Reassessing the commuting penalty for immigrants: new evidence from Spain

Commuting to work is a research topic that has attracted a growing interest from different areas of knowledge in recent years. On the one hand, commuting trips reflect the decisions concerning the binomial place of residence/workplace in a social and spatial context (Taylor and Ong 1995; Houston 2005; Beckman and Goulias 2008), since they are directly related to the behaviour of individuals in both markets. For that reason, studying commuting trips is relevant for the design, implementation and evaluation of policies concerning transportation and territorial planning and, in general, for all issues related to the design of the cities with the objective of achieving more efficient mobility patterns. On the other hand, from the individual point of view commuting consumes a significant part of the total time that individuals devote to their work activities and reduces the time available for other activities (Kenworthy and Laube 1999; Kahneman et al. 2004; Kahneman and Krueger 2006). Accordingly, the monetary and time costs derived from commuting have been associated with multiple negative effects in the work, health and personal life spheres (Jansen et al. 2003; Stutzer and Frey 2008; Novaco and Gonzalez 2009; Wener et al. 2003; Gottholmseder et al. 2009), and is therefore a relevant phenomenon when analysing individual well-being.

In this vein, the relative commuting of immigrants is an important issue for this group and their host countries, given both the crucial relevance of their labour integration for their assimilation and the significant increase in international migratory flows in last years (OECD 2018a, b). Hence, part of the origin of the lower wages and poorer working conditions that immigrants tend to exhibit (very especially in the case of immigrants from emerging economies) may be explained by the differences in the patterns of commuting between natives and immigrants, which according to some authors could constitute a good indicator of the lack of spatial matching of immigrants’ labour supply and demand (Preston et al. 1998; Blázquez et al. 2010; Liu 2009). Yet, although research on both the determinants of commuting patterns and their individual and social consequences has grown significantly in the last years, not many studies have specifically focused on the differences between native and immigrant workers. Consequently, although there is now a growing body literature on immigrant commuting, this is overall an understudied line of research.

The aim of this article is to examine the differences in terms of commuting between natives and immigrants in Spain. One of the main contributions of the research is the use of decomposition techniques for the first time in this field of study. This is relevant insofar they permit quantifying which part of the raw differences in commuting times between immigrant and natives is explained by their different characteristics and which part remains unexplained, reflecting actual differences in the patterns of commuting for individuals otherwise observationally similar. In the same vein, the analysis considers also the immigrants’ type of countries of origin as a potential source of heterogeneity within this group, given that such heterogeneity has been identified both in their labour market performance (Chiswick 1978; Borjas 1985; Friedberg 2000) and in their overall use of time (Ribar 2013). Furthermore, this is one of the few studies based on individual data from a nation-wide representative survey (as far as we know the only other exceptions are Hu 2017 and Hu et al. 2019), which contrasts with the focus of previous studies on limited territories, such as certain metropolitan areas or regions, which hampers the generalisation of the findings of their case studies. Finally, another distinctive point of the research is that it explores whether the divergent behaviour of native and immigrant workers in terms of commuting could be related to a differential effect of commuting in terms of individual well-being and, specifically, to a hypothetical greater tolerance to commuting by immigrants.

Spain is a particularly interesting case study for the examination of immigrants’ relative commuting. Hence, it is a country characterized by a significant amount of recent migratory flows in last two decades, when it became the destination of a significant portion of the overall recent immigration to the European Union (OECD 2018a). Immigrants to this country exhibit a high labour participation and immigration flows have had, in fact, very notable impacts on the Spanish economy, including an increase of the flexibility of its labour market and its potential economic growth (Izquierdo et al. 2010; Arce 2010). On the other hand, there is also evidence about the territorial and labour segregation of immigrants in Spain, as immigrants tend to concentrate in particular regions, types of cities and neighbourhoods (Fernández-Huertas et al. 2019; Maza et al. 2013; Pareja-Eastaway 2009). They are also strongly segregated in certain disadvantaged segments of the labour market such as low-skilled occupations (Simón et al. 2008), inter alia because at their arrival they experience an intense downward occupational mobility and the subsequent occupational progress is rather limited (Simón et al. 2014).

