Transcript: Immigration and integration in Europe 

Tim Phillips talks to Tommaso Frattini (University of Milan) 

Attention on migration helps because this is definitely an important issue and an issue that deserves attention, deserves to be discussed and talked about. 

More than one in eight residents of the EU is an immigrant. It’s one in six in the EU-14 countries. For a decade, the Migration Observatory has been tracking how successfully migrants are integrating in society and in work. So today on VoxTalks Economics, the economic and social implications of a decade of migration. Welcome to VoxTalks Economics, I’m Tim Phillips. Every year the Migration Observatory publishes a report on immigrant integration in Europe. Tommaso Frattini of the University of Milan and a member of the CEPR-RPN on Political Economy of Migration is one of the editors of the 10th report. It’s coming out on the 18th of this month. I’ve had a sneak peek. And Tommaso joins me now. Welcome to VoxTalks Economics, Tommaso. 

Tommaso, what’s the purpose of the Migration Observatory? 

The idea behind a Migration Observatory is to provide an evidence-based picture of migration in Europe. So migration is an issue about which there is a lot of discussion. This discussion is often very polarised. And what we try to do with the Migration Observatory is to bring consistent and comparable data that allow us to ground the debate over migration to a set of facts that can be compared in a consistent way across European countries. Ten years ago, we observed the way the migration policy debate was going, and we thought at the Centro Studi Luca d’Agliano, that it would be a good idea to start an initiative like the Migration Observatory. So we teamed up with the Collegio Carlo Alberto and got this started. 

And this report in particular, what do you try and discover in this? 

We analyse the economic integration of migrants across Europe. So what I mean by economic integration is how migrants perform in European labor markets compared to natives. So every number that we give, every figure that we give in the report is benchmarked against the situation of natives in the country we look at. And what makes this edition of our annual report particularly interesting is that this year, we combine a snapshot of the situation in 2024 with a comparison on how the labor market situation of migrants has evolved, has changed between 2015 and 2024. So, over the 10 years that we’ve been studying and analyzing the data. 

Yeah, it’s hard work over 10 years, but then you get the payoff at the end of it that you can make the comparison. 

Overall, this time, where have you got that data to provide a rigorous benchmark? 

So every year we analyze the data that come from the most recent edition of the European Labour Force Survey. The European Labour Force Survey is a dataset that’s collected by Eurostat, it’s actually collected by individual countries, national statistical offices, and then harmonized by Eurostat. So this is the main harmonized EU-wide dataset to study the labor market. And this dataset allows us to study consistently the labor market situation of migrants and natives across countries and over time. 

As you’ve already said, there is a lot of attention given to this topic. It’s something that everyone’s got an opinion on, whether they’re an economist or a member of the public. There are plenty of economists that would wish that they had more attention given to their subject. I imagine sometimes you wish there was a little less given to yours. Does the amount of coverage and the tone of the coverage, does it help illuminate the discussion or do you think it distorts it sometimes? 

Well, you know, Tim, I think it does both. But tension on migration helps because this is definitely an important issue and an issue that deserves attention, deserves to be discussed and talked about. Excessive attention and the way the issue is often discussed and portrayed in the policy debate or in the media may actually distort the debate because the focus is very often on short-term events like recent arrivals, recent flows, rather than on longer-term outcomes, a longer-term picture, like integration of migrants who are already in the European Union. What we try and do in our report is precisely to rebalance the importance of these respective topics, right? So by providing a picture of how integration of migrants in European countries evolves over time. 

When the public worries that immigration overcrowds local schools, overwhelms hospitals and puts up local taxes to pay for them, are those fears justified? Anna Maria Maiba and Mina Senses spoke to us in 2023 about their research in the US. Research that has only become more relevant in the years since then. Follow us and you can listen to the episode, called ‘Immigration and Public Goods’, from June 2023. 

So as you say, it’s a very useful exercise to look back over 10 years, 10 years of almost continuous discussion and debate about the state of migration in Europe. I make that comparison. If you go back to 2015, the foreign-born share of the population in the EU-14 countries, which provide that accurate comparison, I think was 11.5%. Now, has this risen over the last 10 years? 

Oh yes, it has risen. It has risen quite significantly. In fact, by 2024, the latest year for which the ULFS data are available and the year in which we focus our most recent analysis, the share of foreign-born residents in EU-14 countries has reached 16%, almost 16%. This has been an increase of more than four percentage points. And it leads to about 52.5 million foreign-born individuals living in EU-14 countries today. It also indicates that migrants are a structural component of European societies as of today. 

The debate, as you say, focuses on recency. That’s what we think about in the news, what has just happened. And so, of course, it focuses on who has just arrived. Is the proportion of migrants that have been in Europe for less than five years, is that still rising? 

This is one key area where perceptions in reality diverge. So the perception of individuals in general is typically that most migrants have just arrived in the country, right? 

Whereas instead, as you have said, less than one in five of the migrants who live in European countries today have arrived within the previous five years. 

