KDI 경제정보센터

Immigrants make up significant proportions of the population and labor force in many developed economies, but they face considerable challenges in navigating those labor markets, such as occupational regulations and licensing, lack of destination-specific skills, or outright discrimination. In our recent working paper,we studied how labor market barriers affect immigrant workers collectively and by occupation groups across the US and other destination countries.

In a recent blog post, we summarized cross-country empirical evidence from our paper of employment differences between immigrant and native workers across four occupation groups―non-routine cognitive, non-routine manual, routine cognitive, and routine manual. Non-routine cognitive occupations include management and professional occupations; non-routine manual occupations include jobs like health aides and food workers; routine cognitive occupations include jobs like retail sales and clerical workers; and routine manual occupations include jobs like construction and assembly workers. In this essay, we shift our focus to the earnings differences between immigrant and native workers across these four occupation groups.