Over-qualification of worker migrants in Latin American southern cone countries, Argentina and Brazil

Gabriela A. Sala, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)

In Latin American’s Southern Cone, in the last decades of the twentieth century, Argentina continued concentrating the highest stocks of intraregional migrants while Brazil saw a growing amount of bordering migrants. In both countries the increase of regional migrants agreed with improvements in both the schooling of the population and the work force. This article proposes to analyze the level of over-qualification of the regional and native migrant workers in Argentina and Brazil, based on census information, using two methodologies. The first one is based on the relation of the qualification of the occupation and the maximum level of instruction reached by the worker. The second is based on the comparison of each worker’s schooling, measured in years of study, and the average schooling of its occupational group.