Immigrants in Spain earn a third less than local workers
At a time when immigration has flared up as a social issue and experts warn that the Spanish economy will need millions more migrants in the future, a new study has found that foreign workers in Spain earn around a third less than locals.
Immigrant workers in Spain earn 29 percent less than natives, a new study has revealed.
Led by the University of Oslo and published in Nature Journal, the report ‘Immigrant-native pay gap driven by lack of access to high-paying jobs’ was carried out by researchers from more than a dozen universities around the world with Navarra's IESE Business School participating in Spain.
READ ALSO: Why are so many different types of foreigners choosing to move to Spain?
The results show a significant salary gap between foreigners and Spaniards, with migrant workers in Spain earning 29.3 percent less than locals on average, the highest figure among countries included in the research.
This difference is similar to that observed in Canada (27.5 percent) but far ahead of other European countries included in the study such as Norway, Germany and France (20.3, 19.6 and 18.9 percent, respectively) and far exceeds the figures recorded in the United States (10 percent) and Sweden (7 percent).
In the nine countries analysed, immigrants earn on average 17.9 percent less than locals.
The report concluded that around three-quarters of the wage gap is due to the “segregation” of immigrant workers into lower-paid jobs, while the remaining 4.6 percent is due to wage disparities within the same job and company.
In the latter case, referred to as “within-job inequality” in the study, Spain also stands out with one of the highest percentages (7 percent), surpassed only by Canada (9.4 percent) and closely followed by France (6.7 percent).
The study, which analysed data from 13.5 million people including employers and employees, reveals that, by region of origin of workers, the average wage gaps across countries studied were: Sub-Saharan Africa (26.1 percent), Middle East and North Africa (23.7 percent), Asia (20.1 percent), Latin America (18.5 percent) and Europe, North America and other Western countries (9.0 percent).
The exception are non-EU digital nomads who need to earn €2,762 per month to be eligible for Spain's Digital Nomad Visa in 2025, but they work for employers overseas.
Fernando Pinto Hernández, Professor of Economics at Rey Juan Carlos University, stated in the Spanish press that “the Spanish case is particularly worrying and highlights the existence of structural obstacles to labour integration, even for workers who have already entered the formal market.”
This comes as experts forecast that Spain will need up to 25 million migrant workers in the coming decades in order to maintain the pensions system as a generation of Spanish workers begin to retire.
However immigration has flared up as a sociocultural issue in Spain in recent times. The leader of Spain's far-right party Vox, Santiago Abascal, last week downplayed reports that the party intends to deport 8 million foreigners, including second-generation migrants born in Spain. This followed controversial comments from party spokesperson Rocío de Meer's comments that Vox wants to deport "8 million people".
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