Qualification of South American immigrants in Spain and the United States : migration cycle, labor markets and selection policies

By systematically comparing the educational and labor profile of South American immigrants in Spain and the US, this article aims at identifying differences in the attraction power of each destination for the skilled migrants born in this region, and discussing the potential role of the cultural links, labour market structure, migration cycles and return selection to explain those differences. We exploited the statistical information contained in Spanish and US sources for adult immigrants born in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Equator and Peru: 2011 Spanish Census, National Immigrants Survey (ENI 2007) and Labor Force Survey in Spain, and the American Community Survey (ACS 2012) in the US. Our results suggest significant differences in the migration dynamics of each national group to our two destinations, which highlights the difficulty of designing one-fit-all migration policy for the entire region of South America. Skilled Brazileans and Ecuadoreans seems much more likely to migrate (and stay) to the US than to Spain, Peruvians show hardly any difference across the two destinations, and both Argentineans and Colombians fall in the middle of the other two.