Immigration and labour market flows

We document facts about the labour–market transition rates of immigrants and natives in France, Spain and the US, for the period between 2003 and 2018. We find large differences in how immigrants’ labour–market transitions compare to those of natives across the three countries. Native-immigrant gaps in transition rates are not equal across nationalities of immigrants within each county, and cannot be explained by compositional differences in terms of observable characteristics such as education, age, sector or occupation. Our results point to other factors, such as human capital transferability, discrimination, type of migration and language proficiency as being more important determinants of immigrants’ labour market performance. Despite the differences across the three countries, using a VAR model we find a common stylized fact: inflows of foreign workers have a weak and mostly non-significant effect on the job-finding and job-separation rates of natives.