Migrant educational investment in Spain and its return on the labour market. Reducing the employment and occupational gap?

This article measures and explains how different is the labour market returns to education among immigrant and native-born in Spain. We test the assimilation thesis comparing the probability of being employed versus that of being unemployed taking into account the human capital origin and the economic context. The paper then moves on to investigate the quality of the occupation achieved. To do this, we distinguish different national groups, specifically, Latin Americans, Africans, Eastern Europeans and Europeans from EU+15 and natives. We test our hypothesis by using a rich data set from the Spanish Labour Force Survey (LFS) with quarterly observations spanning over 2002-2010. Results from logistic regression models show that Spaniards have higher probability of being employed in comparison to immigrants. Moreover, foreigners who finished their studies in the host country have lower likelihood of being employed with respect to the rest of immigrants. As expected, focussing on the occupational attainment, we find that educational investment in country of destination increases the chances of being occupied in the skilled occupations. On the other hand, we can confirm that schooling in origin and destination has a differential impact in terms of labour returns and that this varies depending on the degree obtained. All these preliminary findings suggest two main conclusions. Firstly, that the human capital acquired in origin is only partially devaluated and that it still helps to understand the performance of immigrants in destination country. Secondly, that immigrants are unequally able to benefit from their educational investment in destination. The paper also considers several explanations to this unequal ethnic ability.