Do Moroccan migrants to Spain fare better or worse than other migrants?

Núria Rodriguez-Planas and Raquel Vegas

Middle East Development Journal, 2014, vol. 6, issue 2, 308-328

Abstract: Poor language skills at arrival and low educational attainment raise concerns about how well Moroccans do after arrival in Spain. Using the 2007 Encuesta Nacional de Immigración, this paper compares Moroccans' legal and labor market integration over time relative to the two other largest groups of migrants in Spain: Ecuadorians and Romanians. Modeling jointly legal and labor market integration and exploiting the richness of our data set, which includes migrants' employment history before and at arrival in the host country, we find that Moroccan male migrants assimilate themselves at least as well as the other two nationalities. Among women, Moroccans and Ecuadorians follow a similar pattern that contrasts with the one observed among Romanian women. While the former mainly arrive to Spain to work with legal status and, with time in Spain, (some of them) move out of employment; the latter are considerably (and persistently) more attached to the labor force, although they tend to lack legal status at arrival, and only gain such status over time. Controlling for observable characteristics and using Heckman-corrected estimates, our wage analysis finds that with the exception of Moroccan and Romanian males for which no wage differences are observed, Moroccans outperform the other two nationalities in terms of higher wages at arrival. Moreover, this wage differential does not decrease over time.

Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1080/17938120.2014.961824

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