Abstract

The article investigates the connection between changes in the structure of labour demand and the processes of immigrants' occupational integration in Italy. Adopting a within-country comparative approach which focuses on the territorial differences characterizing the country is useful in order to explain important dynamics that would remain in the shadow in a national or cross-national perspective. The Centre-North and the South represent, in fact, two deeply heterogeneous institutional contexts if we consider the labour market performance, the productive structure, the informal mechanisms of regulation between demand and supply, the migratory dynamics, and the effects of the Great Recession. The paper highlights how, and to what extent, the changes in terms of productive structure, professional stratification, and working conditions are intertwined with the «globalization» of the Italian labour market and the transformation of the native supply in the Centre-North and in the South. Based on the LFS dataset provided by ISTAT (2005-2015), the empirical evidence shows the existence of common trends and important internal differentiation, confirming that the specificities of the Italian labour market in the international scenario are evident above all in the Mezzogiorno. During the Great Recession, in the southern regions the dynamics of the immigrant labour supply have strengthened the criticalities of the structure of labour demand, favoring the torsion towards the so-called "low way to the degrowth of the Italian labour market".