The impact of immigration on the labour market: a case study of peruvian and colombian immigrants on employment opportunities in the ecuadorian labour market.

Abstract

This paper aims at empirically assess the impact of unskilled immigration on the labor market in a destination country, in this case, Ecuador. As separating types of workers according to their abilities is difficult, it was used as identification strategy, to take account those immigrants coming from Colombia and Peru assuming that they are mostly unskilled. Similarly, variable where impact was assessed were unemployment rates of domestic skilled and unskilled workers. For practical purposes, it is taken as reference, a model developed by Portes & French (2005) for the UK. Results in agreement with previous studies show little or no statistically significant effect on the mentioned test variable, which can be explained as well by the existing literature.