Reacción a "Immigrant workers earn 29% less than people born in Spain"

This study represents one of the most ambitious and robust approaches to date to analyse wage inequalities between immigrants and natives in developed countries. It is based on high-quality administrative microdata linking employers and employees for 13.5 million workers in nine countries, including Canada, the United States, Spain and several European economies. The methodology (country-specific regressions combined with meta-analysis) is statistically robust and allows us to distinguish between two fundamental causes of the gap: discrimination within the same job (within-job inequality) and segregation in access to better-paid jobs (between-job sorting). The central finding is that three-quarters of the wage gap is due to the latter, which is consistent with previous literature, but its comparative and systematic quantification is a real novelty of the article.

However, it should be noted that, although the design is rigorous, there are some limitations: in countries such as Spain, the available data do not allow a distinction to be made between first- and second-generation immigrants, which prevents intergenerational mobility from being studied adequately. Furthermore, differences within the same job are not fully explained, so it is possible that unobservable factors such as informal networks or institutional biases may also be influencing the results.

The Spanish case is particularly worrying. Spain has the highest overall wage gap in the entire study (29.3%) and one of the highest even for the same occupation and employer (7%). This highlights the existence of structural barriers to labour integration, even for workers who have already entered the formal market. Public policy in Spain should focus on: (i) improving the effective recognition of foreign qualifications; (ii) strengthening retraining programmes and access to labour networks; (iii) assessing possible biases in recruitment and promotion processes in large and medium-sized companies; and (iv) adapting active employment policies to the diversity of migration trajectories. Ignoring these mechanisms perpetuates inequalities and wastes skilled talent.