Ethnic penalties in the transition to and from unemployment: A West European perspective

Abstract

The gap between unemployment rate of immigrants and that of natives varies across West European countries. This article aims at explaining these differences by taking into account economic and institutional characteristics of labour markets and by adopting a dynamic perspective, that is, disentangling the risk of being unemployed into two different risks: that of entering unemployment and that of remaining in long-term unemployment. From the analyses of yearly transitions to/from unemployment, less immigrant penalization results in those countries where the employment protection legislation is stricter, the labour demand is more biased towards low skilled jobs and the welfare state is less generous for the unemployed. Furthermore, the article summarizes the main results of five country studies also focused on labour market transitions of immigrants and natives.

Institutions and structures as barriers? A comparison of native‐born and immigrant unemployment durations across 12 European countries

“…The acceptance of poor jobs by immigrants is believed to be due to their ignorance about the host-country's labour market, their expectation of a temporary stay in Europe (Bonacich, 1972;Kogan, 2004b;Piore, 1986) and the even poorer job quality in their country of origin (Piore, 1986). Consequently, previous research has confirmed that immigrants find jobs easier in labour markets that have a high demand for low-skilled labour (Kogan, 2006;Reyneri & Fullin, 2011). In line with this, we therefore anticipated that transitions to the secondary sector increase relatively more for immigrants as the demand for low-skilled labour increases (Hypothesis 4).…”

“…Following Kogan (2006Kogan ( , 2007, Fleischmann and Dronkers (2010) and Reyneri and Fullin (2011), we also used three macro variables. First, the EPL index (time varying) is based on the level of hiring and firing regulations and the easiness of using temporary contracts (OECD, 2004).…”

Trade-off between Employment and Job Quality: Ethnic Penalty in Italian Regional Labour Markets

“…Compared with the Centre-North, the South of Italy has a significantly lower employment rate and higher unemployment rate, but also a wider secondary labour market in terms of: a more undeveloped process of tertiarization and a widespread incidence of unskilled, low paid, poorly protected, precarious and irregular jobs. From this starting point, according to Kogan (2007) and Reyneri and Fullin (2011a), we may expect that in a context with a larger secondary labour market, immigrants have higher employment entry chances (and risk unemployment to a lesser extent), thereby facing a lower degree of penalty than natives. The reasons for better employment chances for immigrants and reduced penalty compared to the native-born may be ascribed to mechanisms regulating the matching between labour demand and supply at lower levels on the occupational hierarchy.…”

“…International migratory dynamics have seen many changes in the last thirty years, first and foremost the gradual differentiation in the areas of origin and destination of the flows (Castles and Miller 1993;Massey et al 1998). Also for this reason, besides the traditional focus on the ethnic aspects of immigrants, the analysis of the institutional characteristics of host societies, including the structure and regulation of the labour market, has become increasingly important to comprehend the processes of reception and integration (Reitz 2002;Büchel and Frick 2005;Heath and Cheung 2007;Kogan 2007;Sá 2008;Pichler 2011;Reyneri and Fullin 2011a;Ballarino and Panichella 2013).…”

Immigrants’ initial steps in Germany and their later economic success

“…However, immigrants tend to experience more frequent labour market transitions. Particularly recent newcomers can be found in less permanent labour market statuses, experiencing more frequent shifts both from employment to unemployment, and the other way around (Reyneri & Fullin, 2011).…”