Migration, Class Attainment and Social Mobility: An Analysis of Migrants’ Socio-Economic Integration in Italy

Abstract

This article focuses on the socio-economic integration of ethnic minorities in Italy, combining the literature on migration with research on social stratification. We analyse the ethnic penalty on occupational attainment and career mobility, integrating the origin–education–destination theoretical framework with the migration status. Since ethnic penalty is an ‘umbrella concept’, we also quantify the extent to which it is mediated by differences in education and social origin. Furthermore, adopting a diachronic view of migrants’ class attainment, we verify whether the post-migration downgrading is followed by a recovery during the career, considering also mobility within the working class (standard and non-standard). Our analyses are based on the Multipurpose Survey on Households and Social Condition and Integration of Foreign Citizens. The results show that migrants are penalized in the Italian labour market, remaining largely ‘trapped’ in the working class. This inclusion at the bottom of the class structure reduces their heterogeneity by education and by social origin. Moreover, their penalty increases during the career, except when they move from the non-standard to the standard working class. Finally, we find that the ‘unexplained’ component of ethnic penalty, net of education and social origin, is substantial and increases from the first to the current job.

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

“…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).…”

“…Recent research showed that the effect of education and social origin interact with the migration status (Zuccotti, 2015), since several mechanisms of reproduc-tion of social inequality are 'country-specific' (Torche, 2015), i.e. they cannot be transferred among societies (Panichella et al, 2021). However, it is not yet clear how these mechanisms change among different European receiving countries.…”

“…Indeed, foreign qualifications may lack formal recognition and may not be recognized by institutions in the host country, and often they provide a weaker informal signalling (Kanas and Van Tubergen, 2009;Lancee and Bol, 2017). Therefore, immigrants have lower returns to education compared to natives (Panichella et al, 2021;Zeng and Xie, 2004). Migrants have also to deal with an imperfect command of the host language, which makes it difficult the job search processes and diminishes their labor productivity (Chiswick and Miller, 2015;Koopmans, 2016), and they have limited knowledge of the local labor market functioning (Friberg, 2012;Papademetriou, Somerville, and Sumption, 2009).…”

“…that migration disrupted processes of intergenerational social reproduction" (Heath and McMahon, 2005, p. 411), and that the EP disappears when the social class of origin of the second-generation is controlled for (Gracia, Vázquez-Quesada, and Van de Werfhorst, 2016). The literature on first-generation migrants is even more limited, showing that migrants with higher social origin have are more at risk of social demotion (Panichella et al, 2021), albeit their chances of relative social mobility are similar to that of native population (Li and Heath, 2016).…”

“…There are different explanations on why the mechanisms of the intergenerational repro-duction of social stratification may work differently among individuals with different ethnic statuses (Panichella et al, 2021). First, since migrants' qualifications lead to lower economic returns (see above), but at the same time these investments are afforded more often by highstatus families, there is a process of perverse openness which leads to stronger downward mobility for high-status migrants (Li and Heath, 2016).…”