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.

Italy is a country with a long history of emigration and a very short experience of immigration. The paper first surveys the Italian emigration pattern describing the characteristics of the Italian emigrants (age, sex, skill level), their area of origins and the directions of their movement. The determinants of the migration choice are then analyzed as well as the policies affecting the decision to migrate. The end of the first section provides an analysis of the emigration effects in the areas of origin, namely the positive effect of the remittances and the changes in the composition of the remaining population. The second section surveys the recent Italian immigration phenomenon with a description of the immigrant characteristics, such as area of origin, sex, age, and location in the country. Special attention has been given to the illegality issue because the majority of the immigrants became legal by applying for an amnesty. The determinants of the emigration in the country of origins and the effects in the destination close the picture. The conclusion provides a look at the future and the policy changes that should be adopted.

Gavosto, Venturini, Villosio (1999) find that the impact of foreign workers on the wage of natives was positive. Such a result was partly to be expected, and therefore the effect of immigrants on native employment is analyzed here. Two aspects of the unemployment experience are taken into account: i) displacement risk, measured by the probability of moving from employment into unemployment; ii) job-search effectiveness measured by the probability of moving from unemployment into employment within one year. The quarterly Labour Force Survey data (ISTAT) from 1993 to 1997 was used. The transition probabilities depend on two sets of independent variables at time t: the individual characteristics and the external conditions of the market. A probit model was applied for repeated-cross-sections on "specific" local areas in order to control for possible autocorrelation and endogeneity. The results show that in the northern part of Italy, where most immigrants are located, the share of immigrants has no effect or a complementary effect on the probability of finding a job for workers looking for a new job while for people looking for a first job (the young) a negative effect is detected only in 1993 while the effect is positive in the most recent periods. For native transition from employment to unemployment a complementary effect prevails, while there is a negative effect only in the manufacturing sector in Northern Italy for 1996. This effect, however, is possibly due to other factors, i.e. the spread of temporary contracts in that area during that year.

Cultural differences play an important role in shaping migration patterns. The conventional proxies for cross country cultural differences, such as common language; ethnicity; genetic traits; or religion, implicitly assume that cultural proximity between two countries is constant over time and symmetric. This is far from realistic. This paper proposes a gravity model for international migration which explicitly allows for the time varying and asymmetric dimensions of cultural proximity. In accordance with Disdier, Tai, Fontagné, Mayer (Rev World Econ, 145(4):575–595, 2010) we assume that the evolution of bilateral cultural affinity over time is reflected in the intensity of bilateral trade in cultural goods. The empirical framework includes a comprehensive set of high dimensional fixed effects which enable identification of the impact of cultural proximity on migration over and beyond the effect of pre-existing cultural and historical ties. The results are robust across different econometric techniques and suggest that positive changes in cultural relationships over time foster bilateral migration.

In this paper, we analyse the characteristics of employed migrants before and after the beginning of the recession in Italy to understand whether the economic crisis has exacerbated or reduced the high segmentation of the Italian labour market, with foreign workers largely concentrated in low-paid and low-quality jobs, even when highly educated. The analysis looks separately at male and female migrants because of strong gender specialisation, with the female component highly concentrated in the homecare and healthcare sectors, and the male component mainly employed in the manufacturing and construction sectors. We inquire how employment, working conditions, and wages have changed before and after the crisis in the sectors and occupations, where foreign workers are concentrated with respect to the other sectors and occupations of the Italian economy. We conclude that the disadvantage of being in a segmented labour market nevertheless allowed for positive growth of foreign employment during the recession, but it implied an even greater segregation in terms of low-skilled, unstable, and poorly paid jobs.