How are you doing in your grandpa’s country? Labour market performance of Latin American immigrants in Spain.

This paper analyses wage differentials between local and foreign workers from Latin America and the Caribbean in Spain, which was traditionally a country of emigrants, being precisely Hispanic America the main host region of Spanish migrants during the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition, we also compute earnings. The paper exploits the Earnings Structure Survey 2006, which is the first nationally representative sample of both foreign and Spanish employees. Using the Machado-Mata econometric procedure, wage differentials between locals and foreigners are decomposed into the gap related to characteristics and the one due to different returns on endowments (i.e., discrimination). First, we find that, in absolute terms, the latter component grows across wage distribution, reflecting the existence of a kind of glass ceiling. Second, there seem not to be significant wage gap between Latin American and the last of foreign employees, probably because non-native workers are employed in low-skill jobs.