The class attainment and the career mobility of southern italians in northern Italy and in west Germany : a comparison between internal and international migrants

This paper studies the class attainment of a single group of migrants, the Southern Italians, to two destinations: Northern Italy and West Germany. It analyses whether the labour market trajectories vary among institutional contexts or follow the same integration pathway across different receiving societies. In doing so, this study expands the literature in two directions. On the one hand, it stresses the importance of macro-features of the host society for studying migrants' integration processes. On the other hand, it highlights similarities and differences between internal and international migration. The paper reports empirical analyses based on the Longitudinal Survey on Italian Households (ILHS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). The results show that the inclusion of Southern migrants, both internal and international, took place at lower levels of the class structure. The greater rigidity and the strong emphasis on vocational training of the German labour market pushed Southern migrants into the unskilled urban working class. In Northern Italy, by contrast, the possibility of entering the public sector facilitated their inclusion in the middle classes. Despite those differences, in both destinations, Southern migrants had fewer opportunities of upward social mobility than the native population.