In summary, the evidence obtained shows that immigrants in Spain have significantly unadjusted longer commuting trips than native workers. Part of the explanation of this phenomenon is related to the important differences existing between both groups in terms of observed characteristics, such as a different distribution in the use of modes of transport. In any case, one of the main findings of the research is that immigrants have significantly adjusted longer commutes than observationally similar native workers (i.e., even when differences in a broad set of relevant personal, territorial, mode of transport and labour attributes are controlled), which confirms the existence of an immigrant penalty in commuting. The penalty is only observed, yet, in the case of immigrants from emerging countries, as the commuting behaviour of those from advanced countries is not significantly different to that of comparable native workers. Moreover, although the penalty is rather similar along gender, education and occupational lines, it is on the contrary much more pronounced for individuals living in large municipalities and the region of Madrid, respectively. This implies that the vast majority of previous studies on the commuting of immigrants, which focus on specific highly populated geographical environments, could offer a biased perspective so that their results may not be applicable to other territories with different characteristics. Finally, given that commuting has a similar negative impact on satisfaction in different domains of life for immigrants and natives, immigrants’ longer commutes are not apparently associated to a greater tolerance, which helps to discriminate against potential competing explanations of the phenomenon.

The structure of the article is as follows. After this introduction, the second section reviews the literature related to immigration and commuting. Then, the third section describes both the database and the main variables. Next, the econometric strategy used in the empirical analysis is explained in the fourth section. The results are presented and discussed in the fifth section and, finally, the main findings of the research are synthesized in the conclusions section, where some policymaking implications are also outlined.

In the last years, the literature has paid a considerable attention to the economic and social integration of immigrants in their host countries (see e.g. Borjas 1999; Lalonde and Topel 1997; OECD 2018b). Given that the relative situation of immigrants in the labour market is a crucial point in their assimilation, a large number of empirical analyses focus on comparisons with native workers in terms of relevant labour attributes such as occupational attainment or earnings. Their findings show that immigrants are typically segregated into worse occupations than native-born workers and that this occupational segregation tends to persist over time (Green 1999; Chiswick et al. 2005a and 2005b; Jasso and Rosenzweig 1988; Bauer and Zimmerman 1999; Constant and Massey 2003; Amuedo-Dorantes and De la Rica 2007). In the same vein, they confirm that immigrants typically face a significant gap in earnings relative to native-born workers, although it tends to diminish the longer they remain in their host country (Chiswick 1978; Borjas 1994 and 1999; Chiswick et al. 2005b; Friedberg 2000; Baker and Benjamin 1994; Lacuesta et al. 2009). Moreover, they show that the labour results of immigrants differ significantly according to their origin, due to the heterogeneity in the transferability of human capital acquired in their country of origin and its relationship with the cultural, linguistic and economic distance with the host country. In part as a result of these factors, immigrants from less developed economies tend to experience poorer occupational attainment and lower earnings (Chiswick 1978; Borjas 1985; Friedberg 2000; Hagan 2004; Chiswick et al. 2005a). This is particularly evident, for example, in the case of Spain, where the labour performance of immigrants from advanced countries is overall rather similar to those of native Spaniards and e.g. they do not experience an occupational downgrading when entering the Spanish labour market. In contrast, those from emerging economies exhibit significantly lower earnings due to their intense segregation into low-wage firms and occupations (Simón et al. 2008; Amuedo-Dorantes and De la Rica 2006, 2007), and also experience a very severe occupational degradation at their arrival and a very slow occupational progress afterwards (Simón et al. 2014).

In this context, studies that focus on the commuting behavior of immigrants are not very abundant, which is striking. On the one hand, because commuting is an activity that in aggregate terms has significant environmental and social implications, and that from an individual point of view involves monetary and time costs that have been commonly associated with multiple negative effects in different domains such as health, personal life and work (Jansen et al. 2003; Stutzer and Frey 2008; Novaco and González 2008; Wener et al. 2003; Gottholmseder et al. 2009). On the other hand, because commuting reflects the individual choices made in terms of place of residence/place of work within a given social and spatial context (Taylor and Ong 1995; Houston 2005; Beckman and Goulias 2008). Hence, the study of the relative commuting of immigrants may contribute to a better understanding of the consequences of their geographical concentration and the subsequent poorer relative labour outcomes.

