Legal status and immigrants’ labour market outcomes: comparative evidence from a quasi-experiment in Western and Southern Europe

Improved legal status has been found to be associated with better labour market outcomes for immigrants, although causal effects remain difficult to ascertain. This article contributes to the debate on the ‘citizenship/legal status premium' by providing quasi-experimental evidence based on the 2007 EU Eastern Enlargement, following which immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria, the new EU Member States, acquired the EU citizen status. The article also contributes to the literature on legal status effects, mainly focused on single-country studies, by comparing ‘older' destination countries of Western Europe with ‘newer' ones of Southern Europe. Results show that while EU citizenship acquisition is associated with higher employment rates in Western European countries, the association is null or negative in Southern European countries, where immigrants are more strongly urged to be employed. On the other hand, EU citizenship acquisition is more strongly associated with improvements in skill levels in Southern Europe, where immigrants are usually segregated in unskilled jobs, but only among men. In these countries, EU citizenship acquisition positively affects male self-employment chances as well. The article concludes that possible effects of improved legal status should be interpreted in light of different institutional contexts and models of immigrants’ labour market incorporation.