Immigrants in the labour market and beyond

I investigate the labour market performance of immigrants in the UK. In particular, I aim to advance understanding of the international transferability of qualifications, skills, and experience. I also discuss the roles of differential self-selection and labour market discrimination, and consider immigrant uptake of the native national identity. First, I examine the incidence and wage associations of over-education among migrants to the UK from the ‘A8’ EU accession countries of Central and Eastern Europe. I find that A8 immigrants face a substantially higher risk of over-education in the UK than other recent EU immigrants, and that this additional risk remains after taking account of observed characteristics. I argue that this result is driven by unobserved differences between the groups, arising from distinct self-selection processes associated with the institutional context of the EU accession. Second, I examine how qualifications and the origin of schooling and experience can help us to understand immigrant earnings, and, in particular, the difference between the wages paid to immigrants and natives with apparently similar human capital profiles. I show that accounting for the level of qualification held by immigrants, as well as the source and duration of schooling, causes conditional wage estimates to converge substantially with those of natives. Finally, I examine how variation in the original motives for migration can help us understand the labour market performance of immigrants, and their propensity to adopt the native national identity. On employment and wages, I find that those who originally came as work or student immigrants are the most successful, while family immigrants do less well, and refugees fare the worst. On national identity, I find that those who originally came as refugees and family immigrants are the most likely to identify as British, while work and student immigrants are the least.