1 Are Foreign Migrants more Assimilated than Native Ones?

Preliminary version, work in progress, not to be quoted. The paper focuses on wage assimilation of male immigrants in the Italian labour market. Italy has a recent history of foreign immigration and a long history of internal immigration from the Southern regions to the North. The objective of the paper is to understand the pattern of assimilation of foreigners and of native immigrants to local natives. We use the administrative dataset on dependent employment, WHIP, which allows us to distinguish workers into three groups: foreigner workers, locals and native immigrants, a comparison not yet exploited. We estimate a fixed effect model of weekly wage of male 18-45 years old which controls for unobserved heterogeneity and introduced both macroeconomic controls and the dimension of the ethnic community of workers. Our results show that the three groups of workers are not very different, as it is expected in a country with a strong centralized bargaining. Native immigrants are always just a little below locals. Foreign workers have lower entrance wages than natives, but accumulation of both human capital and social capital contributes in reducing their wage gap. The sector and regional economic growth affect positively all workers, while the unemployment rate has a negative effect only on the locals wage, the one who do not mouve. The dimension of the migrant community in the destination labour market when significant plays a negative role, suggesting a supply effect in a segmented labour market. When to better control the economic cycle, we take all the workers entered in the labour market in the same year 1990, we have similar results: the foreigners never reach the native immigrants and locals. What thus emerges is that language and knowledge of the social capital matter in the assimilatio