The Labor Market Situation of Migrants From the Americas in Europe and the United States

The shading in Table 11 allows us to appreciate the situation of the workers of the Americas. Gray/blue shading indicates that the labor market situation of immigrants has deteriorated or improved, respectively, by at least one percentage point, with respect to the participation rate, the employment rate, or the unemployment rate. While this characterization of increase or decrease may be clear with respect to the employment and unemployment rates, it is less obvious in the case of the participation rate, whose evolution may be affected by the “added worker effect”. This refers to the tendency of married women to enter the labor market in order to compensate for the decrease in family income when their spouses lose their jobs. Thus, an increase in the participation rate may be an indication not so much of better opportunities in the labor market, but of declining family income.

This is observed in Table 11 for emigrants from the Southern Cone, where for almost all countries women have maintained or increased their participation in the labor market in 2012-2013 compared to 2010-2011, given the deterioration of economic conditions.

The labor market situation for immigrants from the Caribbean and Central America, on the other hand, has benefited from an improvement in economic conditions in the United States since 2010-2011, the main destination country for migrants from those regions. The employment rate has increased three points for immigrant men from the Caribbean and Central America but only one point for women from those regions. Similarly, the unemployment situation has improved more for men than for women. By contrast, the labor market situation of immigrants from the Andean Region and the Southern Cone tended to deteriorate from 2010-2011 to 2012-2013, reflecting the large concentration of immigrants from those regions in Spain.

Immigrant women from the Southern Cone seem to be showing signs of the “added worker effect”, particularly in Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, with large increases in the participation rate of women, at the same time as the situation in the labor market of immigrants. men from these same countries has worsened.

The general picture then corresponds to a return to normality in the labor market in the United States, with positive impacts on the employment situation of immigrants from the Americas, but on the other hand a continuous decline in Spain, with unemployment affecting nearly a third of the immigrant labor force in the Americas. This is clearly a quite different labor market from the one immigrants found upon arrival and although the rate of departures from Spain is more than five times what it was in 2005, the level of returns in 2013 cannot yet be characterized as massive.

During 2014, the first signs of improvement in the situation of the labor market in Spain were observed, although at a slow pace, so that the level of departures observed in 2013 could be maintained. However, the situation in Spain offers almost a case study in how even an extremely unfavorable labor market has not greatly affected the settlement intentions of migrants from the Americas.