Explaining the labour performance of immigrant women in Spain: The interplay between family,migration and legal trajectories

Abstract

The labour performance of migrants has been largely assumed to vary with individuals’ reasons to migrate. Accordingly, migrants who migrate to join their relatives at destination are commonly expected to be negatively selected in terms of their labour characteristics. However, family and economic reasons for migration are not mutually exclusive but often complementary, especially among women. In addition, there exists a large variation in the post-migration employment rates of the so-called ‘family migrants’. In this article, I argue that the temporal sequence of migration and key family life-cycle events may help us in explaining the post-migration employment patterns of migrants, especially that of females. To test this hypothesis I first construct a comprehensive typology that classifies all immigrants according to the timing of marriage and migration for each spouse, and their immigrant or native origin. Next, I examine the explanatory power of this typology by estimating the employment probability of migrants in multivariate logit regressions that include the resulting types of ‘family migrants’ as independent. The obtained results confirm the theoretical and empirical utility of studying marriage and migration jointly in order to explain differences in the labour performance of immigrant women. Moreover, the main conclusions concerning cross-type differences in female labour behaviour remain valid ever after controlling for current legal status and legal status at entry, and running separate analyses for the main origin groups in Spain.

Keywords

family migration immigrant policy immigrant women labour performance legal status

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