 |
| OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría. He is a former Finance Minister of Mexico. |
OECD governments need to do more to help immigrants integrate and make better use of their skills, according to OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría.
“The better targeted immigration policies are, the more successful integration will be. This in turn will help reduce the risk of political backlash against immigrants,”he said. “Much greater emphasis needs to be put on helping recent immigrants learn the host-country language and become familiar with workplace practices.”
A new OECD publication, A Profile of Immigrant Populations in the 21st Century, gives more accurate information and a better understanding of patterns of immigration over recent decades, based largely on national censuses from 2000. Migration is a key issue for OECD and this study is part of a broader programme to examine the policy challenges of migration in the context of population ageing and globalisation.
Gurría said that the report’s findings show that integration policies need to be better designed and implemented. “Addressing the problem of overqualification is all the more urgent as a growing number of countries want to attract more high-skilled immigrants on the grounds that they will help boost economic growth and have fewer difficulties integrating into society,” he said.
“To be prepared for the future,”he said,“governments need to act now to put proper policies in place to help satisfy labour needs partly through migration and enable the integration of migrants. Every OECD country should make this a priority. It is socially, politically, ethically and morally correct, but it is also an act of sheer economic rationality.”
In practically all OECD countries, immigrants are more likely to be overqualified for their job than a person born in that country. In Denmark, Greece, Italy, Spain and Sweden, for example, the share of people doing a job for which they are overqualified is twice as high as for native-born workers.
Immigrants to OECD countries are also better educated on average than native-born people, with nearly one in four having completed tertiary education compared to one in five native-born.
The way a country’s labour market works also affects how effectively migrants integrate. In Italy, immigrants find jobs more easily but are frequently overqualified. In Belgium, immigrants find jobs that match their skills but the immigrant unemployment rate is high.
Efforts by OECD countries to attract highly skilled workers affect the supply of skilled people in the countries these workers leave which are often among the poorest in the world. The brain drain, for example, hits mainly small African and Caribbean countries, with some smaller countries such as Fiji, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Mauritius, having more than 40% of their highly-skilled population living abroad.
These countries also have many of their doctors and nurses leaving to work abroad, as do African countries including Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Tanzania. Over 50% of doctors from those countries work abroad. There is also a gender dimension to the brain drain: women from developing countries with tertiary degrees are also more likely to emigrate to OECD countries than highly-skilled men: 17.6% versus 13.1%.
On average, 7.5% of the total population in OECD countries was foreign-born circa 2000 (about 9% of people aged 15 years old and over). The highest percentages were recorded for Luxembourg (32.6%) followed by Australia (23%) and Switzerland (22.6%). On the other hand, less than 1% of the populations in Korea and Mexico was foreign-born.
Migration to OECD countries is gender balanced. Overall, 51% of the immigrants in OECD countries are women and this proportion has increased in recent migration flows, notably in countries where family migration is predominant and/or where labour migration plays an important role in addressing needs in the domestic service and long-term care sectors.
Immigrants tend to be under-represented among the youngest and oldest age groups. Immigrants are largely concentrated in the 25-64 age group. On average, 13.2% of the foreign-born are between 15 and 24 years old and 13.9% are over 65 years old, compared to 17.9% and 17.1%, respectively, for the native-born. There are, however, important differences by country of origin, mainly due to the history of international migration trends.
Immigrants are “more qualified” than the native-born. In the OECD area as a whole, the share of people with tertiary education is higher for the foreign-born (23.6%) than for the native-born (19.1%) (see Chapter 3). Despite marked differences across countries, this finding holds for most individual OECD countries. Similarly, the share of people with no or low educational attainment is higher for immigrants than for the native-born. In relative terms, the educational attainment of immigrants in OECD countries is thus well depicted by a U-shaped curve.
The employment rate of immigrants compares less unfavourably to that of the native-born than commonly thought. On average, 62.3% of immigrants between 15 and 64 years old are employed in the OECD, compared to 66% of the native-born, the discrepancy between the two groups being even lower for women. Unemployment among immigrants, however, remains relatively high, notably in some European countries, and the labour market outcomes of recent immigrants are usually not so positive. Finally, there are major differences in terms of labour market performance by country of origin and education level.
On the labour market, highly-skilled immigrants tend to have less favourable results than low-skilled migrants in relative terms vis-à vis the native-born. The employment gap between foreign-born and native-born persists, and indeed increases, in nearly all OECD countries, with level of education. Furthermore, in almost all OECD countries, immigrants are more likely to be “overqualified” (i.e. working in jobs/occupations for which their skills are too high) than persons born in the country. This is due notably to problems of transferability of human and social capital and to lack of host-country language proficiency.
The employment of immigrants has largely diffused across sectors, and particularly to high and low-skilled services. Across the OECD area, differences in the distribution of employment between sectors are larger between countries on aggregate than within countries between immigrants and the native-born. On average, 28.2% of immigrants are employed in agriculture and industry, 12.4% are in producer services, 20% in distributive services and 39.3% in personal and social services (including education and health), as compared to 33%, 10.6%, 21% and 35.4% for the native-born, respectively.
More than four out of ten immigrants aged 15 years old and over in the OECD live in the United States (31.4 million). The second largest receiving country is Germany, with almost 8 million foreign-born (about 10% of immigrants aged 15 and over) followed by France, Canada and the United Kingdom. In total, about 38% of immigrants in the OECD area reside in the EU15, but about a third of them are coming from within the EU25.
There are more Latin American immigrants (19 million) in the OECD than Asian immigrants (16 million) . Circa 2000, Mexico is the single most important origin country, with about 8.4 million persons born in Mexico living in other OECD countries (99% in the United States).2 The United Kingdom and Germany rank second and third with respectively 3 million and 2.4 million immigrants in other OECD countries.3 The main non-OECD countries in terms of importance are China and India (ranked 7th and 8th, respectively) with about 2 million migrants each.
Non-OECD immigrants in the OECD represent a marginal share of the population of their origin countries. In 2000, there were about 57 million persons born in non-OECD countries living in the OECD area. They represented about 5% of the total OECD population and no more than 1.1% of the population of their countries of origin. This proportion is even lower for India, China, Indonesia, Russia, Nigeria or Brazil, where less than 0.5% of the population has emigrated to the OECD. It reaches, however, 25% in Cape Verde, 20% in Albania, 13% in Lebanon and even higher figures in some of the small island states.
The brain drain hits mainly small African and Caribbean countries. There is no generalised brain drain from developing countries to the OECD. The emigration rate of people holding a tertiary degree is generally low (i.e. less than few percentage points) in most large countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India and China. However, there are exceptions: a number of smaller countries – some of which are islands such as Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Mauritius and Fiji – have more than 40% of their highly-skilled population resident abroad, and sometimes as much as 80%.
The gender dimension of the brain drain. Comparing male and female highly-skilled emigration rates shows that women are proportionately more likely to emigrate to the OECD. This is true globally, as the average emigration rate of tertiary-educated women is 17.6% compared to 13.1% for men, but it also holds for almost all origin countries.
OECD member countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States (30 Member Countries).
The Paris-based OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) is a think-tank/adviser for its member countries.
