This article aims at analysing the trajectories of immigrants in the Italian labour market, focusing on yearly transitions from unemployment to employment and vice versa. Regression models show that, controlling for age, educational attainment and region, immigrant workers lose their jobs more often than natives but, once being unemployed they have more probabilities of finding a job than natives. As the probabilities of both transitions can be affected by characteristics of the initial status as well, the two transitions have been analysed separately. For the risk of losing a job, the segregation of immigrants in the secondary labour market seems to be the main reason of their penalization, but also the main reason of their advantage in job seeking, since their unemployment spells are shorter than those of natives, although at the cost of accepting worse working conditions. Analyses are based on the yearly transition matrices of Italian Labour Force Surveys, from 2005 to 2008.

Cross-sectional literature has shown that in Switzerland as elsewhere immigrants are more penalized than the native-born population both considering the unemployment risk and their position in the employment structure. Using a longitudinal framework, the present article focuses on a comparison between male immigrants and natives in the Swiss labour market, analysing two risks: the risk of unemployment and the risk of entrapment in unskilled occupations. In the first part of the article, using a dynamic random effect models, we show that immigrants present less state dependence than natives considering both unemployment and the risk of entrapment in unskilled positions. In the second part, using Heckman selection models, we show that less state dependence of immigrants corresponds to a higher mobility towards the skilled working class that is limited to the secondary labour market. We explain these differences with the interplay of Swiss labour market characteristics, in particular, the need for high flexibility and the positive selection of immigrants whose access to the Swiss labour market is generally realized through the bottom of employment structure.

Detecting communities in complex networks accurately is a prime challenge, preceding further
analyses of network characteristics and dynamics. Until now, community detection took into account
only positively valued links, while many actual networks also feature negative links. We extend an
existing (spin glass) approach to incorporate negative links as well, resulting in a method similar to
the clustering of signed graphs, but more accurate and more general. To illustrate our method, we
applied it to a network of international alliances and disputes. Using data from 1993{2001, it turns
out that the world can be divided into six power blocs similar to Huntington’s civilizations, with
some notable exceptions.

This article aims to contribute to the understanding of the conditions under which the social capital from strong ties impacts on the first decision of internal migration. The existent literature assumes three different mechanisms: (a) ties to relatives are locationspecific assets which deter migration over time; (b) relatives can be regarded as financial resources which have a positive impact on individual migration at young ages, independently of their location of residence; © spurious association due to selectivity of migrants. We analyze these hypotheses studying different dimensions of ties to relatives and applying hazard models to a large data set for West-Germany (i.e. GSOEP). Following residence careers since age 15 we are able to identify a significant negative effect of the size of ties to relatives, which may be associated to value orientations of attachment to community. To live further away from ties exert a higher propensity towards migration, which grows when we control for regional heterogeneity, meaning that less dispersed ties to relatives may be found in settlements with higher migration propensity, like some rural areas with less economic opportunities. Living near parents and siblings impact negatively on migration, but parent’s resources have a positive effect. Last, we also find that the individuals with lower labor market opportunities are more likely to stay constrained by the social capital embedded in the location of residence. To sum up, ties to relatives affect importantly migration propensities, which imply that future trends in family relationships are likely to change migration patterns.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate what role networks play when it comes to differences between Swedish men and women in their access to social support. I use data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey from 2000, which contains information about a number of concrete situations where respondents are asked to judge if, when needed, they can muster practical, emotional and material help. Using information about the size and composition of individuals’ networks, it is found that having larger and heterogeneous networks increase the likelihood of receiving social support. Swedish women are found to have greater access to social support although they have smaller and more homogeneous networks on average. The study complement case studies with survey-based network measures and analyze the extent to which important compositional characteristics of networks increase our understanding of gender differences in welfare outcomes.