In their seminal study on the topic Preston et al. (1998) examine the commuting patterns of immigrants in the New York metropolitan area in order to contrast whether they incur in a commuting penalty. Their results confirm that after controlling for individual, household, economic and mode of transport characteristics, certain immigrant subgroups have longer commuting times than natives, which is interpreted as an indirect evidence on the negative impact that spatial barriers associated with their residential segregation, their limited access to certain means of transport or the geographical distance to employment opportunities have on their adaptation within the labour market. Blázquez et al. (2010) and Liu (2009) also explore indirectly the relationship between residential location and job accessibility of immigrants in the Madrid region and certain United States metropolitan areas (Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC), respectively, by analyzing immigrants’ commuting patterns. Their findings confirm that, after controlling for personal, household, job and mode of transport characteristics, immigrants tend to have longer travel times than natives, which is consistent with immigrants having specific location patterns that lead to intense residential segregation in ethnic enclaves.

Along these same lines, in their analysis of the spatial, social, demographic, and economic determinants of immigrant commuting in California, Beckman and Goulias (2008) confirm that they present longer relative commutes, although this varies depending on elements such as age, residential location, or the relative use of public transportation. With a different approach, Newbold et al. (2015) examine the relative patterns of commuting of immigrants in the Ontario Golden Horseshoe secondary region in terms of distance rather than duration of commuting. They conclude that immigrants exhibit lower relative commuting distances, although differences with natives tend to decrease with immigrants’ length of stay in the country of destination, due to their progressively increasing use of private means of transport, which allow for longer journeys. Finally, Hu (2017) and Hu et al. (2019) analyze the relative commuting of immigrants for the United States as a whole using nationally representative data. On the one hand, Hu (2017) examines changes in the commuting behavior of Asian immigrants by years of stay in the country and arrival cohort. The results show that differences in commuting time relative to native-born Asian Americans are only significant for recent Asian immigrants who have lived in the United States for less than four years (albeit only for the most recent cohorts), but not for established Asian immigrants with longer stays. On the other hand, Hu et al. (2019) find that there are significant differences by immigrant race/ethnicity in both the relative use of public transportation and commuting behavior, and that, in terms of assimilation, the time required to converge with the U.S.-born is considerable in all cases, but shorter for white immigrants (23.8 years) than for Hispanics (27.6 years) and Asians (32 years).

Aside from being relatively scarce, the aforementioned studies suffer some limitations. The first one is that although they distinguish in some cases according to the racial/ethnic group of immigrants (Preston et al. 1998; Newbold et al. 2015; Hu 2017; Hu et al. 2019), they do not differentiate according to the level of development of the country/region of origin. The only exception is Blázquez et al. (2010), who observe that immigrants in the region of Madrid coming from emerging areas exhibit higher commutings than natives, but that this is not the case for immigrants coming from advanced areas such as the European Union-15, United States and Canada. The second one arises in terms of the specific groups of workers and, very especially, of the territories covered. Hence, with the exception of Hu (2017) and Hu et al. (2019), none of them is nationally representative, as they cover specific metropolitan areas in the United States (Preston et al. 1998; Beckman and Goulias 2008), certain secondary regions in Canada (Newbold et al. 2015), and a particular region in Spain (Blázquez et al. 2010), while some of them focus moreover on certain specific sub-groups of immigrants (Liu 2009; Hu 2017).

According to the results of the literature on the determinants of commuting, there are four types of potential explanatory factors that help to explain the individual patterns of commuting and, therefore, could be behind the differences in commuting between immigrants and the native population. The first is related to individual or family characteristics, as men, older workers, individuals with higher levels of education, those acting as reference in the household and those who live with a partner or who have children tend to be more likely to get involved in longer commuting trips (Gimenez-Nadal et al. 2018; McQuaid and Chen 2012; Lee and McDonald 2003). The second regards spatial factors related to urban form and the built environment, that exert a significant influence on commuting patterns (Ewing and Cervero 2010; Lin et al. 2015), among which variables such as urban size and population density stand out (Engelfriet and Koomen 2018). In the first case, an increase in size is usually related to the expansion of available employment and housing options and, therefore, to longer commutes (Levinson and Kumar 1997). In the second case, higher levels of density generally result in shorter commuting distances due to increased accessibility (Ewing and Cervero 2010), although this effect is moderated by congestion, which may plausibly be increased by the self-selection of low-income households into dense urban neighborhoods that are well served by public transit and may cause that shorter distances do not result in shorter travel times (Levinson and Kumar 1997). The third type of explanatory factors are those related to transportation modes. The mode of transport affects commuting duration in a significant way, given that the use of public transport modes significantly increases travel times compared to private means which provide greater mobility and independence such as the car (Asensio 2002; Van Vugt et al. 1996). The choice between these different modes is conditioned by accessibility to them, which is determined by residential and work location, and the type of routes, with public transport means more associated in practice with urban routes and the use of the private vehicle with other type of routes and long distances (Commins and Nolan 2011; Kawabata and Shen 2007). As regards active modes of transport such as cycling or walking, they are often associated with reduced travel times, although their use depends on available infrastructure and travel distance, especially in densely populated territories (Vandenbulcke et al. 2011; Panter et al. 2011). Finally, a last type of explanatory factors includes those related to job attributes, as they exhibit a significant influence on the duration of daily commute to work, since the distribution of different types of jobs is not homogeneous throughout the territory, giving rise to differentiated geographical labour markets by occupations and sectors, and commuting trips that tend to be longer in skilled occupations as well as in sectors such as manufacturing industry and certain branches of the service sector, such as financial activities (Bill et al. 2008; Cubukgil and Miller 1982; Gera and Kuhn 1981; Zhang and Wang 2015; Casado-Díaz 2000; Eurostat 2020).

