The socio-professional insertion of immigrants in Andalusia

Abstract

In the last few decades a new phenomenon has burst intensively and rapidly into Spanish and Andalusian societies, and established itself: economic immigration. Immigration policies have shown a continuous interest in achieving the social integration of foreigners in host societies. The importance of employment has not gone unnoticed by social integration policies, nor by the economic immigrants themselves, since employment is the main source of income and status for individuals in our society. We begin from the hypothesis, more accepted than rejected, that achieving social integration is closely related to entering the labour market and maintaining stable employment. For this reason the present article focuses on analysing the socio-professional inclusion of economic immigrants in the autonomous community of Andalusia, as a fundamental indicator of their possibilities of social integration.

Keywords: immigration; labour market; professional insertion; social integration.