Ricerc@Sapienza

The labor market is a privileged sector of analysis and represents the place of confrontation between immigrants and Italian society; it is also the area in which the contradictory nature of migration policies (Italian and European) emerges.
In Italy the working dimension plays an important role in the formation of social inequalities. To tackle the relationship between immigrants and the labor market, it is first of all necessary to identify the social dynamics that regulate the management of foreign labor on the Italian territory. This is because some factors linked to the labor market have had, over the years, a strong weight in the formation of inequalities: this is the case of the dynamics of access to employment, grading, mobility and salary remuneration. Most of the foreign workers are employed in the lower segments of the labor market, in sectors with high accident risk and low pay. Foreigners are over-represented in jobs such as agricultural laborers, cleaners, domestic workers, general workers and construction workers. Their concentration in these areas is the result of a typical segmentation of the contemporary labor market. In particular with regard to the female foreign population, labor inequality involving immigrants is a systematic inequality and permeates the entire work experience of this segment of the population. Demographic changes therefore have important implications on economic and social issues, in particular, also on the pension systems. It is crucial the role of demographic equilibrium in the sustainability of a pay-as-you-go pension system, where the pensions are mostly paid from the current contributions by the active age groups. Immigrants must be thought as a resource for stabilizing the population distribution in order to achieve the sustainability of the pay-as-you-go pension system. We extended the classical Leslie population growth model (built for insects) to a control-theoretical model, appropriate for dynamic simulation of the demographic background of a human population referred to pension system, in order to think of different scenarios with the presence of immigrants. The present work, also on the basis of the modified Leslie model, aims to contribute to the national and international debate on sustainability by combining socio-economic and actuarial issues with the logic of immigration policy in Italy and in Europe in a historical context full of changes.