These elements are expected to have a significant influence in explaining differences in commuting between immigrants and native people. In this vein, several studies indicate that immigrants and natives tend to use different means of transport and that, although this relationship is moderated by certain factors, this contrasting behaviour persists even after controlling for various personal, housing and employment characteristics (Kim 2009; Heisz and Schellenberg 2004; Tal and Handy 2010). Consequently, immigrants tend to be more dependent on public transport due to their limited access to private means (Blumenberg 2008; Bohon et al. 2008), although their use of public transport decreases as age, income, distance to workplace and length of stay in the country of destination increase (Heisz and Schellenberg 2004; Newbold et al. 2015; Hu 2017). In the same vein, the influence of job attributes could also be relevant in this context given that, as previously noted, immigrants tend to be segregated in worse occupations and have overall poorer working conditions (Waldinger 1994; Catanzarite 2000; Wilson 2003; Bohon 2005; Blázquez et al. 2010). Finally, spatial variables could be relevant given the significant residential segregation generally observed for immigrants, especially in densely populated areas (Newbold et al. 2015; Preston et al. 1998).

Previous studies have precisely proposed immigrants' residential segregation as one of the basic explanatory hypotheses of the commuting penalty they face compared to natives of the same characteristics (Preston et al. 1998; Blázquez et al. 2010; Newbold et al. 2015). This circumstance could derive from their preference for locating in ethnic enclaves with a significant presence of culturally similar immigrants (Preston et al. 1998; Liu and Painter 2012; Liu 2009; Elliott and Sims 2001; Blumenberg and Smart 2009; Parks 2004; Wang 2006, 2010; Cutler et al. 2008), a process driven by a search for more cultural comfort, family and friendship ties, or for easier access to housing (European Commission 2003; Echazarra 2010). Although in Spain the residential segregation of immigrants is lower than in the United States or other European countries (Fernández-Huertas et al. 2019), due to factors such as the low importance of elements such as public housing that tend to increase the residential segregation of immigrants (Pareja-Eastaway 2009), immigrants also tend to concentrate there in areas where there is a large presence of other culturally related immigrants (Maza et al. 2013; Ballester and Vorsatz 2014; Blázquez et al. 2010; Pareja-Eastaway 2009; Echazarra 2010). This non-random location of immigrants in the territory could reduce their job opportunities, insofar as spatial concentration in disadvantaged areas increases the probability of locating far from jobs (Parks 2004; Wang 2006, 2010; Cutler et al. 2008), thereby introducing incentives to widen the job search area (Blázquez et al. 2010; Newbold et al. 2015; Liu 2009; Zavodny 1999). This is even more accentuated if, in addition, the areas in which they are located are characterized by poorer access to public transportation and, consequently, limited connectivity (Taylor and Ong 1995; Shen 2001; Grengs 2010; Cohen and Sirkeci 2011).

A second potential explanatory hypothesis of the commuting penalty is the possible presence of a phenomenon of discrimination against immigrants in both the labour and housing markets deriving from xenophobic attitudes among the native population (Cohen and Sirkeci 2011). This is a phenomenon widely documented in the case of the labour market, where there is abundant evidence on the existence of employer discrimination against immigrants, so that in practice they effectively receive fewer job opportunities than natives with exactly the same characteristics (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004; Silberman et al. 2007; Drydakis and Vlassis 2010; Booth et al. 2012). Moreover, this circumstance also occurs in the housing market, where several studies for different countries, including Spain, confirm that immigrants also receive discriminatory treatment in access to rental housing (Bosch et al. 2010, 2015; Bengtsson et al. 2012; Baldini and Federici 2011). This discriminatory practices could restrict immigrants' choice in terms of the spatial location of their housing and jobs, which could indirectly result in longer commuting times.

