International Organization for Migration (IOM)

Improving Access to Labour market Information for migrants and employers
100
from migrant workers employed by relatives or friends seems to be the preferred
method for Italian families. A “good” immigrant worker will suggest another “good”
immigrant worker, given that his/her reputation – and possibly even his/her job – is
at stake. Clearly, these referrals usually concern workers that belong to the same
ethnic network or national group.
As a matter of fact, families need not only a productive worker but also someone
whose honesty and trustworthiness is high enough to be given access to the family
house and to be entrusted with its youngest or oldest members. Where direct personal
contacts are not enough to find a good candidate, some special intermediaries seem
to play an important role in the Italian context. The Catholic Church – and all its
related organizations and NGOs – seems to be a prominent actor in facilitating the
match between families and immigrants. Similarly, non-confessional NGOs and
trade unions are active in this area.
Discrimination against migrant workers
The literature on discrimination against immigrants in the Italian labour market
is still very limited with respect to other European countries (Fullin, 2006).
Unfortunately, as suggested by the little research available, this apparent lack of
interest for the phenomenon is not due to an absence of discrimination in Italy.
Dustmann and Frattini (forthcoming) find that immigrant workers are less likely to be
in employment and substantially more likely to be in the bottom deciles of the earning
distribution than native workers with similar characteristics. This disadvantage does
not seem to vanish with the length of their stay in Italy. Indeed, Venturini and Villosio
(2008) have shown that foreign workers employed in the private sector in Italy earn
the same wages as natives upon entry into employment, but that the two wage profiles
diverge with on-the-job experience. Foreign workers do not seem to assimilate from
an employment perspective either: a difference in employment between foreign and
native workers is found even upon entry, and increases over time. At least part of these
gaps in wages and employment between immigrants and Italians may be explained by
a discrimination against foreign workers.
The best way to test whether employment or wage gaps can actually be attributed
to discrimination or, rather, to differences in characteristics which cannot fully be
observed by the researcher (for example, fluency in the host country language, ability,
skills, attitude to work, motivation, and so on) is by conducting field experiments.
These experiments are widely used both by economists and sociologists to study
discrimination both in the labour market and in other areas such as the housing
market. For the labour market, they generally imply sending identical CVs – which
only differ in the nationality of the candidate or name (with names suggesting a native
background and names suggesting an immigrant one) – or using actors of different
nationality/ethnic group to answer to job advertisements from newspapers and the
Internet. Any systematic difference in the response rate of potential employers is then
attributed to discrimination, as the “candidates” only differ in nationality/immigrant
background/ethnicity (see, for instance, Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004).