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ABSTRACT
Improved legal status has been found to be associated with better labour market outcomes for immigrants, although causal effects remain difficult to ascertain. This article contributes to the debate on the ‘citizenship/legal status premium' by providing quasi-experimental evidence based on the 2007 EU Eastern Enlargement, following which immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria, the new EU Member States, acquired the EU citizen status. The article also contributes to the literature on legal status effects, mainly focused on single-country studies, by comparing ‘older' destination countries of Western Europe with ‘newer' ones of Southern Europe. Results show that while EU citizenship acquisition is associated with higher employment rates in Western European countries, the association is null or negative in Southern European countries, where immigrants are more strongly urged to be employed. On the other hand, EU citizenship acquisition is more strongly associated with improvements in skill levels in Southern Europe, where immigrants are usually segregated in unskilled jobs, but only among men. In these countries, EU citizenship acquisition positively affects male self-employment chances as well. The article concludes that possible effects of improved legal status should be interpreted in light of different institutional contexts and models of immigrants’ labour market incorporation.
Acknowledgements
This article is part of the research activities carried out within the Horizon 2020 Project GEMM (Growth, Equal Opportunities, Migration and Markets) financed by the European Commission, addressing the challenges and barriers that European countries face in managing the mobility of persons to achieve competitiveness and growth. The authors wish to thank Emilio Reyneri for helpful suggestions and advice throughout the making of the article, and Gustavo De Santis for reading the manuscript and providing helpful comments. The usual disclaimers apply.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Stricter regulations were often enforced for immigrants admitted to the regular labour market for less than 12 months.
2 In contrast with previous results, Bratsberg and Raaum (Citation2011), using fixed-effects panel models, found no positive effect – and even a negative impact for some groups – of citizenship on the labour market outcomes of immigrants in Norway.
3 The reasons underlying the country and year selection are explained in the methodological section.
4 Countries that restrict naturalisation often allow a relatively easier access to long-term stay permits as a ‘second-class citizenship’ (Huddleston et al., Citation2015).
5 Not only are immigrants in Southern Europe very likely to be employed in low-skilled jobs, but they also tend to work in small firms and with flexible contractual arrangements (Fernández and Ortega, Citation2008; Martínez-Pastor, Citation2014), factors that increase their mobility in and out of employment (Fullin, Citation2011).
6 Scandinavian countries, UK and Ireland are not included because the quasi-experiment cannot be implemented due to lack of necessary information and too small numbers of immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria in the selected period.
7 For this same reason, our quasi-experimental design could not be extended to the 2004 EU Enlargement.
8 Beyond sample size issues which would prevent from considering them as a separate group, immigrants from richer OECD countries have been excluded as that they do not represent an adequate control group in our counterfactual approach. Romanian and Bulgarian nationals’ labor market outcomes should be compared with immigrants as similar as possible, in terms of labor market integration, but who did not obtain the EU citizenship (nor the citizenship of the destination country) throughout the observational window.
9 Controls include education (lower-secondary, upper-secondary and tertiary), years since migration (1-5, 6-10, >10), age (young, young adult, adult, older), sex, having ever been married, the degree of urbanisation of the city of residence (dense, medium, thin) and year. Since analyses are implemented across country clusters (Southern vs. Western Europe), models also include dummies for each country of residence interacted with all other variables included in the models.
10 Only immigrants who were living in the EU countries as of 2004 have been considered. Unfortunately, detailed information on immigrant background in the EULFS is not at all available before 2004.
11 Full results of the models summarised in and are available as supplementary materials.
12 Additional results, not presented for reasons of space but available upon request, show that the 2007 EUEE has improved Romanian and Bulgarian men’s skill levels and chances of becoming self-employed in Southern Europe with respect to all other national groups.
13 Given that long-term consequences of naturalisation are considered, for the analysis of job quality, skilled manual (1-digit ISCO codes 6 and 7) and service sector occupations (1-digit ISCO code 5) have been included among low-skilled jobs.
14 As control variables we include area of origin (2004 and 2007 new-EU countries, other non-EU15 European countries, MENA, other Africa, Asia, Latin America), education (low-secondary, upper-secondary and tertiary), years since migration (1–5, 6–10, >10) and two-way interactions between the three variables, age (5-year intervals), having ever been married, the degree of urbanisation of the city of residence (dense, medium, thin), region (NUTS-2) and year. Results were virtually identical when excluding immigrants from new-EU countries.