Finally, another possible explanatory hypothesis is that immigrants tend to have a greater tolerance for long commutes than natives. In general terms, differences in the preferences/attitudes of immigrants and natives have been verified in very diverse fields, such as risk attitudes, time preferences, trust and reciprocity, or residential location (Constant et al. 2011; Albanese et al. 2016; Hui et al. 2012; Dimou et al. 2020). In the specific case of commuting, their hypothetical greater tolerance could be related to the priorities of immigrants, plausibly related to a situation of necessity, who often have an urgent need for income after migration and, in general, greater financial restrictions than natives, which could force them to be less selective in their choice of employment, and therefore more susceptible to accept job opportunities associated with long commutes (Akresh 2006; Chiswick et al. 2003; Landesmann and Leitner 2020; Chatman and Klein 2009). This is seen, for example, in their access to different modes of transport, as financial constraints force immigrants initially to use inexpensive modes and/or to accommodate their commutes to those of relatives or friends, until they have sufficient resources to afford options that allow them to expand their mobility (Lovejoy and Handy 2008; Chatman and Klein 2013; Landesmann and Leitner 2020). A higher immigrant commuting tolerance may also be related to the exposure to long commutes in their countries of origin, as commuting habits are strongly persistent over time and only tend to change significantly upon significant modifications in individuals' family, work, or residential circumstances (Klein and Smart 2019; Klein et al. 2018). In this sense, immigrants tend to have a greater exposure to public transport and less access to private means of transport in their areas of origin (Chatman and Klein 2013; Chatman 2014; Blumenberg and Smart 2009; Blumenberg 2009; Blumenberg and Evans 2010; Jost 2020; Simonsohn 2006), in a context where in many emerging countries public transport systems suffer from major deficiencies (Hu et al. 2018; Henderson 2002; Carruthers et al. 2005; Wu et al. 2019).

One way of examining a population group's degree of tolerance for commuting is by analyzing the effect of commuting on their individual satisfaction. In this sense, the bulk of studies that have explored this relationship tend to conclude that commuting is an activity that has an overall negative impact on individual satisfaction. Thus, for example, longer commutes reduce the time available for family relationships or enjoying free time (Kahneman et al. 2004; Kahneman and Krueger 2006) and produce higher levels of stress or negative feelings (Wener et al. 2003; Gottholmseder et al. 2009; Evans et al. 2002).¹ One factor that has not been explored in depth, however, is whether the relationship between commuting and overall individual well-being varies with the worker migrant status, although this factor could contribute to explaining the differences observed in the commuting patterns of the two groups of workers and, in particular, the afore-described migrant penalty. In fact, in the studies that explore the relationship between commuting and satisfaction with different areas of life, the immigrant variable is not usually introduced even as a control variable (e.g. Dickerson et al. 2014; Olsson et al. 2013; Wheatley 2014). The very few exceptions are Albert et al. (2019) and Simón et al. (2020), who show that the satisfaction of immigrants in these domains is comparatively lower, although no evidence is offered for this group as regards the particular impact of commuting on satisfaction. For this reason, the final part of our empirical analysis examines in a novel way whether the impact of commuting on satisfaction differs between immigrants and natives.

The empirical analysis is based on the Survey on Quality of Life at Work (in Spanish Encuesta de Calidad de Vida en el Trabajo; hereafter SQLW), a yearly survey conducted by the Spanish Ministry of Employment and Social Security between 1999 and 2010, when it was interrupted without being replaced by a comparable survey in terms of size, representativeness and variables considered. The SQLW is composed of independent cross-sections that have a yearly sample size of around 8,000 workers. The purpose of the survey is to offer detailed information on the social and labour circumstances of Spanish workers. For that reason, it includes very rich information, including individual and household characteristics and the objective attributes and subjective assessment of certain characteristics of jobs. In addition, the survey includes information on variables that measure the level of satisfaction of workers in different life domains such as job, housing, personal life, and leisure time.

