Do Moroccan migrants to Spain fare better or worse than other migrants?

Abstract

Poor language skills at arrival and low educational attainment raise concerns about how well Moroccans do after arrival in Spain. Using the 2007 Encuesta Nacional de Immigración, this paper compares Moroccans' legal and labor market integration over time relative to the two other largest groups of migrants in Spain: Ecuadorians and Romanians. Modeling jointly legal and labor market integration and exploiting the richness of our data set, which includes migrants' employment history before and at arrival in the host country, we find that Moroccan male migrants assimilate themselves at least as well as the other two nationalities. Among women, Moroccans and Ecuadorians follow a similar pattern that contrasts with the one observed among Romanian women. While the former mainly arrive to Spain to work with legal status and, with time in Spain, (some of them) move out of employment; the latter are considerably (and persistently) more attached to the labor force, although they tend to lack legal status at arrival, and only gain such status over time. Controlling for observable characteristics and using Heckman-corrected estimates, our wage analysis finds that with the exception of Moroccan and Romanian males for which no wage differences are observed, Moroccans outperform the other two nationalities in terms of higher wages at arrival. Moreover, this wage differential does not decrease over time.

Keywords:

• legal and employment integration
• MENA men and women
• Moroccans
• Ecuadorians and Romanians

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge financial support from the Barcelona GSE (through CREMed). We would like to thank the anonymous associate editor and two referees for helpful comments which greatly improved this draft of this paper. We also thank the comments from participants of the III CREMed Workshop in Barcelona.

Notes

1. An assumption here is that if people migrate to Spain to work, it is because there are jobs available. In the case of Spain at the time under analysis, this assumption seems to hold.

2. Unfortunately, the ENI was onetime effort, and thus, we do not have information post-2007 to understand how the current recession has affected immigrants' employment situation in Spain.

3. This information is published by the Spanish Labor Department based on immigration resident permits issued by the immigration services.

4. The Spanish Labor Force Survey interviews households and thus may include immigrants who do not have legal status in the country.

5. The choice of model needs some explaining with respect to making legal status a choice. Some immigrants may have the choice of entering legally but choose not to because waiting for the work visa is a lengthy process that retains them in the country of origin. Thus, despite the risks, they may prefer entering the country illegally. Alternatively, the model of legal status can be viewed as a binary outcome, given characteristics rather than a choice strictly speaking. We thank two anonymous referees for raising this point.

6. The richness of our data set contrasts with that of other papers in this literature, such as Aydemir (2011) or de Silva (1997).

7. See Croson and Gneezy (2009) for a thorough literature review in which women are found to be more risk-averse than men.

8. It is important to highlight that having joint probabilities is much more informative than to have individual probabilities. For instance, for Moroccan males, the individual probability of working shows that since arrival their conditional probability of working is 70%. In contrast, the joint probability highlights that more than half of those working at arrival do so without legal status and that with time in the country they all acquire legal status.

9. Although integration patterns between Moroccans and Ecuadorians are similar, the Moroccan dummy and the interactions of this dummy with YSM are statistically significantly different (as shown in Table 3(a)).