person has been employed in the current job for less than a year. We therefore define new hires as those who obtained their job within the previous 12 months.

The evidence for Western Europe shows a strong and positive correlation between the share of new hires in an occupation (which we refer to as “turnover”) and the share of foreign workers (Figure 7). That is, migrants tend to work in occupations with a more dynamic structure and with turnover that might be unmet by natives’ supply of labor, resulting in labor shortages. The elasticity of the share of migrants to new employment is about 0.1, meaning that a 1 percent increase in the share of new hires is associated with a 0.1 percent increase in the share of migrants in a given occupation of a NUTS2-level division of destination (see Appendix 3). The correlation between turnover and the prevalence of immigrant workers per occupation is stronger for non-EU migrants and those coming from NMS13 countries, while migrants from high-income EU15 countries are not likely to be in high-turnover occupations (Appendix Figure A8, Panels a, b, c).

As a final step, we show that the higher responsiveness of migrants to labor-demand conditions and job openings results in higher exposure to income shocks derived from supply and demand changes that surfaced during the pandemic. Figure 8 shows that ISCO-08 three-digit occupations in the EU with a higher share of new hires in 2018 also have higher ex ante exposure to income risks. In conclusion, there is a strong, positive relationship between job openings, the share of immigrants (especially from NMS13 countries and non-EU countries) and high-income risks at the occupational level in high-income EU countries. Therefore, negative demand shocks that reduced jobs in certain sectors during the pandemic are likely to have had more impact in occupations in which immigrants are overrepresented.

# 7. From Ex Ante Vulnerability to Ex Post Job Losses

In this section, we examine the correlation between our different measures of ex-ante vulnerability to COVID-19, and the actual employment impacts of the pandemic on workers by immigration status. We utilize the latest available of EU-LFS in 2020, which covers the first year of the pandemic. As per the previous waves, the data covers all Western European Union countries as well as Norway and Switzerland.

Figure 9 presents the growth rates of different types of jobs over time, based on the categories of ex ante measures of risk we had identified earlier. In Panel A, we see that the growth rates of essential and non-essential jobs followed a parallel path since 2015, including the decline of around 1.5 percent 2020. In sharp contrast, in Panel B, the number of teleworkable jobs grew at an even higher rate in 2020, while the number of non-teleworkable jobs dropped sharply by 3.3 percent. Income risk combines the two previous measures and Panel C shows that employment in occupations categorized as having an income risk dropped much more sharply (-3.6%) than in occupations considered as income safe (-0,1%). Finally, employment in occupations with a health and job tenure. However, better-suited proxies, such as job vacancies in the EU, are not available at finer levels of disaggregation of occupations and sectors.

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