IMMIGRATION IN ITALY By Laura Zanfrini* 1. From a source to a ...

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climatic/environmental conditions, relative job uncertainty, represent the major factors, whichdrive young Italians away from the building industry, even those who are not in possession ofany training credit, and generate a strong demand for migrants to be employed as masons,manual workers, carpenters, and assemblers: actually, foreigners’ employment in the buildingsector is more than twice as high as Italians’. In the metal and mechanical industry, well-knownare the recruitment problems deriving from the disaffection with factory work shown by thenew generations entering the labour market: actually, a large part of predicted hiring of migrantsconcerns skilled workers, plant operators and unskilled personnel;- The Italian model of social protection that, as it is known, represents the “familistic” variantof welfare regimes. Having to face the growing care demand determined by the population’sageing process, Italian families have increasingly resorted to migrant workers (largely female),to the point to give birth to a “parallel welfare” whose dimensions are larger than those of thenational health system. Migrants’ role in feeding this segment of the labour market is attested bytheir percentage out of the total number of house-help workers registered by Inps (NationalInstitute for Social Security), that touched 75% in 2002 and continued growing in the followingyears;- The employers’ tendency to address themselves to migrant workers to fill jobs alreadycharacterized by their presence. Together with the autonomous and self-propulsive initiative ofmigrant workers – who enter the labour market largely using ethnicized channels – thistendency have contributed to stigmatize some kind of occupations, subsequently labelled as“migrants’ jobs”, without necessarily reflect real recruiting difficulties. This process contributesto reinforce the ethnicisation of the labour market (involving the risk of migrants’ occupationalsegregation and wage discrimination), but also to erect material and symbolic barriers whichobstruct the access to these jobs by the Italian workers still available. The most eloquent case isrepresented by persons assigned to cleaning services, the job profile that, in collectiveimagination, represents the example par excellence of a low social prestige job;- The growing number of self-employed migrants and entrepreneurs, a process which hascounterbalanced, in recent years, the progressive reduction of Italian independent workers. Atthe source of this phenomenon there are several different reasons, which may refer both to aparticular propensity, shown by some groups to self-employment and to the emerging newstructure of opportunity. The traditional spreading of self-employment, one-man businesses andmicro-firms in the Italian reality, the general drop in earning capacity involving many activities(which has diverted the interest of local entrepreneurs in them), the need for a generationturnover depending on the fact that many artisans and self-employed workers have become wellon in years, the growth of an outlet market formed by migrants themselves, the interest shownby some Italian consumers’ segments in “exotic” products, are all factors that may haveencouraged the development of self-employment among migrants. Along with these factors, weshould consider also some structural changes that are at the base of the emerging newmetropolitan economies, and of the resulting springing up of firms operating in the area of retailtrade, food (shops and restaurants), cleaning services, transports, house upkeep services, and soon, and in the second place, in the spreading of outsourcing logics, which have strengthened theneed to have available a network of small suppliers to which less profitable activities can be left.The self-employment phenomenon should be therefore interpreted also in the light of the labourmarket changes that have gradually made the boundaries of self-employment, subordinateemployment and unemployment more permeable and indefinite than in the past. Most firmsestablished by migrants are in fact one-man businesses that, to simplify, might in somecircumstances represent a sort of functional equivalent of the resort to atypical contracts. Theadaptability of first-generation migrants, but also their juridical vulnerability, may contribute toexplain their peculiar “propensity” to set up businesses on their own, although the boundariesbetween their search for greater autonomy and their subjection to the terms imposed bycustomers can be however hardly traced out.Laura Zanfrini, Immigration in Italy, June 30, 2013. 12
