Occupational characteristics and trajectories of young immigrants’ descendants in Italy

Abstract

Immediate immigrants’ descendants represent a significant part of the Italian population with a migratory background at a young age, and they are increasingly entering the Italian labour market for the first time. We aim to test the downward path that can be framed in terms of the segmented assimilation theory, investigating the descendants’ access to employment and their working characteristics. This is a first attempt at analysing these under-researched issues due to the still young average age of immigrants’ descendants. Paying attention to youths aged 18–29 years, we use information from the ad hoc ISTAT labour force survey module of 2021 on the integration of migrants and their descendants into the labour market and perform descriptive analyses on employment/unemployment status and occupational characteristics. To touch upon compositional effects, multivariate analyses will deepen the study of factors linked to over-education by using the two step Heckman procedure. Second generation immigrants have the highest probability of employment exclusion. This is not the same for the other migratory generations, who seem to have a similar path to the Italians. Among workers, second generation immigrants have a highly skilled position and an educationally relevant job more frequently than the other groups.