Shoring up economic refugees: Venezuelan migrants in the Ecuadoran labor market

Ecuador became the third largest receiver of the 4.3 million Venezuelans who left their country in the last five years, hosting around 10 per cent of them. Little is known about the characteristics of these migrants and their labor market outcomes. This article fills this gap by analyzing a new large survey (EPEC). On average, Venezuelan workers are highly skilled and have high rates of employment, compared with Ecuadorans. However, their employment is of much lower quality, characterized by low wages, and high rates of informality and temporality. Venezuelans have experienced significant occupational downgrading, relative to their employment prior to emigration. As a result, despite their high educational attainment, Venezuelans primarily compete for jobs with the least skilled and more economically vulnerable Ecuadoran workers. Our simulations suggest that measures that allow Venezuelans to obtain employment that matches their skills, such as facilitating the conversion of education credentials, would increase Ecuador’s GDP between 1.6 and 1.9 per cent and alleviate the pressure on disadvantaged native workers. We also show that providing work permits to Venezuelan workers would substantially reduce their rates of informality and increase their average earnings.

Twitter as social media arena for polarised social representations about the (im)migration: The controversial discourse in the Italian and international political frame

Grounded in social representation theory and its empirical investigation into the ‘social arena’, inspired by the ‘modelling paradigmatic approach’, the research presented in this article is part of a larger project aimed at reconstructing the ‘multi-voice’, and ‘multi-agent’ discourse about (im)migration. Specifically, this contribution’s focus is on the exploration of shaping and sharing social representations about (im)migrants through communication via the social medium ‘Twitter’. A total of 1,958 tweets (967 Italian and 991 English tweets) were analysed through Systeme Portable Pour L’Analyse Des Donnees Textuelles [Portable System for Textual Data Analysis]SPAD in two lexical correspondence analyses. The results show a dichotomous discourse organising a semantic space structured around five different factors for the two distinct Twitter corpora: both clearly show polarised social representations of ‘immigrants–migrants’, leading to exclusion–inclusion policies depending on the discursive agent’s ideological affiliation in the Italian and the international political frame. Used as a propaganda tool, Twitter echoes the related pro- and anti-immigration polemical representations of opposite political leaders in posts that are positioned differently in relation to the progressive/conservative ideology.