Okay. This is a persistent feature of migration in the EU over the last 10 years, which indicates that actually migration has been going on for quite some time. What is true, however, is that in recent years, the proportion of migrants who have been in European countries for less than five years has increased relative to ten years ago. So this actually indicates that there has been an acceleration of migration in recent years. 

And also, of course, the debate focuses on refugees and asylum seekers. I imagine some members of the public might think that they are the dominant numbers within migration, but are there proportionally more refugees or asylum seekers than there were 10 years ago? 

Yes, there are. So, this is one change that has happened over the last decade. Over the last 10 years, the proportion of EU migrants has, among the old immigrant population in Europe, has decreased. And at the same time, the proportion of non-EU migrants has increased. So what we have witnessed over these years is a growth in the size of the foreign world population, but also change in its composition in terms of countries of origin, with non-EU countries gaining more importance and, among non-EU countries, countries of origin of refugees and asylum seekers, of course, play also an increasingly important role, which has accelerated since the so-called 2015 refugee crisis, and then again, more recently, with the war in Ukraine. 

Well, yes, I was going to ask you about that, because a non-EU country, but within the continent of Europe, Ukraine has seen a massive movement of people across its borders. How important are the Ukraine numbers within this data that you’re looking at? 

They are certainly important because migration from Ukraine is responsible in part for the uptick in immigration influence that we have have witnessed in recent years. So you can, if you look at the over-time evolution of the stock of migrants in the European Union, you clearly see that there is a change in the slope of this line just after the start of the war in Ukraine, because there’s been a very large inflow of refugees from Ukraine in[to] European countries. However, at the same time, we should keep in mind that Ukrainians are clearly an important part of the recent flows of foreign-born individuals entering the EU, but they’re not the dominant group in the total stock of migrants. So to answer your question, Ukrainians contribute to explaining the trend of a shift towards non-EU migration, the increasing importance of migration from outside of the European Union, relative to internal migration within the European Union, but they are not the biggest group that we can talk about in Europe. 

As you say, Tommaso, one of the purposes of the report is to compare how migrants are doing in the labour market and in society compared to native-born citizens,. You report the employment gap between these two groups. What is the employment gap? What does it represent? 

So the employment gap is very simply the percentage point difference in the probability of being employed between migrants and natives. So the size of the employment gap indicates how far migrants are from the benchmark represented by natives. So if the employment gap was zero, then we could say that migrants are fully integrated in terms of employment. So it’s a metric. that allows us to measure the degree of integration of migrants. And what we do and what is important about the employment gap is that we can not only measure the difference in the employment probability between migrants and natives overall, but we can also compute the employment gap for migrants relative to similar natives. So, a part of the differential employment probability of the differential labor market outcomes of migrants relative to natives might be due to the fact that they have different characteristics. They have different age, they have a different education, which can obviously lead to different labor market outcomes. And what we do in the report is we compute the employment gap, both overall and keeping these observable characteristics fixed. So we compare migrants with similar natives. 

How big is it over the 10 years? Is it growing? Is it shrinking? 

So, first of all, how big it is. It is about 9 percentage points, meaning that across Europe, migrants are about 9 percentage points less likely than natives to have a job. As I said earlier, however, part of this difference might be simply driven by the fact that migrants and natives are indeed different. For instance, we may perhaps talk about that later, migrants are a bit less educated than natives in general. So this might explain part of this gap. Indeed, it does explain part of the gap, but a very small fraction. So even when we compare migrants with natives who have the same education and same age and same gender, on average, the employment gap shrinks to seven percentage points, so from nine to seven. So characteristics of migrants explain part of this gap, but as you can see, a large part of the gap cannot be simply driven down or explained by the fact that migrants are less educated than natives. And coming to the second part of your question, Tim, this is very interesting. Remarkably, the gap has remained pretty much stable over the decade, even though two facts have happened. First, the level of employment, so the employment probability of both immigrants and natives has increased over time. So now the probability of working is higher than it was 10 years ago for both immigrants and natives, but because it has grown for both groups, the gap has remained pretty much unchanged. Secondly, and even more remarkably, the employment gap has remained constant, even though, as we discussed earlier, the composition of the immigrant population has changed over time. So over time, we have observed a decrease in the size of the EU migrant population, and the EU migrants are those who tend to do better in the labor market, so they tend to have a smaller employment gap. So, you would expect it if there’s less EU migrants and more non-EU migrants, then the gap would tend to increase simply because non-EU migrants are worse off in the labor market relative to EU migrants. But over time, the employment gap for non-EU migrants has decreased too, okay? So what we observe is that now we have a larger proportion. of migrants that is from outside the EU. This group is more disadvantaged on the labor market, but it is less disadvantaged than it was 10 years ago. 

How do they compare the internal EU migrants, who I assume are almost all economic migrants using freedom of movement, and non-EU migrants, who I imagine are composed of many groups, but with a significant proportion of people who would not have migrated or perhaps have restrictions on work because of their immigration status. 

That’s right. So, indeed, for EU migrants, the employment probability gap is about two percentage points. For non-EU migrants, the employment gap is about 11 percentage points. 

