occupations require the same education levels but entail different types of tasks). These jobs tend to be less amenable to work-from-home options and more likely to be strongly hit by the pandemicrelated supply restrictions (Mongey, Pilossoph and Weinberg, 2020). Second, migrants rely on networks of preceding waves of friends, families, and diasporas to find jobs when they arrive. This process creates a path dependency in the selection into specific occupations and perpetuates the occupational divide. Finally, migrants are more likely to be employed in dynamic occupations with higher employment turnover which leads to higher vulnerability.

Our paper contributes to several strands of literature in economics and other disciplines. First, it adds to the growing literature on the employment and labor market consequences of the COVID19 pandemic. Most papers thus far have explored the overall labor-market impacts in high-income countries (Adams-Pressel et al., 2020a; Adams-Pressel et al., 2020b; Bartik et al., 2020; Cortes and <mark>Forsythe</mark> 2020; Rojas et al., 2020). Related studies have explored the impact on different groups within the labor force (Albanesi and Kim, 2021; Mongey et al., 2020; Alon et al., 2021).<sup>1</sup> The emerging pattern is that the groups of workers who were already vulnerable to income and employment risks prior to the pandemic are also the ones most negatively impacted from COVID19-related shocks. The literature thus far shows that employment risks associated with COVID-19 have disproportionately affected low-wage and less-educated workers (Rio Chanona et al., 2020; Mongey, Pilossoph and Weinberg, 2020). Similarly, Garrote-Sanchez et al. (2020) find that the pandemic exacerbated inequality in the labor market, especially in richer countries where betterpaid and better-educated workers were almost fully insulated from the shock.

We focus on migrant workers, who represent an under-examined category of workers within the literature that has analyzed the labor-markets impacts of the pandemic thus far. A handful of studies have looked at this group, finding that immigrant workers tended to be more exposed to the negative labor market consequences of the pandemic (Boeri et al. 2020; Borjas and Casidi, 2020; Fassani and Mazza, 2020a; Fasani and Mazza, 2020b; Yasenov, 2020). However, the drivers of increased exposure among migrant workers have yet to be analyzed in detail. In contrast to previous contributions, this paper provides a detailed descriptive analysis of the potential drivers of the higher economic and health risks faced by migrants during the pandemic. It also examines actual job losses that followed the pandemic by migrant status, in addition to ex-ante measures of vulnerability to the pandemic. We focus on migrant workers in the EU, one of the main destinations for immigrants; the region hosts some 60 million of the world’s estimated 272 million immigrant workers. By taking advantage of the harmonized labor-force data available for multiple destination countries in Europe, we examine potential drivers at a granular level, taking into account migrants’ personal characteristics, occupations, and origin countries.

The paper also contributes to a literature examining and comparing the occupational choices of immigrant and native workers, and the risk levels for the two groups that stem from these occupational choices. The literature has primarily focused on occupational hazards and has shown that immigrant workers are over-represented in occupations with higher rates of injuries and fatalities. This has been evidenced in the US context (Orrenius and Zavodny 2009; Hersch and

> 1 For evidence on the labor market effects of COVID-19 in developing economies, see for example Kamis et al. (2021) and Kugler et al. (2021).

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