As regards the main variables of interest in the analyses, self-reported commuting is measured as the time devoted by an individual to the one-way daily trip between home and work, measured in minutes. The immigrant status is derived from the nationality of the individual so that those whose nationality is not Spanish are considered as immigrants. This group is additionally divided into two different subgroups depending on the geographical origin of the individual, to distinguish between those coming from advanced economies, on the one hand, and emerging and developing countries, on the other.² Finally, the individual level of satisfaction with different life domains are derived from the answers to a set of questions where the level of satisfaction is measured on a 0–10 scale where the extremes denote the lowest and highest level of satisfaction, respectively.

Regarding the independent variables in the empirical analysis, according to the literature, four different types of characteristics have been considered. First, individual and family attributes: gender; age; maximum level of education; presence of children under 15 years old; marital status (whether the person lives with a partner or not); daily time spent on household tasks (in minutes); and household income.³ Second, variables related to the geographical environment: region of residence (there are 17 regions in Spain), size of the municipality (five categories ranging from less than 10,000 inhabitants to more than one million are distinguished), and density (measured in inhabitants per km², approximated as the average population density of the municipalities of a similar size in the individual’s region of residence).⁴ Third, the mode of transport used in the travel to work, distinguishing between a wide range of modes of transport, both public (bus, metro or tram, taxi or train), private (car, motorcycle or bicycle), or other modes (traveling on foot or other means). Finally, several attributes of the jobs have also been considered, including objective attributes and worker’ subjective perceptions. The objective characteristics considered are type of workday (part-time or full-time and continuous shift or split shift); type of contract (temporary or permanent); seniority; occupation (distinguishing between those characterised by high levels of qualification -directive and technical-; low qualification -elementary occupations- and medium qualification -the rest of occupations-); firm size (less than 10 workers, between 10 and 249 or more than 249); the activity sector (primary sector, industry, construction, or services); and type of sector (public or private). Subjective variables include over-education (an individual is considered to be over-educated if he/she declares that his/her education level exceeds that required in his/her job); the perceived level of routine and physical effort in the job; as well as the perceived level of danger/risk and the valuation of the security and health in the workplace, all of them measured on a 0–10 scale.

The analysis uses microdata from the SQLW for the period 2007–2010, given that prior to 2007 the main variable of interest, commuting, was measured in intervals. The sample includes employees aged 16–65 (62 observations have been excluded).⁵ Those individuals who declare a commuting time exceeding 3 h (8 observations) have also been excluded. The final sample consists of 25,957 salaried employees (23.252 native workers and 2.705 immigrants, of which 2,415 are from emerging countries and 290 from advanced economies) for the pool of four years, which represent 99.7% of the total salaried employees surveyed.⁶ The sample weights provided by the SQLW have been used throughout the empirical analysis. Consequently, the evidence obtained is representative for the entire salaried population in Spain.

Different econometric methodologies of estimation and decomposition are used in the empirical analysis. First, the Oaxaca-Blinder technique (Oaxaca 1973; and Blinder 1973) is used in order to perform a detailed decomposition of the differential in the average commuting between natives and immigrants. Secondly, an ordered logit type model is used to estimate the impact of commuting on the job satisfaction of natives and immigrants. Both techniques are described below.

This research examines differences in the duration of commuting to work between the immigrant and native population in Spain, a relevant issue since immigrants' longer commuting may reflect, among other factors, an imperfect spatial matching of their labour supply and demand with negative implications for their relative labour outcomes and their individual well-being. The study contributes to an under-researched line of research that, in contrast with the intense overall attention paid in the literature to the relative situation of immigrants in host countries, has been little explored, with a reduced number of studies that with a few exceptions (Hu 2017; Hu et al. 2019) mostly cover specific territories (Preston et al. 1998; Beckman and Goulias 2008; Newbold et al. 2015; Blázquez et al. 2010) or sub-groups of workers (Liu 2009; Hu 2017). In contrast to many of these works, our empirical analysis is based on microdata from a nation-wide representative survey, whose richness of information permits taking into account properly how different personal, geographical, mode of transport and job characteristics highlighted by the literature as determinants of the commuting can affect the relative commuting times of immigrants. The novel use in this field of study of decomposition econometric techniques allows quantifying the joint and individual effect in the commuting gap of explanatory factors and eventually isolating mobility patterns for observationally similar natives and immigrants. Furthermore, the research focuses on the potential heterogeneity within immigrants by considering separately those coming from advanced countries and emerging countries, a factor frequently neglected in previous studies on the topic, and a plausibly relevant question given the abundant evidence on the heterogeneity of labour performance of immigrants according to the level of development of their areas of origin. Finally, the article also explores whether immigrants’ commuting penalty could be associated to a hypothetical lower effect of commuting time on their satisfaction levels in different domains of life.

