Immigration and Labour Market Segmentation in the European Union

Abstract

Although not historically unprecedented, Europe is going through a time of intense change in terms of both the intensity of immigration and the public perception of this demographic phenomenon. This chapter aims to analyse the labour market participation of immigrants in the European Union, both from a national comparative perspective and from a European point of view. With that aim, the chapter is organized as follows. Section 6.2 deals with several methodological issues linked to the study of immigration, particularly regarding the specificities of the Jobs Project database. In order to provide a background to the current migration flows, the Section 6.3 discusses how the current immigration levels compare to previous waves both in the Old Continent and in other regions of the world. The following section presents a demographic and economic characterization of immigrant population in the European Union. The backbone of the chapter, Section 6.5, addresses the different patterns of participation of foreigners in national labour markets, including the allocation of migrants along the national job structures and the incidence of over-qualification among this group. Finally, Section 6.6 concludes and summarizes the main findings of the chapter.