"Life among the lowly": measuring the effect of immigration on the destination country

"Life among the lowly" is the XIX century best-seller which strongly con- tributed to the anti-slavery movement. Certainly, it denounced the life and labour conditions of black slaves, but it also inspired some stereotypes on black people that still survive today. These two faces of the novel are contained in the present dissertation. The first chapter "Hate at First Sight? Dynamic Aspects of the Electoral Impact of Migrations: the Case of the UK and Brexit" analyses how native political preferences are influenced by the presence of foreigners in a neighbourhood. The last European and U.S. election campaigns hinged on the migration issue and we argue that the preferences expressed through the vote might reflect some prejudicial attitudes. Instead, the second and third chapters refer to the impact of immigration on the domestic labour market. "Need for Flexibility or Subsidies? Reviewing the Impact of Immigration on the Domestic Labour Market" reviews all the seminal papers that have contributed to understand the effect of immigrant workers on native labour market conditions. The conclusion of this literature sustains a non negative impact of foreign labour supply on native average wage. According to these studies this effect is achieved more easily when the labour market is flexible and workers can nimbly change their occupations. Nonetheless, the crucial hypothesis of all the analysis is a perfect elastic capital supply. Studies on the reaction of investments to an increase in the immigrant labour-force are still rather scant and we try to improve the knowledge on the underlying dynamics in the last chapter. "The Labour Demand Response to Supply Shocks. The Indirect Effect of Immigration" investigates how industries and firms production decisions are influenced by migration inflows. The general conclusion, as suggested by the title of the review, is that policy makers should pay attention to industrial policies and not only to labour market structure. In particular, previous studies on the impact of foreign-born population on native voting preferences have highlighted a positive effect of immigration on the electoral consensus for right-wing parties. Nonetheless, this result holds with some caveats. To overcome the limit of the existing literature we formulate the hypothesis that an anti-immigrant attitude rises only at the arrival of the migration inflows and disappears some period later. At the basis of such a dynamics there could be material concerns about the adjustment costs of the new population or some prejudices, both denoting an "hate at first sight effect". To measure this potential mechanism we use an approach based on the standard network instrument which robustly supports our hypothesis. With regard to the analysis on the labour market, neglecting the reaction of investments to an increase in the labour supply can lead to some mislead- ing policy conclusions. Our contribution to the literature is to explicitly looking at the labour demand side of the market. Furthermore, contrary to the existing studies, the data that we use allow us to conduct the analysis at the firm level. We then avoid the bias that originates from the heterogene- ity of production units within industries. The data refer to an important case-study such that of Italy. Although it is only a landing country for most migrants, inflows increased tremendously from 2007, deserving a specific at- tention from academics. The result of the empirical analysis – conducted by means of the network instrument – highlights that immigrant labour- force has been largely absorbed by the adoption of more labour-intensive technologies. The layout with which we present the different studies depicts the order of priorities that in our opinion policy makers should follow. From the very beginning of the refugee crisis the economic analysis has been used in order to find political answers. Public attitudes in favour of solidarity have been linked to the ability of the market in absorbing the population shock. In doing that few attention has been given to the potential effect of the phe- nomenon on the political stability and social cohesion. On the contrary, we expect that public actors would build a community around shared values and consequently design the policies to overcome the market failures

Second-generation adolescents’ competencies and the role of integration policies

Immigration into the OECD countries has seen a sharp increase since the middle of the 1980s, even if not at a constant rate. Integration policies are a fundamental tool to help the newly arrived to integrate and assimilate with the native population. While the literature on the immigrants’ integration level is very rich for settlement countries (USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and for the few European countries that have a long tradition of immigration (Germany, UK, France), very little is yet known about other European economies that have only recently become destination countries. Indeed, the availability of data has made difficult to carry out comparative analysis of the integration process of immigrants in most of the EU countries, particularly for the second-generation. This research wants to fill this gap, analysing the role of the socio-economic background in the educational outcome of immigrants. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the effect of the socio-economic background is more or less pronounced in different EU countries that adopt different integration policies and have different education systems. In this work, we concentrate on second-generation adolescents and compare their performances with that of native adolescents and with that of first generation adolescents. The chosen indicator is the score obtained in the 2012 PISA test by each student (native, first and second-generation immigrant) in reading. We compare the results obtained for each of the EU15 member states and for the settlement countries. The results, in line with the prevalent literature, show a strong impact of the socio-economic background on the immigrant adolescents’ performances. The effect is weaker in those countries where the integration policies concern disadvantaged children since an early age

Migration and Trade during the Belle Époque in Argentina (1870-1913)

Between 1870 to 1914 the Argentine economy performed spectacularly with a yearly average real growth rate of 5.94 per cent. Increased resource endowment in both land and labor, via migration, and openness to trade have been considered the two main drivers of this success. In this paper we underline the central role of Argentine immigration in contributing not only to increase resource endowments, but also to lower trade costs boosting exports and imports. By considering Argentine bilateral trade and migration from eight European countries (Austro-Hungarian Empire, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and United Kingdom) we use a migration-augmented gravity model to estimate the contribution of the massive in ows of Europeans. In particular, we nd that the main pro-trade e ect was on imports: an increase of 10 per cent of migrants from one country could increase imports up to 8 per cent from the same trade partner. To overcome the typical endogeneity problem our study proposes migration to the US from the same countries as a instruments that could capture the same push (but not Argentine pull) factors triggering European out-migration

Le ragioni dell’ostilità verso l’immigrazione. Quale ruolo per il framing politico?

