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The empirical literature on the long-term unemployed shows that long-term unemployment is mainly concentrated on a very narrow segment of the active population and that the characteristics of the first job matter to explain the time spend unemployed throughout a career. The literature on the labor market of the immigrants highlights the different barriers that immigrants face when they arrive in their host countries and shows that immigration does not negatively impact native employment and wages. This article tries to connect these two literatures in analysing how the immigrant background of a worker can explain the number of non-working days throughout a career (between 30 and 50 years old) for several cohorts of individuals between 1955 and 2010. Among other variables, we show that being born in Africa and in Middle East has an impact on the number of non-working days. In addition, we investigate through a multivariate regression whether the country of birth increases ex-ante the proportion of the number of non-working days between 30 and 50 years old. We find that the country of birth does play a central role in explaining the unemployment incidence of an individual over his/her career.