Formal, and informal, recognition of skilled migrant’s professional qualifications in the European Union and its influence in labour market outcomes

Abstract

In the last decades the European Union has been very active in creating legal apparatus and mechanisms to enhance intra-european labour mobility, to further establish a single labour market and to achieve the EU2020 goals of smart and inclusive growth. However, several constraints of political, legal, administrative and practical nature continue to hinder the mobility of workers and the recognition of their professional qualifications. Professional qualifications are an element of economic empowerment and distinction. Recognition is a mechanism of regulating, and ordering the access to the labour market. Therefore, formal and informal recognition of professional qualifications, or their non-recognition, influences migrants’ access to the labour market, but also the migrants’ position within the market itself. Numerous observations on the European Union context, that included third country nationals and Eastern Europeans, continue to show the underutilization of skilled migrant workers and the existence of wage differentials. Similarly, recently conducted studies about Portuguese skilled emigrants, particularly on nursing professionals, suggest disparities in status and earnings when compared to natives. These results challenge the principle of nondiscriminatory treatment of workers and disclose the phenomenon of labour market segmentation. To cope with this issue it’s relevant not only to identify the degree of influence of institutional, organizational and social contexts in the formal, and informal, recognition processes of professional qualifications, but also to understand its underlying factors and mechanisms. In this research, we focus on the case of Portuguese nursing professionals. In this research we adopt a multilevel approach, thus contributing to highlight the articulations of the various factors and mechanisms that produce inequality, between migrants and natives, in the labour market.