Native and Immigrant Youth in the Italian and Spanish Labour Markets: A Deeper Insight in the South-European Model of Immigration

The paper aims at analysing the main characteristics of young immigrants’ insertion in the Italian and in the Spanish labour markets, and the effects of the crisis, on the basis of a comparison with the young natives. Italy and Spain are interesting cases as they both represent the Mediterranean familistic model of welfare state and the South-European model of new immigration. In fact, in the Southern European countries – contrary to what happens in Continental and Nordic countries - immigrants are only poorly penalised as for the risk of unemployment, but they are strongly penalised as for the access to highly skilled jobs in a clear segmentation of the native and immigrant labour markets. Moreover, in both countries, the young immigrants represent a very significant share of the youth and show quite peculiar socio-demographic features when compared both to young natives and to adult immigrants. This suggests the opportunity to take a closer look at this specific segment of the labour force when discussing the Southern European model of insertion of immigrants in the labour market.

Italy and Spain are interesting cases also because, with the crisis, they have both experienced a significant increase in the youth unemployment rates, more than registered in other European countries. However, the impact of the crisis on employment in the two countries has been different as it was dramatic in Spain and less severe in Italy. The different consequences that the crisis has had in the two countries - both on the risk that young immigrants and natives to be unemployed and on the jobs they are likely to have - are anyway still to be explored.

On the basis of Eurostat Labour Force Survey microdata, the paper will show the characters of the so-called Southern European Model of integration of immigrants in the labour market with specific reference to the young adult component of the labour force. More specifically, we will estimate logit models and average marginal effects to compare natives’ and immigrants’ labour market outcomes before and in the period of the crisis, using 2007 and 2012 as reference years. To the purpose and coherently with the peculiar characters of the Southern European model, we will estimate logit models for two distinct and specific dependent variables, measuring the labour market outcomes of native and immigrant youth. On the one hand, we will look at the differences in the probability of avoiding unemployment for the two groups before and "after" the crisis and, on the other hand, we will look at the differences in the probability to access highly skilled non-manual occupations, again before and "after" the crisis.