Eugenio Levi, Rama Dasi Mariani e Melissa Mongiardo, basandosi sul loro recente saggio, esaminano il problema dell’ostilità verso l’immigrazione e puntano l’attenzione sul modo in cui i politici hanno raccontato il fenomeno migratorio, influenzandone la percezione. I risultati che presentano, suggeriscono che nella scena pubblica attuale ha assunto particolare rilevanza una narrativa basata sulla contrapposizione “noi vs loro”, alimentata dalla mancata integrazione degli immigrati, dalla generale sfiducia verso i politici e dal senso di insicurezza delle persone

Seconda generazione nei paesi di nuova e vecchia immigrazione: integrazione scolastica e capital socio economico della famiglia d’origine

La forte ondata migratoria, che ha interessato molte economie dell’Europa occidentale a partire dalla fine del secolo scorso, ha posto numerosi paesi di destinazione, fino ad allora caratterizzati da tassi positivi di emigrazione, di fronte a nuove sfide per l’integrazione degli immigrati. Molti sono gli studi svolti sul processo di integrazione economica e sociale degli immigrati nei paesi storicamente di accoglienza, come gli Stati Uniti, il Canada e il Regno Unito, mentre, anche a causa della scarsità dei dati, relativamente pochi sono gli studi svolti per i paesi di nuova immigrazione, tra cui spiccano l’Italia, la Spagna, il Portogallo e l’Irlanda. In questo lavoro si vuole colmare in parte tale lacuna analizzando il grado di integrazione degli adolescenti di seconda generazione nei paesi EU15 e in quelli OCSE di vecchia immigrazione e confrontando i loro risultati con quelli relativi agli adolescenti nativi e di prima generazione. Questo lavoro allarga le conoscenze rispetto alla letteratura corrente sui paesi europei soprattutto grazie alla più ampia area geografica posta a confronto, ma anche per il database impiegato. Infatti, sono stati utilizzati i risultati dei test PISA 2009 che, sebbene siano già stati sfruttati per studi simili, non sono mai stati utilizzati per un’analisi comparativa tra tutti i paesi EU15. Nello studio si è voluto verificare il ruolo che il capitale socio-economico delle famiglie d’origine ha nel processo di integrazione. I risultati ottenuti, in linea con gran parte della letteratura, mostrano che, seppure con diverse sfumature, il ruolo del background familiare è in grado di influenzare il processo di integrazione degli adolescenti attraverso vari canali

The impact of immigration on the domestic labor market. A review of the literature

According to the 1951 Geneva Convention “the term "refugee" shall apply to any person who [...] owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality [...]”. In 2015 there were about 21 millions refugees all over the world, meaning that at least 21 millions forced migrants lived in a country different of that of birth. These figures are the highest from the Second World War and the European refugee crisis is drawing large attention from all the social sciences. Economics is giving new insight to the current situation, as witnessed by the increasing literature on the effect of refugees and immigrants on welfare and on political preferences. Furthermore, economics can give its contribution by analyzing and explaining the reaction of the market to this shock. Indeed, the economic literature has been giving attention to the effects of immigration on the receiving country from long time, motivated by the great importance that the phenomenon has always had for the American society. Among others, most of the studies have concerned with the impacts of immigration on the economic growth, on the international trade and on the domestic labor market. Regarding this last point, the main concern of labor economists has been the effects of immigrant workers on the labor market outcomes of natives, especially on wages. Clearly the answer to the question “Do immigrants worsen the labor market conditions of natives?” is not unique neither in theory nor in the data. We review here some seminal papers that in various ways have tried to answer to the previous question. As will be more clear in the following, these contributions can be split into three streams – the competition between natives and immigrants, the location decisions of natives, and the reaction of firms. Each of them deserves to be analyzed separately. Nonetheless, they are mutually related and their results contribute to draw a general framework within which we can understand the reaction of the domestic economy to a migration flow. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the early economic studies on the effect of immigration on native workers, which have started the ongoing debate. Section 3 analyzes researches that have measured the competition between immigrants and natives in the labor market. Section 4 and section 5 present respectively the empirical studies on the natives location decisions and on the firms reaction following a migration shock. Section 6 concludes

The labour demand response to supply shocks. The indirect effect of immigration

The economic literature is debating from long time on the identification of the impact of immigration on native wages and recent studies seem to validate the result of an average null effect. Nonetheless, the adjustment mechanisms of the labour market need to be further analysed. In particular, we want to study how firms respond to an increase in the foreign labour supply, focusing on the Italian case. We contribute to the ongoing debate by replicating the methodology of Dustmann and Glitz (2015) with RIL data – a firm-level panel dataset on Italian firms. The aim of the study is to measure to which extent the labour demand accommodates to a supply shock with an increase in the total production or with the adoption of more labour-intensive technologies. Our main result – obtained with an instrumental variable approach – shows that the second effect is dominant and greater than the one documented in previous studies for other countries. In line with the reference literature, the result holds in particular for the manufac- turing sector, while in sectors less-exposed to international competition we can suppose a greater effect on prices than on quantities