International Organization for Migration (IOM)

ITALY 7
francesco fasani 26
Abstract
Better access to information for employers (private and public) who are willing to
hire migrant workers – both from abroad and from inside the country – and for
prospective and resident migrants looking for available job opportunities, would
critically improve the speed and quality of the matching process. This would have
important welfare-enhancing implications for employers, workers and for the
economy as a whole (given that better matches lead to higher productivity). This
report aims to provide a comprehensive picture of the matching process between
employers and immigrants in Italy in recent years.
A variety of actors participate in the process of matching between demand and
supply of foreign workers in the Italian labour market. As we will see in the
subsequent sections, informal channels (namely personal networks, direct referrals,
and so forth) dominate both employers’ and workers’ search strategies in Italy.
Meanwhile, public employment services play a role which is marginal at most.
Private agents, instead, are more relevant in this context: both for-profit firms –
such as temporary workers’ agencies – and non-profit bodies – such as NGOs, trade
unions, the Catholic Church and its related institutions – do intervene in aiding
the flows of information between employers and candidates and in facilitating
the matching. Finally, ethnic networks seem to play a major role in the Italian
context.
There are some aspects which are peculiar and specific to the Italian case and possibly
to other Mediterranean EU Member States (such as a segregation of migrant
workers in low-skilled occupations, a vast presence of undocumented immigrants,
7
26 Francesco Fasani is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Economic Analysis (IAE-CSIC),
Barcelona and Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (GSE). The author
would like to thank Maurizio Ambrosini, Gian Carlo Blangiardo, Tito Boeri, Giovanni Facchini,
Tommaso Frattini, Rachele Poggi and Emilio Reyneri for their help, suggestions and comments.
country studIes – ITALY
87