This article looks at the impact of citizenship acquisition on the labour market position of immigrants in Belgium. Citizenship is open to all immigrants with a sufficient period of legal residence, without any language or integration requirements. In that respect, this study is an important complement to existing studies which have mostly focused on countries with strict acquisition rules. Based on Labour Force Survey data for 2008, this study uses probit regression to estimate the static and dynamic employment probabilities and unemployment risks. We find that citizenship acquisition is associated with better labour market outcomes for non-Western immigrants in general. This effect remains after controlling for years of residence since migration, indicating the existence of a citizenship premium in Belgium.

Many studies have demonstrated a disadvantageous position for children of Turkish immigrants in the German educational system. This paper analyses whether an intergenerational assimilation process can be detected regarding the cognitive skills and German language skills of young children of Turkish origin in Germany. A ‘forms-of-capital’ model is applied that assumes that the families’ endowment with various sorts of capital strongly affects the next generation’s skill development and educational attainment. A detailed differentiation of children’s generational status is used including second and third generation immigrant children as well as the 2.5 generation and children of intermarriages with natives. The data of the project ‘Preschool Education and Educational Careers among Migrant Children’ show large differences between native German children and all groups of migrant children with regard to German language skills. Also substantial differences with regard to cognitive skills are found for all children of Turkish origin except for those with one native German parent. Second and third generation children do not differ from each other on both tests while especially children with a first generation mother and a second generation father score worse than all other groups. All differences between the generational groups (including the difference to the Germans) regarding children’s cognitive skills can be explained by the families socioeconomic status and educational resources while significant generational differences remain regarding children’s German language skills. This latter skill is very specific for the receiving society and all remaining generational differences within the sample of Turkish children can be accounted for by the parents’ endowment with receiving country specific resources (e.g., parental German language proficiency). The results contradict the notion of a straight-line assimilation of Turkish immigrants in Germany.

The gap between unemployment rate of immigrants and that of natives varies across West European countries. This article aims at explaining these differences by taking into account economic and institutional characteristics of labour markets and by adopting a dynamic perspective, that is, disentangling the risk of being unemployed into two different risks: that of entering unemployment and that of remaining in long-term unemployment. From the analyses of yearly transitions to/from unemployment, less immigrant penalization results in those countries where the employment protection legislation is stricter, the labour demand is more biased towards low skilled jobs and the welfare state is less generous for the unemployed. Furthermore, the article summarizes the main results of five country studies also focused on labour market transitions of immigrants and natives.

In sociology, the appropriateness of national approaches for understanding social
inequality in today’s societies is being increasingly questioned, and EU-wide ap-
proaches are advocated instead. In this paper, we link the growing debate about
national or EU-wide approaches to reference group theory, investigating whether
comparisons with foreign countries influence levels of individual life satisfaction.
Our results indicate that, on the one hand, more people can be assumed to have
a national frame of reference than a broader international one; on the other hand,
among those who do have an idea of how average people in other countries live,
cross-border comparisons certainly influence people’s satisfaction with life. Upward
comparisons in particular are important: The more people feel personally deprived,
relative to other countries, the less satisfied they are with their lives. In contrast,
the feeling of relative gratification has a much smaller impact on life satisfaction,
and often no impact at all. This leads us to conclude that EU-wide approaches to in-
equality do make sense, but that there is also no need to jettison national approaches
completely.