The evidence obtained confirms that, in line with previous results in the literature (Preston et al. 1998; Blázquez et al. 2010; Liu 2009; Hu et al. 2019), immigrants in Spain have significantly longer unadjusted commutes compared to native workers, especially in the case of those from emerging countries. The use of decomposition techniques allows us to confirm that a significant part of the unadjusted differences in commuting length between immigrants and natives are due to their different observed characteristics. Although other elements such as their regional distribution and their sectoral segregation also contribute significantly to the longer commutes of immigrants, transportation modes have a very influential effect in this vein, which is consistent with the important differences in the mode of transport used by immigrants and natives (Kim 2009; Heisz and Schellenberg 2004; Tal and Handy 2010; Blumenberg 2008; Bohon et al. 2008; Newbold et al. 2015; Hu 2017).

Yet, according to the results of the decomposition analysis longer commutes are also explained in a significant manner by unobserved elements, which confirms the presence of different patterns in mobility for observationally similar natives and immigrants and, hence, the immigrant penalty in commuting found in previous studies (Preston et al. 1998; Blázquez et al. 2010; Liu 2009; Hu et al. 2019). It is important to note, however, that this penalty apparently exists only for immigrants from emerging countries, given that in the case of those from advanced countries their longer commutes are fully explained by their different relative characteristics.

The results of a disaggregated analysis for immigrants from emerging countries show in turn that the commuting penalty for immigrants tends to be rather homogenous along different socioeconomic lines, which suggests transversal potential explanatory elements for all types of immigrants regardless of their gender, education or type of job, a question that should be tested in future research. Yet, the commuting penalty experienced by immigrants is on the contrary much higher in highly populated areas, such as the very large municipalities of Madrid and Barcelona or the whole region of Madrid. This finding is relevant insofar as it suggests that previous studies on the topic, which tend to be focused mostly on these types of highly populated environments (Preston et al. 1998; Beckman and Goulias 2008; Newbold et al. 2015; Blázquez et al. 2010), tend to overestimate the commuting penalty of immigrants and, hence, could offer a biased perspective on the phenomenon.

In many of the previous studies on the topic, the commuting penalty of immigrants is solely attributed to a phenomenon of involuntary spatial entrapment in areas that restrict their labour opportunities, without providing direct evidence of the presence of this spatial mismatch. However, the commuting penalty could be due to a combination of elements such as their preference for locating in ethnic enclaves (Carlson and Theodore 1997; Shen 2000; Pareja-Eastaway 2009; and Echazarra 2010), the presence of discrimination phenomena in the labour and housing markets that reduce their ability to choose in terms of spatial location (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004; Silberman et al 2007; Drydakis and Vlassis 2010; Bosch et al. 2010, 2015; Bengtsson et al. 2012), as well as to a greater tolerance of this group towards commuting (Chatman and Klein 2013; Landesmann and Leitner 2020; Chatman 2014). The results achieved in our empirical analysis contribute to increase our knowledge on this matter, since they do not support the last of these hypotheses, according to which the unexplained differences in commuting times between immigrants and natives are due to contrasting attitudes towards this phenomenon.

In any case, the origin of immigrants' commuting penalty must continue to be investigated in the future. Analysing commuting constitutes a central element of transport and infrastructure policies, and understanding and modelling commuting patterns and worker location decisions is a major concern for urban planners and policymakers aiming to reduce it. Thus, in the case that the origin of immigrants' commuting penalty is residential segregation derived from their preference to voluntarily reside in ethnic enclaves, and given the strong explanatory capacity of modes of transport in immigrants’ relative commuting patterns, improving their access to cars could be an effective measure (which could not be adopted without a broader assessment incorporating aspects related to its social cost in environmental terms), as well as improving the efficiency of public transportation in order to reduce commuting times. Alternatively, if the commuting penalty has an essentially involuntary origin, deriving from discriminatory practices against this group in the housing and labour markets, policies aimed at offering solutions to the spatial segregation of immigrants could be effective by acting on these mechanisms to expand their access to employment and housing and therefore bringing their places of residence and work closer together.