L’efficacité des politiques d’intégration dans l’amélioration du taux d’emploi des personnes d’origine étrangère

Throughout Europe, the labour market integration of immigrants tends to lag behind that of natives. This paper empirically analyses the role played by integration policies in closing this gap in EU countries. Relying on the Migration Integration Policy Indicator (MIPEX), we find that countries with more developed policies favouring integration of immigrants are not necessarily associated with a higher employment rate of immigrants. This finding is due to the fact that different types of policies have opposite effects: while policies favouring family reunion, tackling discrimination and allowing for political participation seem to increase the labour market integration of immigrants, a higher labour market mobility, as well as larger access to permanent residence and nationality are negatively linked with the employment rate of immigrants. Moreover, our results confirm that immigrants’ labour market integration varies with the skill composition of the migrant population, a higher level of qualification favouring employment. The composition of the immigrant population within a country in terms of skill levels, however, could also be influenced by integration policies in potential destination countries, a premise which we also test. We show that integration policies indeed act as a pull factor for migration in a gravity model that controls also for the restrictiveness and skill selectivity of migration policies. Yet, it seems that more elaborate integration policies affect primarily the number of high-skilled immigrants entering the territory, but not the number of medium or low skilled, and this only for those from EU countries. Different factors hence seem to be at play for the low and medium skilled, but once moved, our results show that low-skilled migrants are the ones benefitting the most from integration policies in terms of employment rate.