DELSA/ELSA/WD/SEM(2010)14 Chart 3: Share of tertiary educated among native-born and foreign-born persons aged 15 and over by country of residence, circa 2000
Share of tertiary educated among foreign-born
60%
JAM
non-OECD countries OECD countries PER
50% IDN
IRL
40%
ISR
CAN
COL GBR
MEX MNG
30%
ECU BOL
HND
GTM NIC
SYC SEN BRA
20%
LKA
10% KEN
USSR-EST NOR
BGR
SLV IRQ GMB IND
ROU USSR-BLR AUS DNK CUB LUX PRI ESP HUN USSR-LTU CHL JOR FRA GRC DOM DEU ITA FYUG-SVN
ARG
SWE BEL
NZL JPN USA
FIN
LAO MYS
0% 0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
Share of tertiary educated among native-born Source: DIOC-E 2000 (release 2.0)
22. Comparing the labour market status of foreign-born and native-born in different destination countries provides a unique perspective on the integration outcomes of migrants in different contexts. The labour market outcomes of foreign-born and native-born persons differ significantly across countries of residence, but there is no systematic regional pattern. Among OECD countries, for example, native-born tend to have higher employment rates than foreign-born notably in Northern European countries, whereas in Luxembourg and Southern European countries, foreign-born fare better than native-born. In non-OECD countries immigrants face specific difficulties to integrate into the labour market compared to natives, notably in Africa (excluding South Africa), where the average employment rate of migrants is 66%, 7 percentage points below the figure recorded for the nativeborn. This finding would need to be further investigated, but one explanation may be, for example, the importance of humanitarian migration, as well as the concentration of migrants in urban areas where the public sector still comprises a big part of formal employment. The situation is different in Latin America, where the gap between migrant and native-born employment rates is reversed (the average employment rates for non-migrants and migrants are respectively 56.2% and 61%). 23. Disaggregating the immigrant populations by gender and educational attainment shows that differences between native-born and foreign-born in employment rates are much more pronounced for women than for men, as well as for the high-skilled (Chart 4). In almost all receiving countries included in DIOC-E, highly skilled native-born persons have higher employment rates than foreignborn persons with the same educational attainment level. This is partly due to the fact that foreign qualifications are often not recognised or not transferable to the labour market of the destination country. In addition, language proficiency is more important for high-skilled jobs, and can hinder successful careers in highly skilled occupations. Since DIOC-E includes information on occupations by country of birth and skill level, this issue could be further investigated17.
17
See Dumont and Monso (2007) for a first cross-country analysis of this question, partly based on DIOC data and therefore applied to OECD destination countries only.
20