Essential Work, Migrant Labour: What Explains Migrant Employment in European Key Sectors?

Résumé 0

Amidst the COVID-19 lockdowns, it became obvious that foreign-bornimmigrants play a critical role in economic sectors that are essential to thefunctioning of everyday life. Are they over-represented in these sectors, andhow is the use of foreign labour linked to structural factors in the provisionof essential services? Using micro data from the EU Labour Force Survey(EU-LFS) 2011-2020 for 17 countries, this paper investigates the extent andthe drivers of migrants’ over-representation in key sectors (e.g. health, longtermcare, food supply) relative to the rest of the economy. We measurethe difference in the probability of working in key sectors for various typesof migrants to similar natives across countries of destination. Our resultsshow that in most countries, foreign-born migrants are over-represented withrespect to native-born workers after accounting for individual characteristics.We also provide an overview of the correlation between this residual overrepresentationand potential structural factors. We find a strong and robustcorrelation between migrants’ relative employment probability in key sectorsand precarious job conditions, the degree of autonomy and flexibility at work,as well as attitudes to migrants, both at the country-level and across subnationalregions