Immigration and Occupations in Europe

In this paper we analyze the effect of immigrants on natives ’ job specialization in Western Europe. We test whether the inflow of immigrants changes employ-ment rates or the chosen occupation of natives with similar education and age. We find no evidence of the first and strong evidence of the second: immigrants take more manual-routine type of occupations and push natives towards more abstract-complex jobs, for a given set of observable skills. We also find some evidence that this occupation reallocation is larger in countries with more flexible labor laws. As abstract-complex tasks pay a premium over manual-routine ones, we can evaluate the positive effect of such reallocation on the wages of native workers. Accounting for the total change in Complex/Non Complex task supply from natives and immig-rants we find that immigration does not change much the relative compensation of the two types of tasks but it promotes the specialization of natives into the first type