The Ethnic Penalty in the Italian Labour Market: A Comparison between the Centre-North and South

Trade-off between Employment and Job Quality: Ethnic Penalty in Italian Regional Labour Markets

“…To summarise the results of this part of the analysis, we may conclude that our second hypothesis is partially confirmed. As observed comparing Centre-North and South of Italy (Avola 2012;2014), in a cross-regional perspective the penalty of male immigrants compared to natives regarding segregation on the lower rungs of the socio-professional hierarchy, wages and to a lesser extent employment security, increases simultaneously with the reduction of penalty in terms of access to the labour market. These findings suggest that the competitiveness of immigrants in the most problematic regions in terms of employment opportunities and presence of a significant secondary labour market (with the relative substantial flexibility connoting it) is based on their widespread willingness to accept bad jobs.…”

“…Beginning from these findings, we applied a similar empirical strategy in previous studies to analyse the Italian case from a territorial perspective, comparing the Centre-North and South of the country (Avola 2012;2014). Although the two macro-areas are characterized by the same institutional order, the performance, structure and informal regulation of labour market differ considerably.…”

Immigrants and legal status: Do personal contacts matter?

“…Most of these regions also belong to a group of countries—Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain—that scholars associate with a common Mediterranean immigration model (King, 2000) in which foreign workers have high employment rates but are concentrated in lower status occupations and in the informal sector (Ballarino & Panichella, 2015; Reyneri, 2001; Reyneri & Fullin, 2011). This incorporation model characterises Italy in general (Fullin & Reyneri, 2011; Pugliese, 2002) but southern Italian regions in particular (Avola, 2015).…”

Immigration Italian Style, 1977–2018

“…This article aims to describe the last several decades of Italian migration , distinguishing between the Center/North and the South/Islands of Italy (from now on "North" and "South"), as the migratory histories of these two areas are quite different (Avola 2015). We show how the boom and bust cycles of immigration of recent years can be understood in light of demographic and labor market demand/supply structural changes (Reyneri 1998;Dalla-Zuanna 2006;Bonifazi andMarini 2010, 2014) and the inability (or unwilligness) of public authorities to regulate both entry and exit (Barbagli, Sciortino, and Colombo 2004;Sciortino 2012).…”