L'impatto della crisi sull'inserimento degli immigrati nel mercato del lavoro dell'Italia e degli altri paesi dell'Europa meridionale

Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal were the West European countries that received more economic immigrants in the last 20 years, becoming shortly among the European countries where the proportion of foreign-born people is largest. A peculiar trade off characterized the incorporation of immigrants in the job market of those countries: a small gap between the unemployment of immigrants and that of natives versus a huge penalization of the not few highly educated immigrant workers as regards the quality of jobs. The very recent trends of unemployment and employment rates both of immigrants and natives are analyzed on the basis of the labour force surveys. After the crisis the penalization of immigrants gets worse, although not dramatically (but in Spain), especially for females, whose labour demand remains almost steady. The returns are not so important, as the crisis affects heavily the East European countries of origin, and in Italy the proportion of immigrant workers among people in employment even goes on increasing. By contrast, a "race to the bottom" starts for immigrants, who are more and more employed in low skilled jobs.