Immigrants’ labour market outcomes in Italy and Spain: Has the Southern European model disrupted during the crisis?

The article explores the effects of the economic crisis on the common pattern of immigrants’ insertion into the labour market in Italy and Spain, new destination countries for migration flows only since the late 1980s and experiencing a very similar migration phenomenon. The pattern of immigrants’ insertion into the labour market in these two countries is distinctive because it combines a relatively poor risk of unemployment with a huge risk of segregation in low-skilled jobs, just the opposite of what occurs in many other Northern and Continental European countries. Differently from other studies looking at ethnic disadvantages and penalties in the labour market which often consider immigrants as a whole, in this article the differences among immigrants from Eastern Europe, North Africa and Latin America—the largest pools of immigrants in both countries—are considered. Results show that, in spite of the many similarities and the minor differences between the two countries, the crisis has differentiated the common and distinctive pattern, due to the different employment adjustments which has divergently affected immigrants’ labour market outcomes in Italy and Spain