Labour market performance and migration flows - European ...

European CommissionOccasional Paper 60, Volume Ithis study is the fact that the individual situation of a person in the labour market (employee,unemployed or inactive) does not seem to be significant in terms of propensity to migrate.Besides that, as reported in Section 4.1 above, the income inequalities between countries ofdestination and countries of origin of migration have a non-linear impact on the rate of migration:when inequalities are relatively small initially, an increase in those inequalities will cause a growth inmigration rate, up and to a threshold beyond which further increases in inequality have a negativeimpact on migration. Interestingly, income and wages differentials between the EU and AMCs haveincreased substantially since the 1980s, but have stagnated or have only increased marginally over thelast few years (see Section 2.3).Destination of MigrationOverall, AMC migrants head mainly for Gulf States and other Arab countries (45% of total AMCmigration and the majority destination for Mashreq countries), Europe (another 42%, predominantlyfrom Maghreb countries) and to a lesser extent to the US, Canada and Australia (the remaining 13%;they attract mainly skilled migrants from AMCs). Of these migration streams, AMC migration to Gulfcountries is by far the least studied.However, traditionally migrants from the AMCs have followed two clearly distinct patterns, withMaghreb migrants going mainly to Europe and in particular to France and the Mashreq ones goingmainly to Arab and non-European countries. Recent, more educated outflows are changing directionwith an increase of emigration from the Maghreb countries toward other European countries andCanada and the US and also some Arab countries. This is the case of Algerian migrants 14 where UK(41%), US (53%) and Canada (61%) have the largest share of educated migrants. The same is true forTunisian migrants; this country has experienced an increase in the education of emigrants andemigration to Arab countries: the share of emigrants in Arab countries has increased from 12% in2005 to 25% in 2008. 15 A similar pattern applies to Morocco. 16 As a consequence, four fifths of AMCimmigrants to Europe come from the Maghreb countries; in particular, 85% of Algerian labourmigrants are established in the EU, mainly France. Of these, only 10% have university degrees, incontrast to 84.1% or 72.8% of Algerian migrants to, respectively, the US and Canada. More than 85%of Moroccan migrants are also established in the EU, distributed in France (close to 40% of the total),Spain, the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium. Once again, the vast majority of them (79% in France)have primary or no education, whereas around 70% of migrants to North America have a universitydegree (World Bank 2009a, p. 96). In the case of Tunisia, close to 70% of total migration isestablished in France.Mashreq emigration to the Gulf has a long tradition. At least 80% of Egyptian migrants work inArab countries, where at least 40% of them hold highly-skilled jobs17. An interesting finding is thatEgyptian migrants in the Gulf countries and in North America are more skilled than Egyptian migrantsto Europe, and 55% of highly-skilled Egyptians going to OECD countries migrate to NorthAmerica.18 However, in the last few years there has been an increase in Egyptian migration toEurope. As argued by Zohry (2008) Egyptian migration to Europe is different from other migrationstreams that target the same destination: Egyptian migration is mainly male-dominated and temporarylabour migration in general, while other streams involve males and females who usually intend to stay14 National Background Paper for Algeria (Bouklia-Hassane and Talahite 2009). Also H. Khelfaoui (2006) shows how much more skilled are the Algerian immigrants in the US and inCanada as well as the distribution of immigrants coming from the Middle East and North African (MENA) regions where the skill positions dominate over the unskilled positions.15 National Background Paper for Tunisia (Mahjoub 2009).16 National Backgroung Paper for Morocco (Jaidi 2009).17 National Background Paper for Egypt (Wahba 2009).18 Nassar 2008, Table 6.62