The gap is sizable. And as you were rightly pointing out, this difference is not only and even not predominantly driven by differences in population age or education between these two groups, which do exist, but they’re not the main part of the story. There are other underlying differences between the two groups that create this gap. And although we are not able to precisely identify these barriers, these additional hurdles faced by non-EU migrants, it is easy to think or imagine that much has to do with the institutional constraints that non-EU migrants face relative to EU migrants. A couple of examples come to mind very quickly. One is, it is easier for EU migrants to have their education qualification recognized in other EU country than it is for someone who comes from outside the European Union, for whom having their qualification recognized might be more complicated. Secondly, EU migrants enjoy the freedom of movement within the EU so they can come and go. They can follow the jobs, so they can move to one country [where] they know that they can find easily [a] job, or if they have job opportunities and then after a few years if they lose their job or if they’re dissatisfied with their job, they’re better opportunities elsewhere. They can just move back to their home country or move to a third country. Non-EU migrants do not enjoy the same freedom so they are more limited in their subsequent mobility also. 

You have also identified over the years in the report an employment status gap, which, if I’m correct, is, in some places where migrants are most likely to be working, they’re also more likely to be doing low status jobs. Is that still true? 

Interestingly, that was what we found in 2015, when we started this series of annual reports, this phenomenon apparently is no longer there. 

So what we observe today is that in fact, countries where migrants are doing better in terms of employment probability are also those countries where they tend to have better jobs. So both dimensions of liberal market integration seem to go hand in hand today, whereas that appeared not to be the case a decade ago. 

Tell me a little bit more about the educational status of migrants now. 

So, migrants on average tend to be slightly less educated than natives in the EU. Interestingly, migrants today are way more educated than they were 10 years ago. So among migrants in EU-14 countries, in 2015, 26% had tertiary education. Now, the rate of tertiary educated migrants has increased to 31%. So the educational level of migrants has increased over time. However, what’s remarkable is that this has not meant that now migrants are better educated than natives or even closer to natives in terms of education, because what happened over the last 10 years is that natives became more educated too. So there is an improvement in education in absolute terms, but there is no convergence in relative terms. 

I get it. So, in terms of the employment gap, it’s kind of a running to stand still. 

Exactly. Exactly. So, both groups have improved. And actually, if anything, natives’ educational levels have improved faster than those of migrants in many countries. 

I’m going to ask you a question, Tommaso, and you have to pretend that I don’t know the answer. Is immigration still a political hot button, Tommaso? 

I tend to think it is indeed still a political hot button, even though when you think back to 2015, 2015 was the year of the so-called refugee crisis, right? So migration was at the top. of the political agenda and was making top of the news, the headlines at the time. Things have changed now. The death crisis has come to an end. There are other crises coming underway. Other many developments have happened, but still migration remains a central political issue. And also, even now, even though we’re not in the middle of an actual crisis or humanitarian crisis as we were back then, the focus is still disproportionately on arrivals and on the flows, whereas what tends to be more absent or more secondary in the debate, and especially in the political debate… is the real long-term challenge, which is the integration in European labour markets and European society of migrants who are here. 

And that debate, well, tell me, I look in from the outside, from across the English Channel, but it doesn’t appear controversial, the debate about freedom of movement within Europe. It seems very focused on migrants coming from outside the EU. Is that share that has been rising, do you think it’s going to continue to rise? 

It is quite likely. It is quite likely given the global demographic trends and given the geopolitical factors. On the other hand, it’s, of course, hard to look into the future. Don’t take this as a forecast, but clearly the indication is that the importance of non-EU migration is there to stay. 

The reason I ask you is not to try and make you forecast anything, but to say, well, this is a policy challenge, isn’t it? It’s still a policy challenge. Has EU policy shifted in its attitude towards migrants during the time that you have been preparing these reports? Have policymakers shown signs that they are learning from the data that you present? 

Well, I think that we have seen some improvements over the last decade. At least I think it is now clear and there have been also steps forward in this direction and that we need more harmonization of migration policies at the EU level. The EU has approved the new Pact of Migration and Asylum, which is, I believe, an important step. It is controversial in many aspects, but what I think is a good sign is that it shows an attempt to work towards an harmonization migration policies and asylum policies across different countries. On the other hand, what perhaps we have not learned is that we still give a lot of emphasis or even perhaps even more than we used to, to border control policies rather than to integration policies. 

Let’s hope policymakers continue to learn. Thank you very much for giving them the best chance to do so with these reports, Tommaso. Good to speak to you again. 

Thank you, Tim. Thanks a lot 

The report is called ‘Immigrant Integration in Europe’, it’s the 10th Migration Observatory report and it is Tommaso Frattini and Anissa Bouchlaghem. It’s launched on the 18th of May and it is a free download from CEPR Press. 

VoxTalks Economics is a TalkNormal production. The assistant producer is Megan Bieber. and our editor is Andrei Zagarian. Next week on VoxTalks Economics, must we choose between guns and butter?