Immigration in a Mediterranean Welfare State: The Italian Experience in Comparative Perspective

There is a large body of literature that explores the use of welfare programs by immigrants. It is often argued that welfare programs function as a magnet for flows of unwanted migration. Very little research, however, has been carried out regarding the other side of the coin: the ways in which international migration provides crucial resources for managing the relationships between households, labor markets and the state. Welfare regimes interact often with migration regimes. Using Italy as an empirical case, the paper argues that the Italian migratory system takes place within the context of a structural tension between the welfare system – largely designed according to a male breadwinner model – and the social consequences of women's rising labor participation rate. Such tension triggers specific migratory systems that supply foreign household workers participating in the labor market with statuses that escape the logic of Baumol's cost disease. It is argued that the same strain, and likely very similar solutions, can be found in other western European welfare regimes of a conservative type.