Justin Fox, Columnist

Where Immigrants Get the Job Done, and Where They Don't

The gap between foreign-born and native-born employment is especially wide in Europe's wealthiest nations.

May 25, 2017 at 6:34 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

It's still rough out there.
Photographer: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images

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Overall, labor markets in the Netherlands and Sweden are pretty healthy. The two countries' unemployment rates are near the middle of the pack among members of the affluent-nations club called the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and their employment-to-population ratios -- a measure I prefer because it doesn't ignore the labor-force dropouts who have become such a big issue in the U.S. -- are among the best around.

When you look at employment metrics for immigrants in the Netherlands and Sweden, though, things start to look really different. Among OECD members for which data is available,1495722311536 they have the biggest gap in employment between native-born and foreign-born inhabitants:

Note where the U.S. is on that chart. Here, immigrants are more likely to be employed than native-born people are.