Sònia Parella

The labour market and racial discrimination in Spain

This article analyses the issues raised by immigration into Spain from the specific perspective of entry into the labour market. The first part looks at the mechanisms of discrimination against immigrant workers, and then proceeds to analyse the factors that perpetuate racial discrimination in the labour market, based on the interests and practices of the various social agents (government, employers, trades unions, local workers) in relation to immigrants. We show how the non-EU immigrant labour force suffers from negative discrimination compared to native workers, in terms of both access to jobs and to working conditions, independently of their educational levels, qualifications or prior work experience. This not only gives rise to a loss of human resources available to the host society, but also represents a definite barrier for the integration into the host society of these immigrant groups. As long as immigrants are unable to overcome this vulnerability in the labour market, their socio-economic integration will be impossible.

EL IMPACTO DE LA INMIGRACIÓN EN LA SOCIEDAD RECEPTORA

El articulo presenta un modelo para analizar el impacto de la inmigracion teniendo en cuenta los condicionantes materiales y los factores institucionales que inciden, mediatizados por los medios de comunicacion de masas, en tres dimensiones: la seguridad ciudadana, la identidad cultural y la competencia por los recursos, de la sociedad receptora. Si bien este modelo se diseno para llevar a cabo el analisis comparativo del impacto de la inmigracion en cuatro paises del sur de Europa (Espana, Grecia, Italia, Portugal), el presente articulo recoge los resultados obtenidos para el caso espanol.

Irregular employment amongst migrants in Spanish cities.

This article presents the irregular employment situation of non-European union immigrants in Spanish cities. Foreign labor is remarkable for its heterogeneity in terms of country of origin, demographic characteristics, and the different ways in which immigrants have entered the job market. Legal immigrants tend to concentrate in five different branches of activity, such as domestic service (mostly women), hotel and restaurant industry, agriculture, building and retail trade. Migrants who work in agriculture suffer the worst labor conditions than all other migrants. However, all migrants experience difficulty in obtaining residency and labor permits. Four integration strategies among Moroccan immigrants in Catalonia are discussed and can be viewed as support networks of the immigrants.

The Upward Occupational Mobility of Immigrant Women in Spain

This paper studies the upward occupational mobility trajectories of immigrant women performing unskilled work as a first job in Spain. The goals of the research are to go beyond the debate that focuses on the structural elements that condition their labour trajectories in Spain and to include both personal factors and the way in which these women use their agency in order to shape their labour trajectories. We have opted for a mixed-method approach, using data from the National Immigrant Survey ENI-2007, combined with 42 socio-biographical interviews with immigrant women from Latin America living in the metropolitan areas of Barcelona and Madrid.

El autoempleo de las trabajadoras inmigradas. ¿Una alternativa a la discriminación laboral?

This paper analizes, from a gender perspective, the motivations on the burgeoning development of noncomunitarian migrant women business in Spain. These women decide to become entrepreneurship after long labour trajectories mainly at the domestic service and other labour activities connected with social reproduction and care. We link these activities both to the role of the social networks of immigrants themselves and to the conditioning factors of the economic structures of the host society. The main objective is to study, through qualitative interview technique, if the entrepreneurial decision is a reaction to their marginal position on the labour market, in terms of wages, labour conditions and social status; as well as a reaction to their frustration once they realize labour mobility is difficult.

El modelo de gestión de las migraciones en Cataluña: ¿una "vía catalana" de integración?

Migratory movements from the rest of Spain were the foundation for Catalonia’s population growth until 70s. In the last years, we assist to the beginning of a new wave of immigration from non communitarian countries, which, far from becoming stable, has increased, diversified and extended throughout the territory . Certainly, the Government of the Generalitat has a long history of developing policies on immigration, with the first Interdepartmental Immigration Plan (1993-2000) in 1993. Nevertheless, the third and last Plan, The Citizenship and Immigration Plan (2005-2008), although it maintains coherence with some of the containts and guidelines of previous plans, it introduces important innovations, as well as a new concept of citizenship based on residence, the incorporation of identity as a criteria to define policies or

Educational and Occupational Ambitions among the Spanish ‘Second Generation’: The Case of Barcelona

Using the first wave of Longitudinal Study of the Second Generation (ILSEG in its Spanish acronym), this study examines the determinants of educational and occupational expectations among the children of immigrants in Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain. With over one-in-four births in Catalonia belonging to foreign-born mothers, the multi-ethnicisation of the youngest segments of the Catalan population has become a demographic reality. We present a series of hypotheses about the key determinants of educational and occupational expectations based on the predictions of segmented assimilation theory, which we test through a series of multivariate regression analyses. By and large, our findings confirm the main propositions of this theory. A particularly interesting finding is that, although previous research suggests that mastery of the Catalan language is crucial for achieving social mobility in Barcelona, our findings show that knowledge of Spanish appears to be a stronger predictor of educational and occupational expectations than knowledge of Catalan. Implications of our findings for the socio-economic adaptation of immigrant youth, particularly in light of the enduring economic recession that Spain is undergoing, are discussed.

El retorno desde una perspectiva transnacional

El presente articulo analiza el retorno a partir de la perspectiva transnacional de las migraciones. Con este analisis el texto reflexiona sobre la complejidad que significa pensar el retorno en una epoca en que las migraciones estan fuertemente marcadas por practicas sociales transnacionales. Ademas de examinar el retorno desde la perspectiva transnacional de las migraciones, el texto tambien tiene como objetivo hacer una presentacion sucinta de los textos que conforman el presente monografico.

Social welfare grey zones: how and why subnational actors provide when nations do not?

ABSTRACT In an era where even citizenship is not a guarantee of access to the welfare state, can non-citizens gain access to social protection? Using health care as a lens, and the United States and Spain as cases, we find that non-citizens do have access to social protection via what we call ‘grey zones’, namely points of disagreement between national and local governments that create opportunities for non-citizens. Grey zones are possible due to processes that are often seen as disenfranchising: the denationalisation of policy and the disaggregation of citizenship. In addition, they tend to open up regardless of the nature or intent of national reforms. That said, we find significant variation in the extent to which subnational governments take advantage of them. While differences are somewhat explained by partisanship, significant outliers warrant further investigation.

Latin American Women During the Great Recession in the US and Spain

This chapter focuses on the effects of the Great Recession on Latin American women using a comparative perspective. It seeks to describe, through an intersectional approach, the situation of immigrant women as workers in the labor market in terms of multiple disadvantages that operate as barriers. First, we describe a general overview about the effects of Great Recession on immigrant’s employment from a gender perspective. Following this, the consequences for Latin American women in Spain and the US are discussed in more detail. To this end, I use official statistics and as well as data from research findings on gender differences. The chapter concludes with a brief reflexion regarding the common patterns shared by Latin American women in the two contexts and the most important differences, together with the main implications for theory and for improving intervention strategies.