Earlier studies disagree over whether differences in the human capital configuration or employer discrimination explain second-generation migrants’ disadvantages when entering German labor markets. While the human capital explanation has been tested extensively, less convincing research explores employer discrimination. Furthermore, past research understood the successful completion of a vocational education as part of the human capital configuration and identified it as the major predictor of a successful transition into the labor market. This disregards, however, that for the most part companies are the providers of access to vocational education in Germany, and hence discrimination may occur when companies make their enrollment decisions for these programs. Importantly, this suggests investigating an earlier time point in the process when discrimination may occur than previous studies have considered. Therefore, using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel Study, we analyze the transition from secondary school into the labor market in two steps: first, the transition into vocational education, and second into employment. The GSOEP allows a comprehensive specification of human capital and testing of corollary hypotheses derived from statistical discrimination and taste discrimination.
Using discrete event history models for access to and completion of vocational education programs we find significant and substantial ethnic residuals especially for young Turkish men, even when controlling for receiving country specific capital. This raises serious doubts in specifying vocational education as part of human capital. For the second part of the process, the actual transition into regular employment, we use hybrid estimation modeling. This allows the simultaneous estimation of fixed and random effects, i.e. the estimation of the full set of theoretically relevant predictors. Human capital, including receiving country specific resources, such as German language abilities or the ethnic composition of networks, does not fully explain the ethnic penalties young males with Turkish migration background experience. Finally, interaction models show that a completed vocational education pays off less for Turkish as compared to Germans, again the effect is pronounced for Turkish men. The latter finding is direct evidence for statistical discrimination. Regarding taste discrimination we find no evidence, although, this is conducted through an indirect test. In conclusion, the inclusive human capital measures available in the GSOEP do not fully explain Turkish second-generation migrants’ disadvantages; partly it can be attributed to statistical discrimination.

This study examines employment access, class attainment, and earnings among native-born and first-generation immigrants in Denmark using Danish administrative data from 2002. Results suggest large gaps in employment access between native-born Danes and immigrants, as well as among immigrant groups by country of origin and time of arrival. Non-Western immigrants and those arriving after 1984 are at a particular disadvantage compared to other immigrants, a finding not explained by education differences. Immigrants are more likely to be employed in unskilled manual jobs and less likely to be employed in professional and intermediate-level positions than native-born Danes, although the likelihood of obtaining higher-level positions increases as immigrants’ time in Denmark lengthens. Class attainment and accumulated work experience explain a significant portion of native-immigrant gaps in earnings, but work experience reduces native-immigrant gaps in class attainment for lower-level positions only. The Danish “flexicurity” model and its implications for immigrants living in Denmark are discussed.

Over the past two decades, all European societies have experienced continued and increasing migrations, albeit with very different intensities and characteristics. Our focus is on new immigrants — those who have come from abroad in the past 15 years — in both old and new receiving West European countries. Comparative analyses on this issue are rather weak as the literature on immigrant integration in the labour market is well-established in the old receiving countries, but is just beginning to be developed in the newer receiving ones. The article aims at introducing the articles collected in this special issue, which present the results of a research project that concerns six European countries — Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. Our focus is on inequalities between immigrants and natives with respect to the risk of unemployment and to the access to highly qualified occupations. After having highlighted similarities and differences across those countries, we tried to draw some general conclusions concerning the main factors that may have shaped new immigrants’ incorporation into West European labour markets. In particular, the role played by the nature of immigration and by the labour demand seems to be crucial.

The article analyses the incorporation of immigrants into the Italian labour market and the difficulties they encounter in accessing both employment and qualified occupations. The analysis is based on the Italian Labour Force Survey and highlights the fact that the great majority of immigrants entering Italy are hardly disadvantaged in comparison to Italians as regards the risk of unemployment, but, in contrast, they are highly disfavoured as regards the socio-professional status of their jobs. Unlike what would happen with the old European immigration, nowadays the segregation of immigrant workers in the lowest ranks of the occupational ladder is not due to their poor education. On the contrary, their disadvantage increases if educational attainment is taken into account. The leading role of low-skilled labour demand and underground economy in shaping immigrants’ integration in the Italian labour market is confirmed by the fact that they have fairly easy access to unskilled and semi-skilled manual jobs, whereas they experience serious difficulties in entering self-employment and in obtaining non-manual jobs.

This paper examines the labour market integration of immigrants who have entered Germany since 1990, and compares their situation with that of their predecessors. The analyses based on the cumulative micro-census data reveal that recent immigrants into Germany are on average better-educated than their earlier counterparts, and some ethnic groups are even better- educated than the national average. Despite their high levels of formal education, these immigrants coming mostly from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East face severe integration problems in the German labour market. Thus, after taking into account the value of human capital represented by these immigrants, their ethnic disadvantages appear to increase. This stands in sharp contrast with the disadvantages faced by “classic” immigrants who arrived in Germany during the 1960s and 1970s, for whom lack of human capital had been identified as the main obstacle to labour market integration.

