Suchergebnisse

"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.

In questo Focus, Giuseppe De Arcangelis e Rama Dasi Mariani riflettono sulle ragioni del consenso verso le politiche protezionistiche che si stanno diffondendo a livello mondiale. Dopo aver ricostruito il dibattito sugli effetti dell'apertura commerciale, evidenziandone i benefici attesi in termini di efficienza e l'impatto sulla distribuzione del reddito, essi sostengono che questo impatto insieme alla limitazione della sovranità nazionale indotta da alcuni accordi commerciali, sembra essere la principale causa della crescente ostilità verso l'apertura delle frontiere a merci e servizi.

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.

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.

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the causal effect of immigrant presence on anti-immigrant votes is a short-run effect. For this purpose, we consider a distributed lag model and adapt the standard instrumental variable approach proposed by Altonji and Card (1991) to a dynamic framework. The evidence from our case study, votes for the UK Independent Party (Ukip) in recent European elections, supports our hypothesis. Furthermore, we find that this effect is robust to differences across areas in terms of population density and socioeconomic characteristics, and it is only partly explained by integration issues.

Il saggio, frutto del Premio di ricerca "Fondazione Giuseppe Di Vagno 2017", indaga con approccio interdisciplinare le molteplici ragioni per cui si può essere ostili nei confronti dell'immigrazione. La lente d'osservazione del fenomeno è il modo in cui i partiti politici e l'informazione affrontano il tema immigrazione, ossia il suo framing, e come questo influisce sulla percezione delle persone. Ne emerge un quadro sfaccettato, in cui, a fronte di una politica deresponsabilizzata che ad oggi ha fallito l'obbiettivo dell'integrazione scolastica e lavorativa degli immigrati, acquista particolare rilevanza un frame "noi vs. loro" proposto dalle forze politiche anti-immigrazione, nutrito in gran parte dalla sfiducia verso i politici e verso l'Unione Europea e dal senso di insicurezza delle persone.

Giuseppe De Arcangelis, Rama Dasi Mariani e Elena Rossi-Espagnet ripercorrono le vicende della guerra del Donbass iniziata nel 2014 tra Ucraina e Russia e analizzano gli effetti economici delle sanzioni commerciali che l'Unione Europea impose alla Russia. Sull'efficacia delle limitazioni alle esportazioni verso la Russia, ad oggi ancora applicate, si è aperto un acceso dibattito a livello europeo, poiché in molti sostengono che le sanzioni impongono un costo economico solamente agli Stati Membri dell'Unione. De Arcangelis, Mariani e Rossi-Espagnet focalizzano lo studio su Francia, Germania e Italia e le loro conclusioni testimoniano un effettivo calo delle esportazioni verso la Russia, ma solamente come conseguenza della concomitante crisi economica russa.