Performance of Economic Migrants

This chapter presents an evaluation of the literature on the labor market performance of economic immigrants. It draws on the existing labor economics research and reviews what we know about the different roles/determinants of immigrant economic performance. It starts by presenting an overview of job searches, unemployment, and job evolution over time of immigrants. It then presents the state-of-the-art research on immigrants wages and their economic assimilation by paying particular attention to immigrants’ changing composition, and to the role of human capital characteristics (e.g., language proficiency). The last section covers understudied fields such as financial crisis and more recent Covid crises, and also discussed the more limited literature of performance of female immigrants and will propose new ways forward of research.