IMMIGRANT-NATIVE LABOUR MARKET GAPS ANALYSIS FROM INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVE

While immigration is considered as common solution among receiving countries to address the highly skilled labour force shortages, the evidence from both traditional and new receiving countries indicate that highly skilled migrant workers have less intended performance and markedly lag behind comparable native workers in terms of labour market outcomes. In this sense, the economic integration of highly skilled migrant workers and their inferior labour market outcomes relative to natives seem as serious challenges towards most of host countries. However, the extent of the disparity between immigrants and natives labour market outcomes varies significantly across these countries. Accordingly, the motivating question of this study is how can these differences and immigrant-native gaps variation be explained? There are some explanations from different perspectives (micro and macro-level perspective), but the main focus of this study is on macro-level perspective investigating in particular how institutional factors can affect this cross-country variation. Indeed, this research attempts to expand few existing literature on institutional factors impacts on highly skilled migrant workers incorporation process and their labour market outcomes variation across host countries. Hence, this study breaks new ground by offering a systematic measurement of the role of host countries’ institutions on immigrant-native labour market gaps for highly skilled workers. More precisely, this piece of work hypothesizes that the variations in relative highly skilled immigrants inferior labour market outcomes across advanced industrialized economies might be closely related to those countries’ specific institutional configurations (institutional specificity hypothesis). Therefore, the core aim of this thesis is to explore how the immigrant-native labour market gaps are associated with institutional settings (skill migration and skill formation regimes) in receiving countries? In this regard, current work contains some significant contributions. Firstly, it tries to test new research hypotheses concerning impacts of skill migration policies and key institutional attributes of the host countries on immigrant-native labour market gaps. This work differs from existing studies in that it attempts to bridge between skill formation regimes literature (VOC literature which offers a systematic typology of socio-economic regimes namely, LMEs, CMEs and MMEs) and skill migration policy debates. Secondly, from comparative migration studies perspective, this research extends empirical evidence on the immigrant-native labour market gaps across selected OECD countries including both traditional (Australia, Canada and United States) and European receiving countries. Most specifically, this analysis expands the cross-country evidence in the highly skilled immigrants’ economic integration in receiving countries. To test main research hypotheses of the study, a secondary data analysis for nineteen selected OECD receiving countries is undertaken by applying two-step multilevel modelling to estimate two major outcome variables, namely the risk of being unemployed and the occupational status difference between highly skilled immigrants and indigenous people. The empirical findings show that in all countries studied, highly skilled immigrants (both male and female) significantly lag behind comparable natives in terms of employment chances and occupational status, in conformity with the disadvantage hypothesis. Furthermore, the results obviously confirm significant variation in immigrant-native labour market gaps of highly skilled workers both within country and cross-nationally. As the two-step multilevel linear regressions results confirm, in LMEs countries with general skill regimes, highly skilled immigrants have better employment entry chances. Hence as expected, immigrant-native unemployment gaps tend to be lower in liberal market economies (LMEs) compared to the CMEs and the MMEs. Also, the findings show that immigrants have, on average, higher occupational status in LMEs than those who settled in countries with specific skill regimes (CMEs) and mixed skill systems (MMEs). Accordingly, the immigrant-native occupational gaps for both highly skilled male and female workers seem to be closer in LMEs. Therefore, the results seem to confirm the institutional specificity hypothesis. Considering skill migration policy regimes, the results are mixed especially when it comes to hybrid migration policy systems. Consistent with the expectation, hybrid systems provide favourable conditions in terms of highly skilled immigrants' labour market access and employment, whereas the immigrants tend to have less desirable job positions in host countries with hybrid systems. Hence, the results suggest that immigrant-native occupational status gaps tend to be larger in countries with hybrid systems compared to those with employment-based systems. One of the remarkable implications obtained from the analysis is that both skill migration policies (conditions of entry to a host country) and the host country’s specific institutional arrangements (context of reception) have significant impacts on highly skilled immigrants’ economic performance and as a consequence influence immigrant-native gaps. This reflects the fact that, one the one hand, skill migration policies or contextual factors may have positive or negative effects on immigrants’ outcomes and therefore can facilitate or impede their integration in the host country’s labour market. On the other, it also suggests that immigrant-native gaps may be due to inconsistency between skill regimes and skilled migration policies that leads to labour market inefficiencies in the host countries.