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Abstract
Recent papers have found that often immigrants are overqualified relative to native-born workers when comparing an individual's education to the 'average' education in their occupation. We show that these results are sensitive to differences in the education distribution between immigrants and the native born. Using data for New Zealand, which has an immigration policy that favours skilled immigrants, we find that this approach leads one to conclude that immigrants are, on average, overqualified for their occupation. However, once we account for the fact that immigrants are on average more skilled than natives, we find that immigrants are, in fact, less overeducated than natives.

JEL classification: F22, J21, J61

The immediate effects of COVID-19 on mortality, fertility, and internal and international migration have been widely studied. Particularly, immigration to high-income countries declined in 2020. However, the persistence of these declines and the extent to which they have impacted different migration flows are yet to be established. Drawing on immigration flows from Eurostat and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) time-series models, we assess the impact of COVID-19 on different immigration streams to seven European countries. We forecast counterfactual levels of immigration in 2020 and 2021 assuming no pandemic, and compare these estimates with actual immigration counts. We use regression modeling to explore the role of immigrants' origin, distance, stringency measures, and gross domestic product (GDP) trends at origins and destinations as potential driving forces of changes in immigration during COVID-19. Our results show that, while there was a general decline in immigration during 2020, inflows returned to expected levels in 2021, except for Spain. However, drops in immigration flows from countries outside the Schengen Area to Europe persisted in 2021. Immigrants' origin emerged as the main factor modulating immigration changes during the pandemic, and to a lesser extent stringency measures and GDP trends in destination countries. Contextual factors at origin seem to have been less important.

In recent years, Spain has received unprecedented immigration flows. Between 2001 and 2006 the fraction of the population born abroad more than doubled, increasing from 4.8% to 10.8%. For Spanish provinces with above-median inflows (relative to population), immigration increased the high school dropout population by 24%, while only increasing the number of college graduates by 11%. We study the different channels by which regional labor markets have absorbed the large increase in the relative supply of low educated (foreign-born) workers. We identify the exogenous supply shock using historical immigrant settlement patterns by country of origin. Using data from the Labor Force Survey and the decennial Census, we find a large expansion of employment in high immigration regions. Specifically, most industries in high-immigration regions experienced a large increase in the share of low-education employment. We do not find an effect on regions' sectoral specialization. Overall, and perhaps surprisingly, Spanish regions have absorbed immigration flows in the same fashion as US local economies.

For decades, immigration has been at the core of the political and social debate in Europe. In the post-crisis environment, recent events have inflamed the migration agenda further, as freedom of movement is an essential decision-making point in the planned referendum on European Union (EU) membership in the United Kingdom, and the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean is testing the limits of the EU and of its member states to manage migration in a humane and fair way. Large- scale immigration has long challenged the Westphalian tradition of nation-state sovereignty in Europe (Joppke, 1998). However, these tensions have only increased over the last decade, following conflicts in Europe's neighbourhood, the fall of the 'Iron Curtain' and the eastern enlargement of the EU, or the 2008 global economic and financial crisis. If until recently the most controversial aspect of immigration has been migrants and asylum-seekers from outside the EU and an invisibility of European migration and European migrants, in the last few years we observe that the very principle of migration from the other member states is challenged in a systematic manner for the first time since its proclamation in the Treaty of Rome (establishing the European Economic Community in 1958). The rebellion against the status quo on freedom of movement of people in the EU is led by Western European states. They are the almost exclusive receivers of EU migration, either from the other Western European states, or from the new member states in Central and Western Europe. This essay traces the transformation of EU migration over the last decade, following the most recent enlargements and the south–north migration which has re-emerged since the financial crisis, and examines the causes of an unprecedented contestation of free movement rights. ; Peer reviewed