oa Een vergelijking van de arbeidsmarktpositie van Polen en Bulgaren voor en na migratie naar Nederland

This article compares the pre and post migration position in the labour market of recent migrants to the Netherlands from Poland and Bulgaria, regarding the extent to which migrants have a job, what their socioeconomic status is, and how satisfied they are with their income. The prime question is whether those migrants who found a job in the Netherlands work in a lower socio-economic status job than before migration, with which we test the first part of the U-curve-hypothesis, putting forward that migration results in a loss of job status. We used the dataset ‘Social and Cultural Integration Processes’ (SCIP). This dataset collected information from migrants that registered in the Dutch Municipality Population Registers to a maximum of one and a half year before the start of the survey. We find evidence that almost all Poles have a job in the Netherlands, but, excluding those who were in school in Poland before migration, most had a job in Poland as well. The situation for the Bulgarians is less positive, even though they more often have a job in the Netherlands than they had in Bulgaria. Within both migrant groups the socioeconomic status of the job in the Netherlands is lower than the status of the last job in the country of origin, but less so for family-motivated migrants and higher educated migrants. Income satisfaction has increased substantially for both groups.