Skill structure and labor market integration of immigrants in Europe

Across European countries, immigrants are disadvantaged in labor market attainment relative to natives: foreign-born individuals are less likely to be employed and more likely to be unemployed. Previous research indicates that immigrants’ employment chances are better when the share of low-skill jobs in the labor market is large. Upgrading of the job structure, which has taken place in many countries over recent decades, might therefore have hurt immigrants’ employment prospects. However, an exclusive focus on skill demand neglects another important development in the skill structure of advanced economies: educational expansion. The rapid rise in skill supply has tended to outpace the decline in the low-skill job share with increasing over-education as a consequence, potentially leading to crowding-out of immigrant workers from employment. Based on data from the European Union Labour Force Surveys (EU-LFS) 2004-2016, we perform analyses that jointly consider the demand and supply sides of labor markets. Our results indicate that the size of the low-skill job sector is positively related to immigrants’ employment if and only if those employed in the low-skill sector have low qualifications. In economies with high rates of over-education, where many well-educated natives occupy low-skill jobs, the labor market prospects of immigrants deteriorate.

The Educational System and the Ethnic Skills Gap among the Working-Age Population: An Analysis of 16 Western Immigration Countries

Research shows that children of immigrants, the “second generation,” have comparatively high educational aspirations. This “immigrant optimism” translates into ambitious educational choices, given the second generation’s level of academic performance. Choice-driven (comprehensive) education systems, which allow the children of immigrants to follow their ambitions, are therefore regarded as facilitating their structural integration. The authors focus on an underappreciated consequence of these findings. If the second generation strives for higher qualifications than children of native-born parents with similar performance, working-age children of immigrants should have lower skills than children of native-born parents with comparable formal education. This could result in (statistical) employer discrimination and ultimately hamper integration. This pattern should be particularly pronounced in choice-driven education systems and in systems that emphasize vocational education. Two-step regression models using data on 16 countries support these expectations. The authors explore implications of these findings for comparative research on ethnic gaps in labor market attainment.

Institutional Structure and Immigrant Integration: A Comparative Study of Immigrants’ Labor Market Attainment in Canada and Israel

The present study focuses on the incorporation of immigrants from the former Soviet Union in two receiving societies, Israel and Canada, during the first half of the 1990s. Both countries conducted national censuses in 1995 (Israel) and 1996 (Canada), making it possible to identify a large enough sample of immigrants and provide information on their demographic characteristics and their labor market activity. While both Canada and Israel are immigrant societies, their institutional contexts of immigrant reception differ considerably. Israel maintains no economic selection of the Jewish immigrants and provides substantial support for newcomers, who are viewed as a returning Diaspora. Canada employs multiple criteria for selecting immigrants, and the immigrants’ social and economic incorporation is patterned primarily by market forces. The analysis first examines the characteristics of immigrants who arrived in the two countries and evaluates the extent of selectivity. Consistent with our hypotheses, Russian immigrants to Canada were more immediately suitable for the labor market, but experienced greater difficulty finding and maintaining employment. Nevertheless, immigrants to Canada attained higher-status occupations and higher earnings than their compatriots in Israel did, although the Israeli labor market was more likely to reward their investments in education.