Ethnic penalty and occupational mobility in the Italian labour market

Abstract

The article examines the occupational mobility of immigrants in Italy in a double perspective. First, this work compares immigrants and natives in order to understand whether, and to what extent, in a country characterized overall by low social mobility, natives and migrants have the same chances for improving their social position, or the latter are disadvantaged on an ethnic basis that affects their career (research question 1). Then, the article investigates what are the factors (referring to immigrants’ human capital, socio-cultural assimilation process and ethnic network) fostering occupational mobility among immigrants (research question 2). We conduct an ordinary least squares analysis on microdata from two retrospective cross-sectional surveys, for natives and migrants, with the same sample design, questionnaire structure and variable classification, thereby allowing the comparison of results. The empirical findings confirm that intra-generational occupational mobility in Italy is overall very limited but that geographical origin is a significant factor influencing upward mobility. Thus, the existence of an ethnic penalty is confirmed. Furthermore, among migrants, high human capital improves (short-range) upward mobility, while the socio-cultural assimilation process only partly leads to economic assimilation. Conversely, the recourse to the ethnic network acts as a trap in low-qualified occupational careers, hindering an improvement of socio-economic position.

Professional Trajectories in Migrant Biographies of Qualified German, Romanian, and Italian Movers

“…To provide a valid comparative perspective, this research considers a third category of movers and a second host context. Indeed, the literature confirms that qualified Italian labour force lacks access to adequate job offers that match skills according to working conditions (Avola & Piccitto, 2020), which emphasises the strong economic and non-economic incentives for them to migrate (Assirelli et al, 2018;Lulle & Emilsson, 2021) and the low return rate once they have chosen to move abroad (Saint-Blancat, 2019). All our study participants come from very diverse socio-cultural and political national settings, which points to the context-boundness of thought, behavioural, and decisional patterns.…”

“…Indeed, the Italian context provides for an overall very low social mobility with little return on education (Assirelli et al, 2018), which is additionally starkly driven by the geographical origin of its labour. Avola and Piccitto (2020) have researched the occurrence of the "ethnic penalty" in the Italian labour market and found out that, firstly, foreign workers are increasingly challenged in pursuing social mobility compared to native labour, especially if they come from economically disadvantaged contexts. Indeed, migrants from stable economic contexts resulted less penalised.…”

The labor market integration of immigrant women in Europe: context, theory, and evidence

“…In Italy, the gender gap in occupational status varies by duration of stay. Female immigrants on average start out in a position with a higher occupational status than their male counterparts, but they experience little occupational mobility over time because of overarching gender discrimination in the Italian labor market (Avola and Piccitto 2020). This being said, the occupational mobility of most immigrant men is not predicted to be substantial.…”

Migration and Socio-Economic Integration in Europe. An Analysis of Men’s and Women’s Ethnic Penalty

“…We consider three groups: a) upper class (EGP I-II); b) intermediate class (EGP III-IV); c) working class (EGP V-VI-VII) 4 . In order to provide a more detailed and encompassing indicator of the individual social background of origin, we control also for parental education (Avola and Piccitto, 2020;Gracia, Vázquez-Quesada, and Van de Werfhorst, 2016), which divides respondents into the three groups used to measure respondent education. In both cases we used the dominance criterion: we consider the highest social class and educational title between mother and father (Erikson, 1984).…”

“…This allows to highlight the importance of both education and social origin as important drivers of migrants' socio-economic integration, as well as how this interrelation changes over countries. This issue -which has been rarely addressed in comparative studies -is central in the most recent research on second-generation migrants (Gracia, Vázquez-Quesada, and Van de Werfhorst, 2016;Heath, Rothon, and Kilpi, 2008;Platt, 2005aPlatt, ,2005bZuccotti, 2015;Zuccotti and Platt, 2021;Zwysen and Longhi, 2018), whereas few studies analyzed this issue considering the first-generation migrants (Avola and Piccitto, 2020;Panichella et al, 2021;Li and Heath, 2016).…”