, examines data on several immigrant attributes, including occupation in the United States using the 1940, 1960, 1970, and 1980 Censuses He finds that, in the 1970 Census, immigrants arriving in the previous 5 years were more likely to be in managerial and professional, service, and laborer jobs relative to the native born, and that they were under-represented in "precision production, craft and repair" jobs and in the primary sector. Greenand Worswick, 2002, find zero returns to foreign experience for recent immigrant cohorts but show that, in Canada’s case, this is a change from the early 1980s when immigrants earned returns to foreign experience that were similar to what the native born were earning for domestically acquired experience Much of this change over time is related to changes in the source country composition of the inflow.
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