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Employment and Occupational Mobility among Recently Arrived Immigrants: The Spanish Case 1997–2007

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Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyse occupational mobility among immigrants in Spain in two distinct stages: (1) comparing the immigrants’ first job in Spain with their profession in the country of origin and (2) comparing their current occupational status with the occupational status of the first job they held in Spain. We focus on immigrants who arrived in Spain during the “immigration boom” that took place between 1997 and 2007, using data from the 2007 National Survey on Immigration. For our analysis, we use occupational mobility tables and multi-variable models with occupational mobility as a dependent variable. Our results show that we can better understand the initial access of migrants to the Spanish labour market from the perspective of labour market segregation: for each gender, a particular sector/occupational level (construction and cleaning, respectively) played such a dominant role that it determined almost entirely the observed mobility pattern. We find some (upward) mobility opportunities after such initial strong segregation, which increased with length of residence; however, our results suggest that, even in this case, it is mostly limited to men and associated with the construction boom that finished abruptly in 2007.

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Notes

  1. ISEI is an international classification of occupational status (for more details see Ganzeboom and Treiman 1996).

  2. Overall, control variables include region of origin, educational attainment, year of arrival, age when migrated, recognized qualifications, length of time before first job in Spain, first job obtained through contacts, reasons for migration, family structure when migrated, marriage/partnership status when migrating, home ownership and region (Autonomous Community) of residence in Spain. We group migrants by region of origin into several categories taking into account the most relevant groups in Spain (see, for instance, among many others, Bover and Velilla 2005, and Muñoz de Bustillo and Antón 2010).

  3. This argument is reinforced by looking at the specific occupations within each level shown in Table 1. In the case of women, 60 % of those that find a first job in low service occupations are household cleaners, and a further 25 % are household care workers. In other words, those two occupations alone account for more than 40 % of the first jobs of the overall sample of female migrants. In the case of men, 50 % of those first jobs in low industrial occupations are in agriculture and 35 %, in construction.

  4. The largest occupation within this category is service workers in hotels, restaurants and catering, which accounts for 50 %.

  5. The mobility analysis presented in Tables 3, 4 and 5 does not comprise all possible combinations of categories of origin and destination used earlier in Table 2, since such number of categories would have made the table extremely large (6 possible destinations for each 8 initial categories yield a total of 48 possible transitions). We merge some of the categories to make the table manageable while retaining the most important types of transitions.

  6. The variable region of origin has mainly a control purpose. One should interpret the results associated to this variable with care, since it might be capturing unobservable time-varying factors extremely difficult to assess (even with panel data), such as cultural assimilation, progression in terms of language knowledge, etc. and the sample sizes for each group are not large. It is also worth mentioning that the largest differences by region of origin throughout the article correspond to gaps between EU15/developed countries and the rest of foreign-born workers (from developing countries).

  7. This means the probabilities of currently not being in employment are strongly underestimated in the table, since only those that are currently not employed but had at least one job after arriving in Spain are included in the model, a problem which is especially important for women. Although 17 % of female migrants overall are fully dedicated to household duties, the probability of women being in this category is only 8 % according to Table 2: this is because Table 2 refers to the probability of being in such category now for migrants that worked at least once in Spain.

  8. These findings are consistent with some recent papers on patterns of assimilation in Spain, which find wage and occupational assimilation are both limited (Izquierdo et al. 2009; Rodríguez-Planas 2012).

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank constructive comments from four anonymous referees and the editor Stephanie Bohon and Rafael Grande, Alberto del Rey and José-Ignacio Antón gratefully acknowledge research funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Research Project CSO2010-16413).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, Dublin, Ireland

    Enrique Fernández-Macías

  2. University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

    Rafael Grande, Alberto del Rey Poveda & José-Ignacio Antón

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  1. Enrique Fernández-Macías
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Correspondence to Rafael Grande.

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Fernández-Macías, E., Grande, R., del Rey Poveda, A. et al. Employment and Occupational Mobility among Recently Arrived Immigrants: The Spanish Case 1997–2007. Popul Res Policy Rev 34, 243–277 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-014-9347-4

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