Breaking Barriers: The Impact of Employer Exposure to Immigrants

Steven Lehrer (lehrers@queensu.ca), Louis-Pierre Lepage (louis-pierre.lepage@sofi.su.se) and Nuno Sousa Pereira (npereira@fep.up.pt)
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Louis-Pierre Lepage: Swedish Institute for Social Research, Postal: SOFI, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
Nuno Sousa Pereira: University of Porto

No 2/2024, SOFI Working Papers in Labour Economics from Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research

Abstract: We study how exposure of employers to immigrants, both at the market and at the individual firm level, mitigates immigrant-native disparities. We use administrative employee-employer matched data from Portugal, which provides a unique setting given that it experienced almost no immigration until the early 2000s followed by substantial immigration waves. Focusing on the evolution of market wages across successive immigration cohorts, we find that increased employer exposure to immigrant groups can account for up to 25% of the wage convergence between immigrants and natives over the last two decades. We also document that individual-level exposure of firms to immigrants plays an important role, influencing future hiring and remuneration of immigrants. Our results provide new insights into how barriers to hiring different worker groups shape economic inequality, with novel implications for integration policies.

Keywords: immigration; immigrant-native wage gaps (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2024-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-int and nep-ure
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Working Paper: Breaking Barriers: The Impact of Employer Exposure to Immigrants (2024)
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