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European debates on immigrant integration focus on employment because of its implications for assimilation. Although studies show that Sub‐Saharan African immigrants are most disadvantaged across Europe, cross‐national analyses do not examine labour force participation (LFP) or control for selection into the labour force before estimating employment, calling these results into question. Furthermore, studies rarely discuss visible minority status or gender making it unclear whether (1) country‐context matters for African LFP and employment and (2) visible minority status matters differently by gender. I use French and Spanish census data to determine whether Sub‐Saharan Africans are most disadvantaged in new and traditional receiving countries. My results indicate that country‐context matters, but previous employment findings likely reflect variation in LFP. Despite smaller penalties to migration characteristics in Spain, Sub‐Saharan African men are the only group significantly less likely to be employed in Spain, indicating that they experience unique barriers to job access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various perspectives of immigration from receiving countries. Western Europe and the Gulf opted for a policy of admitting temporary rather than permanent migrants because they see manpower shortages as temporary. Western European governments assumed that the labor shortages of the 1950s and early 1960s would end when those born immediately after the war entered the labor force. Some sociologists and economists have suggested deeper structural explanations for the use of temporary foreign workers. One is that foreign workers can be a cushion in economies with fluctuations in employment. Another reason for admitting guest workers rather than permanent migrants is that the countries of Western Europe and the Gulf believed that they could thereby avoid becoming ethnically plural societies.