migrants have similar education levels. Low-skilled workers tend to have lower language fluency, which tends to limit them to a greater degree to jobs that involve manual labor, rather than interactive tasks, as Peri and Sparber (2009) show. As a result, migrants concentrate in manual labor, while natives have a comparative advantage in finding occupations that involve more complex communication tasks (D’Amuri and Peri, 2014; Foged and Peri, 2016). Similarly, Peri and Sparber (2011) find occupational differences between migrants and native-born workers even if they are highly educated. Among workers with tertiary education, immigrants are concentrated in occupations that involve more quantitative and analytical tasks; by contrast, native-born workers tend to be in jobs that require more intense communication skills.

Thus, we want to examine whether language ability shapes the sorting of migrants into occupations with different skill requirements in the EU – and, as a result, the exposure to the different risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. We begin by using the O*NET survey to identify the intensity of the host-country language requirement per occupation. In particular, the knowledge questionnaire includes the question “What level of English language knowledge is needed to perform your current job?” with answers ranging from one to seven. We transform this measure available for each occupation in the US to ISCO three-digit occupations and create a standardized index of intensity of the host-country language requirement with mean of zero and standard deviation of one.

Our analysis shows that immigrant workers in Western European countries are disproportionately concentrated in occupations that require lower levels of host-country language fluency (Figure 4, Panel A). Across the EU labor markets, immigrants work in occupations in which language skill requirements are 0.2 standard deviations below the mean (Figure 4, Panel B). This difference is statistically significant at the 1 percent level. However, the difference in occupational choices between migrants and natives varies with migrants’ fluency in the host-country language. Migrants with advanced or above-average levels of fluency have occupations with similar levels of language requirements to those required for native workers (just 0.03 standard deviations lower than those of the native-born workers), while migrants with beginner or intermediate levels of language ability are employed in jobs in which the language requirements are, on average, 0.64 standard deviations lower. OLS regressions show that, even after controlling for other individual characteristics (age, age squared, gender, years of education, as well as fixed effects for both regions-of-origin, and countries-of-destination), language fluency is significantly positively associated with the language intensity required in the occupation of workers.

Occupations with higher language requirements are associated with lower levels of job vulnerability. In particular, occupations that require a higher command of the native language, as well as higher communication skills, are significantly more likely to be amenable to telework, which shields them from pandemic-related income risks (Figure 5, Panel A). Such occupations typically require higher levels of education, but this finding holds even when controlling for differences in workers’ average education by occupation. The correlation between language ability required per occupation and the exposure of occupations to health risks is less clear (Figure 5, Panel B).

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