Poor Immigrants! Evidence from the Italian Case

Immigrants tend to be poorer than natives, both because of their precarious situation, previously in the country of origin and because of their unstable situation in the host country. Specific methods to measure the poverty of immigrants have not been suggested by the scholars yet therefore conventional equivalence scales are used to compare the levels of consumption expenditure of households of different sizes. In Italy the equivalence scale used since the Eighties has been the Carbonaro, which was calculated for the Italian population, based on 1981-1983 consumption data (the reference category is the consumption expenditure of a two-member family). When applied to immigrant households in order to estimate the poverty line, 40% of immigrants are included among the “poor” and as many as 21% are among the “poorest”. This result suggests that the method of estimation deserves at least to be discussed. In this study we intend to question the use of the Carbonaro equivalence scale to estimate the poverty level among immigrants. Based on preliminary results, although the incidence of poverty among immigrants remains fairly stable regardless of the scale adopted, some interesting differences emerge with reference to the qualitative characteristics of the “poor”. In particular, the poverty level of some sub-populations is under- or over-estimated according to the scale adopted. These results allow us to make some interesting remarks concerning the use of a conventional measure of poverty among migrants and to suggest some useful considerations for a possible review of this approach. The equivalence scale is calculated on the basis of the 2004-2012 ISMU Surveys on Migrants in the Lombardy Region. The incidence of poverty calculated using ISMU Surveys is compared with that obtained from the 2009 EU-SILC Italian Module on Foreign Population.