2023-12-20 19:59:09
Among the many questions raised by the government’s immigration bill, the employment of illegal foreign workers has been the subject of lively debate, including within institutions. The Senate thus rejected a proposal aimed at perpetuating the employment of undocumented immigrant workers via the granting of one-year residence permits in sectors particularly affected by labor shortage. The National Assembly then reinstated the article in the bill before the joint committee does not opt for a tougher version of the text : the prefect of the territory concerned would, according to the version adopted by the two chambers on the evening of Tuesday, December 19, have complete latitude to grant or not the titles in question.
Three years ago, the Covid-19 pandemic already highlighted the importance of immigrant workers in so-called “essential” sectors, in the sense of European terminology, such as health, transport, or agriculture, essential to the resilience of economies. In France, according to an analysis by the Center for Prospective Studies and International Information (CEPII), certain essential professions are in fact very dependent on immigrant labor: this is the case of cleaning agents and assistants. at home, but also hospital doctors.
Read more: File: immigration in France, what are the issues?
At the level of the European Union (EU), France is not an exception. A year before the start of the health and economic crisis linked to Covid-19, workers born abroad, and in particular non-EU immigrants, were in proportion more people working in essential professions than native speakers in most EU countries.
In an ongoing study, we are exploring factors that help explain this overrepresentation.
Disparities with equivalent profile
We first compared the probability of working in essential sectors for native and immigrant workers, taking into account several observable characteristics such as age, gender, professional experience, level of education. and marital status. Do these factors help explain the differences observed?
Our results show that for an equivalent profile, the disparities between immigrants and natives are still largely visible. In almost two thirds of EU countries the probability of working in essential sectors is higher for immigrants than for natives. This particularly applies to Italy, the United Kingdom (included in our study as well as Switzerland and Norway) and the Nordic countries. This probability is 5% higher for an immigrant worker in France, and rises to 12% in Sweden. Luxembourg, where this difference is negative, is an exception.
When we look at low-skilled jobs in essential sectors (according to the OECD), the gap turns out to be even more marked. For example, immigrants are over-represented in the cleaning sector in three-quarters of the countries studied. In other essential sectors such as transport or health, this difference is less marked but immigrants remain over-represented in half of the countries, notably in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Italy and Sweden.
If individual characteristics are not enough to explain this over-representation, what are the reasons that lead immigrants to occupy low-skilled jobs in essential sectors? One plausible explanation lies in the structural disadvantage of immigrants in the labor market due to the institutional, linguistic, legal or discriminatory obstacles they may encounter.
Those who emigrated as adults
Our study thus analyzes the way in which the over-representation of workers born abroad evolves according to characteristics specific to immigrants and likely to influence their economic integration.
Firstly, the age at which foreign-born workers emigrated is largely correlated with their employment rate. Immigrants who emigrate to their host country at a younger age mostly benefit from a comparative advantage in learning the language of the host country and from a more appropriate cultural and educational background to their integration into the labor market.
With the exception of Denmark, the United Kingdom and Sweden, our results indicate that the overrepresentation of immigrants in essential sectors thus exclusively affects immigrants who emigrated to their host country after the age of 15.
Differences according to places of birth and study
We also know that education and professional experience acquired abroad remain less valued than those obtained in the host country. Immigrants trained abroad have thus more risks find themselves unemployed or occupy a job for which they are overqualified than immigrants with a diploma obtained in their host country.
For an equivalent profile, we therefore observe no difference between workers born abroad who have a diploma obtained in Belgium, France, Spain, Austria and Switzerland, compared to workers born in these countries. Conversely, their counterparts holding foreign diplomas have a much greater probability of working in essential sectors.
Finally, immigrants from European Union member countries occupy positions on the labor market of other EU member countries that are quite similar to those of natives, while the employment prospects of non-EU immigrants appear significantly lower. This is due in particular to the racial and ethnic discrimination of which they are victims and to an unfavorable legal status.
In our study, the place of birth thus seems to matter as much as that of obtaining a diploma: the probability that an immigrant born in an EU country will work in an essential sector is identical to that of a native in Belgium , in Spain, Ireland and Norway. It is higher but remains significantly lower than that of non-EU immigrants in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark and Germany.
And the legal text in all this?
Additional analyzes support the hypothesis according to which the over-representation of immigrants in essential sectors results from the latter’s less favorable position on the labor market.
This over-representation is thus more observed in countries where essential sectors stand out compared to the rest of the national economy by an increased demand for labor, a significant number of part-time employees, an active search for employment, a high feeling of overqualification and a low professional status, and when the proportion of employees receiving a salary below the median of the income distribution is particularly high.
Faced with the pitfalls that we have identified, penalizing both the host countries, which deprive themselves of the real skills of the immigrants present on their territory, and the immigrant workers themselves, the regularization of foreign workers in an irregular situation, envisaged in the first version of the government’s bill would have had little chance of changing the situation.
Conversely, opening the status of civil servants to non-Europeans – as proposed by the collective of civil servants The Meaning of public service – could, for example, make it possible to improve the professional mobility of non-Community workers and their integration into the labor market, with economic benefits for all parties concerned. An alternative which however seems highly improbable after the final vote on the immigration bill by Parliament on Tuesday December 19.
Nikolaj Brobergeconomist and analyst at the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills is co-author of this article.
1703180342
#immigrant #workers #overrepresented #essential #sectors