Salvatore Strozza

The Delayed School Progress of the Children of Immigrants in Lower-Secondary Education in Italy

In Italy, foreign children are often enrolled in classes at a lower grade than that of their age group (what we term in this article ‘delayed school progress’), mainly because of language problems. On their education pathway they also encounter more difficulties than their Italian schoolmates, as evidenced by the smaller numbers of successful exam results. This brings about a widespread delay in their schooling, which grows as the education levels increase. In this paper we seek to identify the causes of this delay using data from a national survey (ITAGEN2) involving more than 20,000 lower-secondary-school students, half of whom are foreigners. The risk of such delay for the children of immigrants remains significant, even with equal resources and commitment, equal socio-economic and housing conditions of the family and relations with their peers. This clearly indicates that the integration problems experienced by immigrants’ children in the Italian school system can negatively influence their subsequent schooling progress and reduce their opportunities for social mobility in the labour market and a positive insertion in Italian society.

Determinants of Foreign Workers' Wages in Two Italian Regions with High Illegal Immigration

Since the end of the 1970s Italy has moved from being an out-migration country to being a foreign immigration country, but very few studies have addressed the factors determining the wages of immigrant workers, owing to the lack of available data. In this paper we analyse the determinants of the wages of immigrants in some areas of Latium and Campania, where the share of illegal immigration is relatively high, using the results of a set of sample surveys which collected information on several aspects of the immigration process in the years 1993-94. The purpose of the article is to shed some light on the factors underlying wage distribution among the immigrants using an estimation method that controls for sample selection problems. According to the empirical results, income differences seem to be relatively high among immigrants. Differences in labour market integration among sexes and area of origin clearly emerge from the results. Moreover, legal status plays an important role in the explanation of the wage gap between documented and undocumented immigrants, also because of the different occupational sector structure in the two groups. Copyright Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.

Integration in Italy Among Selected Migrant Communities: Does Country of Origin Matter?

The present chapter focuses on integration levels and determinants of Moroccan and Ukrainian migrants in Italy. Equal attention is paid to destination and origin factors, which may facilitate or constrain integration outcomes in three dimensions: the labour market, education and access to citizenship. The chapter finds evidence that integration levels, determinants and specifically, the roles of origin factors vary widely across dimensions. In the labour market, both Moroccan and Ukrainian migrants living in Italy show high levels of integration. These extremely positive performances seem due less to origin than to destination factors – namely Italy’s labour market specificities and migration history. In addition, the role played by NGOs appears relevant to helping migrants find employment – not good employment or well-remunerated employment but just employment. In the education dimension, things differ. At an international level, Ukrainians living in Italy show good levels of integration, once controlled for natives’ performance. Thus origin determinants – in terms of conditions at home – seem to prevail here. Not surprisingly, the degree of integration in the “access to citizenship” dimension is connected to the degree of openness/restrictiveness of host citizenship laws and, accordingly, to the length of presence in the country. Our results confirm that Italy is still one of the countries where getting citizenship is one of the main constraints for migrants in both recent communities (Ukrainians) and well-established ones (Moroccans).

The migration and integration of Moroccan and Ukrainian migrants in Italy : policies and measures

INTERACT - Researching Third Country Nationals? Integration as a Three-way Process - Immigrants, Countries of Emigration and Countries of Immigration as Actors of Integration

La recente evoluzione demografica nei maggiori ambiti urbani italiani e il fondamentale ruolo degli stranieri

Recenti lavori hanno segnalato come molti dei principali ambiti urbani italiani stiano vivendo una nuova fase di crescita demografica presumibilmente legata alla crescita della componente straniera della popolazione. In questo lavoro si ricostruiscono dapprima la dinamica evolutiva sperimentata in 8 ambiti urbani italiani negli ultimi sessant’anni per poi soffermarsi sull’analisi del contributo fondamentale fornito nell’ultimo decennio dalla componente migratoria e da quella straniera.