Do migrants displace native-born workers on the labour market? The impact of workers' origin

Arbeitspapier

This article is the first to examine how 1st-generation migrants affect the employment of workers born in the host country according to their origin, distinguishing between natives and 2nd-generation migrants. To do so, we take advantage of access to a unique linked employer-employee dataset for the Belgian economy enabling us to test these relationships at a quite precise level of the labour market, i.e. the firm level. Fixed effect estimates, including a large number of covariates, suggest complementarity between the employment of 1st-generation migrants and workers born in Belgium (both natives and 2nd-generation migrants, respectively). Several sensitivity tests, considering different levels of aggregation, workers' levels of education, migrants' region of origin, workers' occupations, and sectors corroborate this conclusion.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: GLO Discussion Paper ; No. 1420

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination ; Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity ; Job, Occupational, and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion
• Subject: 1st- and 2nd-generation migrants ; Substitutability ; Complementarity ; Moderating factors

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Fays, Valentine ; Mahy, Benoît ; Rycx, François
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Global Labor Organization (GLO)
• (where): Essen
• (when): 2024

Further information

• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET