Jacopo Mazza

Discussion Paper Series CDP 01/21 Being on the Frontline? Immigrant Workers in Europe and the COVID-19 Pandemic Francesco Fasani and Jacopo Mazza Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration Department of Economics, University College London Drayton House, 30 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AX www.cream-migration.org Being on the Frontline? Immigrant Workers in Europe and the COVID{19 Pandemic Francesco Fasani Queen Mary University of London, CEPR, CReAM and IZA Jacopo Mazza∗ European Commission Joint Research Centre April 8, 2021 Abstract We provide a first timely assessment on the labour market impact of COVID{19 on immigrant workers in Europe. We propose a novel measure of individual exposure to employment risk that combines information on four occupation characteristics: the role of workers' occupations in the response to the pandemic, the contractual protection they enjoy, the possibility of performing their job from home and the resilience of the industry in which they are employed. We show that our measure of employment risk closely predicts actual employment losses observed in European countries in 2020. Our measure allows comparing relative employment risk across population groups as well as identifying individual covariates that are associated to higher exposure to risk. We find that: i) migrants { and Extra EU migrants in particular { are exposed to a higher risk of unemployment than native workers, even within industries and occupations; ii) young and low educated migrants are those most exposed; iii) female workers face harsher consequences from the pandemic than men. According to our estimates, more than 9.3 million immigrants in the EU14+UK area are exposed to a high risk of becoming unemployed in the COVID{19 recession; 1.3 million of them are facing a very high risk. JEL Codes: F22, J61, J20 Keywords: employment risk, COVID{19, key occupations. ∗Corresponding author at the KCMD, European Commission Joint Research Centre, Via Enrico Fermi, 2749, 21027 Ispra (VA), Italy. We thank Peter Backus, Matias Cortes and Tommaso Frattini for helpful comments. Computer programs are available on request. The views in this paper are solely the responsibility of the authors and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of the European Commission or of any other person associated with the European Commission. 1 Introduction The costs of recession are rarely, if ever, equally distributed across the population (Hoynes, Miller and Schaller, 2012). Early evidence on the labour market impact of the COVID{19 suggests that this recession is anything but different. A growing body of evidence is showing that pandemic{induced job losses are concentrated among low{wage industries and occupations, young workers, the low educated, women and ethnic minorities.1 Inequalities in the pandemic effects are not limited to unemployment risk. Minorities and other vulnerable groups of workers are over{represented in occupations exposed to higher risk of contagion (Basso, Boeri, Caiumi and Paccagnella, 2020), they are suffering from severe deterioration in mental health (Proto and Quintana-Domeque, 2020) and their excess mortality is particularly high (Platt and Warwick, 2020). Policy interventions can counteract the inequality{ enhancing effects of the pandemic, as shown in Cortes and Forsythe(2020a) for the U.S., but to be effective these actions need to be targeted at those in need. Understanding who will be most harshly affected by the economic consequences of the COVID{19 crisis is then of primary importance. Unsurprisingly, the detrimental economic impact of the pandemic is more severe for those whose labour market participation is relatively vulnerable and whose savings and wealth are inadequate to weather the effects of a lasting recession. Migrant workers possess all these characteristics, yet little attention has been devoted to understanding the peculiar effects this recession is having on them. We fill this gap in the burgeoning literature on the labour market effects of the COVID{19 pandemic, by providing a first timely assessment of how the pandemic crisis is impacting the employment prospects of immigrant workers in Europe.2 Further, we contribute to this early body of evidence by proposing a novel measure of employment risk { which combines the distinction between essential and non{ essential occupations with other indicators that are widely discussed in this literature { and by testing its predictive power on actual employment losses recorded in Europe in 2020. Our measure allows comparing relative employment risk across population groups as well as identifying individual covariates that are associated to higher exposure to risk. Although the focus of this paper is on migrant workers, the approach we develop can be