International Organization for Migration (IOM)

other network members are already employed. 53 This mechanism tends to reinforce
the ethnic segregation in the labour market and may reduce the incentives to learn
the host country language and to acquire host-country-specific human capital, thus
severely hindering the social integration of foreign workers. The consequences of
ethnic segregation for its members clearly depend on the specific set of occupations
and sectors each network has access to and on the ‘quality’ of each network. Indeed,
using matched employer-employee data for the Veneto region in Italy, Colussi (2012)
finds that the likelihood of finding employment for an immigrant substantially
increases with the average employment rate in his/her ethnic network while Boeri,
De Philippis, Patacchini, and Pellizzari (2011), using a novel survey of immigrants in
eight Italian cities, show that migrants who reside in areas with a high concentration
of non-Italians are less likely to be employed compared to similar migrants who
reside in less segregated areas.
Clear evidence of segregation in occupations of immigrant workers in Italy is provided
in Dustmann and Frattini (forthcoming). Coming immediately after Greece, Italy is
the EU15 country with the second largest dissimilarities between the occupational
distribution of immigrants and natives. 54
Augmenting the role played for immigrants by formal channels of job search – such as
the Public Employment Offices – would clearly lead to a reduction of ethnic segregation
in occupations and sectors, which seems to be a desirable outcome in any society. But in
order to do that, one would need to increase the efficiency of these alternative channels.
3. Patterns of access, use and perception of labour market
information by employers and migrants in the context of
recruitment from abroad
Recruiting (and job searching) directly from abroad?
Is there any foreign worker (third-country national) in Italy who has truly been hired
from abroad in recent years? This may sound like a provocative question, but the
most reasonable answer is that probably few have. We have seen how both firms
and families tend to rely mainly on informal channels to recruit their employees
and that a peculiar combination of factors – type of employers, type of occupations,
widespread presence of undocumented immigrants, size of the underground sector,
53 For instance, Frijters, Shields, and Wheatley-Price (2005) and Battu, Seaman, and Yves (2011)
analyse immigrant job search methods with United Kingdom data. They find that, although personal
networks are a popular method of finding jobs among ethnic minorities, they are not necessarily the
most effective ones.
54 In their study, Dustmann and Frattini (forthcoming) use a Duncan dissimilarity index to measure
dissimilarities in occupational distributions. This index can be interpreted as the percentage of
immigrants who would be required to change occupation for immigrants and natives to have the same
occupational distribution. Therefore, the higher the index, the more dissimilar is the occupational
distribution of immigrants and natives. The value of this index in Italy (for the period 2007–2009)
is 27.5 per cent for EU migrants and 36.2 per cent for non-EU migrants. France, Germany and the
United Kingdom have values ranging between one fourth and one half of the Italian ones.
country studIes – ITALY
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