This article appears in the following Oxford Review of Economic Policy issue: LABOUR MIGRATION IN EUROPE [View the issue table of contents]
Labour-market assimilation of foreign workers in Italy
* Università di Torino, IZA, CHILD, CARIM, e-mail: alessandra.venturini{at}unito.it
** LABORatorio Riccardo Revelli, Collegio Carlo Alberto, e-mail: claudia.villosio{at}laboratoriorevelli.it
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Abstract |
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This is the first paper to analyse the labour-market assimilation of foreign (i.e. non-citizen) workers in Italy. It considers the daily wages and the days of employment of male workers in WHIP, a matched employer–employee panel dataset, from 1990 to 2003. The traditional human-capital approach is augmented by a control for the probability of staying abroad, modelled by aggregate variables of the origin country. The human-capital variables considered are age and experience, both in and out of employment. What emerges from the empirical analysis is discouraging. Foreigners who are able to get higher wages are the least likely to stay, but assimilation profiles do not change when return migration is taken into account. Foreigners employed in the private sector earn the same wages as natives upon entry into employment, but the two wage profiles diverge with on-the-job experience. Neither do foreigners assimilate from an employment perspective: a differential in employment between foreign and native workers is found even upon entry, which increases over time. In the construction sector the wage and employment differential is even larger, while manufacturing and services follow the aggregate trend. Africans immigrants have the fewest career prospects while Eastern European and Asian workers are less far behind. The general pattern for foreign workers appears to be a fragmented career, either restricted to seasonal or temporary jobs or alternating between legal and illegal employment.
Key Words: wage assimilation • employment assimilation
We would like to thank the participants at the Oxford Review of Economic Policy seminar in April 2008, Steiner Strom, Simone Bertoli, Andrea Cornia, Daniela Del Boca, Robert Rowthorn, and an anonymous referee for valuable suggestions. We would also like to thank Craig Holmes for his help in the final preparation of this article.
1 This field of research compares different policies, such as income-support interventions and language and training courses, but also groups of migrants who differ according to their nationality or type of entry, i.e. if they are political refugees, illegal migrants, or workers.
2 See, for instance Venturini (2004, ch. 5).
3 Italy does not have a tradition of large European inflows as do, for instance, Greece and Spain, and at the beginning of the 1970s the majority of foreigners were located in Rome, where communities from the former colonies (Ethiopia and Eritrea) were based.
4 Since his 1987 article, Borjas has stressed the selectivity of the migration decision as a function of the human-capital return on migration. In his 1996 article with Bratsberg he also considers the selectivity of the return decision in a cross-sectional approach and always referring to a Roy return on human capital model.
5 More information can be found at www.laboratoriorevelli.it/whip
6 Since the dataset starts in 1985, this variable is left-truncated for workers who joined employment before 1985. This happens less often for foreigners who mainly entered Italian employment after 1987.
7 An additional specification with the origin GNP interacted with dummies for the year of entry has been implemented, which provides similar results and thus has not been reported.