There are no doubts that the massive inclusion of immigrant workforce is one of the majorelements characterizing the changes occurred in the last decades in the Italian labour market. Sincethe beginning of the 1990s, the number of both active and employed migrant workers have beencontinuously growing, conferring to the Italian labour market a more and more evident multi-ethniccomposition [see Table 4].Tab. 4 – Employed workers per economic activity sector, gender and geographical areas. Absolute values(thousands of units). Year 2012Comm.Total Agricult.TotalindustryBuildingindustryManuf.industryTertiaryindustryandtrade OthersItalians 20,564.7 734.5 5,591.6 1,422.3 4169.3 14,238.6 4,232.6 10,006.0Italy Foreign. 2,334.0 114.6 770.4 331.7 438.7 1449.0 418.4 1,030.6Total 22,898.7 849.1 6,362.0 1,754.0 4608.0 15,687.6 4,651.0 11,036.6Italians 10,501.7 273.8 3,360.5 691.8 2668.7 6,867.4 2,091.9 4,775.4North Foreign. 1,398.8 41.2 541.3 192.1 349.2 816.3 221.4 594.9Total 11,900.6 315.0 3,901.8 883.9 3017.9 7,683.7 2,313.3 5,370.4Italians 6,010.0 111.2 1914.8 405.9 1508.8 3,984.0 1,160.2 2,824.0Foreign. 803.2 17.6 288.0 112.6 175.5 497.5 121.1 376.4North-WestNorth-EastCanterTotal 6,813.2 128.8 2,202.8 518.5 1684.3 4,481.5 1,281.3 3,200.2Italians 4,491.7 162.6 1,445.7 285.9 1159.9 2,883.4 931.7 1,951.7Foreign. 595.6 23.6 253.2 79.5 173.7 318.8 100.3 218.5Total 5,087.4 186.2 1,699,0 365.4 1333.5 3,202.2 1,032.0 2,170.2Italians 4,195.3 87.3 976.6 265.3 711.4 3,131.4 867.8 2,263.5Foreign. 622.5 28.0 170.4 101.3 69.1 424.0 116.5 307.5Total 4,817.8 115.3 1,147.1 366.6 780.5 3,555.3 984.3 2,571.0Italians 5,867.6 373.3 1,254.4 465.2 789.2 4,239.8 1,272.8 2,967.0Foreign. 312.7 45.3 58.7 38.2 20.5 208.7 80.5 128.1SouthTotal 6,180.3 418.7 1,313.1 503.4 809.7 4,448.5 1,353.3 3,095.1Source: Eurostat, 2012This growth hasn’t been broken up even during the present economic recession. The impactof the crisis on immigration has proved to be more soft than in other countries, thus revealing thepeculiarities but also the weakness of the Italian labour market. Suffice to observe that, from 2005to 2012, employed migrants had almost doubled, and during the most acute phases of the crisis, theoverall employment has increased thanks solely to the foreign component. The additional foreignemployment that has been produced in these turbulent years amounts to over one million; i.e., avolume significant enough to force us to face the question of its consequences for the Italianworkforce. What is certain is that the substantial need for foreign labour expressed by Italianfamilies – for tasks decidedly unattractive to most of the native labour force – is not enough byitself to account for the extraordinary absorption capacity demonstrated by Italian economy.In order to explain migrants’ occupational performance we can suggest that the law qualitywhich is a distinctive mark of migration in Italy, has contributed “to protect” migrants. Actually,despite some initial signals towards a qualitative labour improvement and up-grading, the crisisended up in a downward realignment of the employment structure, the deterioration of the overallemployment quality and a growth in the number of low-salaried jobs. By affecting mainly low-skilloccupations and more traditional sectors, the new jobs created exacerbated the traditional forms ofsegregation by gender and nationality. Actually, the distribution of employed workers byoccupation [Table 5] clearly demonstrates migrants’ segregation in the lowest levels of the jobs’hierarchy in all the years for which data are available.As data reported in Table 5 clearly demonstrate, employed foreigners’ distribution outlines anoverall picture characterized by substantial immobility. Certainly, at an individual level, there areseveral examples of upward mobility processes, which take shape as migratory seniority grows, andoutline the paths to emulate. However, at a general level, the needs expressed by firms and familiesseem to unavoidably reroute foreign labour towards those segments which are already widelyLaura Zanfrini, Immigration in Italy, June 30, 2013. 13
Page 1 and 2: IMMIGRATION IN ITALYBy Laura Zanfri
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IMMIGRATION IN ITALY By Laura Zanfrini* 1. From a source to a ...

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