Abstract
While much of the literature on immigrants’ assimilation has focused on countries with a large tradition of receiving immigrants and with flexible labour markets, very little is known on how immigrants adjust to other types of host economies. With its severe dual labour market, and an unprecedented immigration boom, Spain presents a quite unique experience to analyze immigrations’ assimilation process. Using alternative datasets and methodologies, this study provides evidence of a differential assimilation pattern for low- versus high-skilled immigrants in Spain. The key finding is that having a high-school degree does not give immigrants an advantage in terms of occupational or wage assimilation relative to their native counterparts.
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Notes
- 1.
Countries with a long tradition of receiving immigrants include: Australia (Chiswick and Miller 1995); Canada (Baker and Benjamin 1994; Hum and Simpson 2000, 2004); Germany (Schmidt 1992; Constant and Massey 2005); Israel (Flug et al. 1992; Friedberg 2001; Eckstein and Weiss 2004; among others); and the United States ( see Card (2005) for literature review).
- 2.
On the one hand, Southern European countries have recently experienced a preponderance of migrants in their territory (Reher and Silvestre 2009; among others). On the other hand, there is also evidence of new immigration flows towards the fast growing developing economies. According to Ratha and Shaw (2007), South-South migration accounts for half of all migration from the South.
- 3.
Amuedo-Dorantes and de la Rica (2007), were the first ones to study the occupational assimilation process of the immigrants in Spain using 2001 decennial Population Census data. Because their analysis focuses on immigrants who arrived during the second half of the 1990s, it misses most of the massive recent inflow of immigrants, which occurred after the turn of the century. As we explain later, because the ethnic composition of immigrants has shifted drastically over the last decade in Spain, their findings are not necessarily transferable to the current situation.
- 4.
Unfortunately our data do not identify in which country the educational degree was obtained, precluding us from such type of analysis.
- 5.
As is common practice in the research using this dataset, we only use the second quarter to avoid repeated observations. The LFS is carried out every quarter on a sample of around 60,000 households. Each quarter, one sixth of the sample is renewed. However, the dataset does not include a variable that allows identification of individuals along the six consecutive interviews.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
Results available from the author upon request.
- 9.
Throughout the analysis in this section we consider four education levels: high-school dropouts; individuals with a high-school degree; individuals with some college education (including those with a short college degree) or vocational training (they may have a trade certificate, but no college degree); and individuals with a completed college degree. As the assimilation pattern between those with and without vocational training is very similar, when we move to the analysis with administrative data we work with three categories: high-school dropouts, high-school degree and college degree.
- 10.
- 11.
The relative risk ratios for two separate MNL (one for immigrants and one for natives) are available in the Appendix A.1.
- 12.
To simplify notation, we no longer write the “i” subindex. However, we are evaluating the probabilities at the same values of the regressors.
- 13.
As a reference, the fitted probabilities for natives are displayed in Appendix tables A.2 and A.3.
- 14.
For native-born individuals, the person is living in Madrid, aged 35–39 years old, currently married. For immigrants, that person is from Latin America and arrived in Spain in 2002.
- 15.
While high-school dropout natives have a fitted probability of being in either category of about 8 % and 9 %, respectively; for high-school graduates these fitted probabilities increase to 13 % and 16 %, respectively.
- 16.
Notice that the flow out of the “professional” category reflects natives moving in towards that category over time.
- 17.
Spanish female participation is in the order of 65 % but drops to 15–20 % after the birth of the first child. In contrast with other countries, this low participation rate among Spanish mothers does not increase as the youngest child ages (Nollenberger and Rodríguez-Planas 2012).
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Acknowledgements
The migration policy consequences from this paper have been discussed in the paper “Wage and Occupational Assimilation by Skill Level: Migration Policy Lessons From Spain” by Núria Rodríguez-Planas.
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Rodríguez-Planas, N., Alcobendas, M.Á., Vegas, R. (2014). Wage and Occupational Assimilation by Skill Level: Recent Evidence for Spain. In: Artal-Tur, A., Peri, G., Requena-Silvente, F. (eds) The Socio-Economic Impact of Migration Flows. Population Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04078-3_8
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