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.

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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.

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