immediately extended to any other category of workers. Several reasons would lead us to expect migrants to face especially dire prospects in the midst of the COVID{19 pandemic. As relative new{entrants in the labour market who typically face linguistic and institutional barriers to access occupations, migrants are generally more likely to have non{standard or informal contract, shorter job tenure and low{skilled occupations than comparable natives (Kerr and Kerr, 2011; de la Rica, Glitz and Ortega, 1See, among others: Cortes and Forsythe(2020b); Couch, Fairlie and Xu(2020); Alon, Doepke, Olmstead- Rumsey and Tertilt(2020); Hupkau and Petrongolo(2020); Adams-Prassl, Boneva, Golin and Rauh(2020); Farre, Fawaz, Gonzalez and Graves(2020). 2This paper builds on earlier evidence discussed in Fasani and Mazza(2020a) and Fasani and Mazza (2020b). 1 2015). The combination of all these factors render their employment status particularly sensitive to business cycle fluctuations, increasing their vulnerability during economic down- turns (Dustmann, Glitz and Vogel, 2010; Orrenius and Zavodny, 2010). Immigrants are also more concentrated in low{pay jobs than natives with similar characteristics: having relatively low earnings and transferring a large fraction of their income abroad through remittances, migrants typically have limited savings in host countries and are therefore poorly equipped to sustain long periods of unemployment. Further, migrants' residence status typically determines their entitlement to welfare state provisions and public health care, limiting their access with respect to natives (Avato, Koettl and Sabates-Wheeler, 2010). In addition, residence permits are often tied to their employment status: being laid off may force them to return home or remain illegally in the host country without any welfare coverage. Two factors may partly offset these weaknesses. First, migrants' higher mobility across areas may enable them to more effectively respond to local negative shocks than natives (Borjas, 2001; Cadena and Kovak, 2016). Second, migrants can typically rely on insurance from family abroad (Yang, 2011), a resource that can be extremely effective when shocks in host and source countries are uncorrelated. Both mechanisms, however, break down when the recession is at a global scale, like the ongoing one. The evidence on migrants' performance in the midst of the COVID{19 crisis is still extremely scarce. A notable exception is work by Borjas and Cassidy(2020) showing that immigrants in the US are experiencing a particularly severe decline in employment. They quantify that about a third of this relative decline is explained by migrant workers having jobs that are less \remotable" than natives and find that undocumented men were hit particularly hard by the pandemic, with their rate of job loss far exceeding the rate of job loss of legal immigrants. In the context of low{ and middle{ income countries (LMICs) such as Nepal and Bangladesh, Barker et al. (2020) observe that migrant households suffer a double fallout: their income dropped due to reduced migration of households members and fewer remittances, while their health hazard increased due to the return of members from national and international destination areas which were more affected by the pandemic. In Europe, harmonized microdata covering the continent since the COVID{19 outbreak have yet to be released. In a rapidly evolving and dramatic recession such as the ongoing one, this delay undermines the ability of policy{makers to intervene in a timely manner designing the appropriate interventions on the affected population, deepening the economic damages of the pandemic. In this paper, we propose a measure of exposure to employment risk that relies on existing data to asses the risk of dismissal at the individual worker level. Our measure links specific characteristics of migrant workers' occupations { which are salient in the context of this unique crisis { to individual level data from one of the most recent waves of the European Labour Force Survey (EU{LFS 2018). The four dimensions that we identify as pivotal in predicting workers' employment risk in the current COVID{19 crisis are: i) es- sentiality; ii) temporariness; iii) teleworkability and iv) industry resilience. We first account for the distinction between key and non{key occupations that many governments introduced when imposing shutdown measures. Despite variation in definitions and enforcement across 2 countries, workers employed in key sectors and occupations could generally continue their activities, although with enhanced safety and health measures. Outside these key occupations, instead, workers and firms were subject to severe restrictions that often implied that workers had to stay at home while

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