Labour Market Participation of Second-Generation Youth In Italy

As second-generation youth are just beginning to enter the labour market in Italy, there is a significant knowledge gap on their labour market outcomes. As regards participation, an important dimension of economic and social integration of youth, second generations might be affected by the same widespread discouragement experienced by youth with no migratory background, even worsened by a more difficult access to employment and/or discrimination. Conversely, they could develop a strong labour market attachment due to ethnic disadvantage in accessing higher education and/or different expectations and aspirations. Using the “decimal generations” framework to define second generations, the article explores the differences in the composition of youth with and with no migratory background by labour market status, focusing on being a student as a special condition of youth inactivity and on being active in the labour market. The analysis builds on the ISTAT Labour Force Survey that since 2021 has released information on the country of birth of the respondent’s parents thus allowing the identification of second generations both in the strict, i.e. the country-born children to at least one foreign-born parent, and extended sense, i.e. the foreign-born who arrived in Italy as children, while previous studies have mainly used respondents’ citizenship. Multivariate models are run to control for socio-demographic composition effects and results show that country-born second generations have outcomes similar to those of the youth with no migratory background. In contrast, the 'in-between' generations -the foreign-born who migrated as children or young adolescents- are less likely to be students but are more likely to be active in the labour market than youth with no migratory background. The analysis then highlights a clear-cut difference between the country-born and the foreign-born children of immigrants.