Background Previous studies have shown that causes of death differ in their relationship with social class, but we lack a more comprehensive description of this variation. The present study provides a detailed and extensive list of social class differences for a large number of specific causes of death.
Methods Swedish population data on all deaths between 1991 and 2003 were linked with census information on household social class from 1990. Relative death risks in groups of causes according to European Shortlist were estimated separately for men and women in eight classes using Cox Regression. In total 2,924,617 persons in the age range 30-59 in 1990 and 129,694 deaths were included in the analyses.
Results A clear mortality gradient among employees was found for the majority of the causes, from low relative death risks among higher managerial and professional occupations to relatively high risks for the unskilled working class. However, there is considerable variation in the strength of the association, from causes such as malignant melanoma, breast cancer and transport accidents among women, where no clear class differences were found. At the other extreme, mental and behavioural disorders, endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases and diseases of the respiratory system all show steep slopes for both men and women in comparison with the total mortality gradient. Excess mortality in cardiovascular disease or cancer – the number of deaths over that which would occur if all classes had the same death rate as the highest class –accounts for around 20% off all deaths among men and and around 15 percent among women.
Conclusions Exceptions to the general pattern – i.e., causes of death in which higher social classes are exposed to greater death risks or in which there is no mortality gradient – are practically non-existent. There is nevertheless a significant variation in the strength of the class differences in specific causes. In research on the social mechanisms of health inequality, this variation needs to be taken into consideration.
Key words: Mortality, social class, cause of death, socioeconomic differences.

This paper analyses the relationship between unexplained
racial/ethnic unemployment and wage differentials and the segregation of social networks,
as measured by inbreeding homophily.
Our analysis is based on both U.S. and Estonian surveys, supplemented
with Estonian telephone communication data. In the case of Estonia we consider the regional
variation in economic performance of the Russian minority, and in the U.S. case we consider the regional
variation in black-white differentials.
Our analysis finds a strong relationship between the size of the differential and network segregation: regions with more
segregated social networks exhibit larger unexplained wage and unemployment differential.

This book introduces social networks to a general audience, from novices in all kinds of fields to experts wanting to catch up, and from academics on the one hand to practitioners in consultancy, management, policy, and social work on the other hand. Sophisticated models are lucidly explained and comprehensible without math (which is put in boxes, footnotes, or references), and are illustrated with network diagrams and examples ranging from anthropology to organizational sociology. A free and easy to use software tool – R’s igraph package – is explained in the final chapter so readers themselves can depict and analyze networks of interest to them. It includes a Graphical User Interface (see brief manual) that can perform a limited subset of igraph’s options in a simple and user friendly way.

Abstract
Cultural resources are central strategic means for families to promote their children’s school success. Cultural resources become particularly relevant in micro-interactional processes between parents and their children as well as between parents and school agents in order to ensure the child’s success. Two mediating ways that possibly affect children’s school carrier are of analytical interest here: first, via frequent and qualitatively high contact between parents and school agents, and second, via regular school related exchange between parents and their child (Coleman, 1988). Parents’ motivation and initiative are potential ‘soft’ factors of success that, as one piece of the puzzle, might contribute to the explanation of systematic ethnic differences in the educational outcome (Lareau & Weininger, 2003). Migration is predominantly believed to at least in part devaluate innate resources (e.g., strategic knowledge or skills) of migrants which at the same time lack resources specific to the receiving country (Esser 2006, Kalter 2003). In contrast, ‘soft’ factors such as educational motivation and engagement are rather context independent resources that might have a positive impact on academic achievements. Educational aspirations of certain migrant groups are known to be remarkably high (Kao & Tienda 1995). For school agents, these factors might as well be a signal of high educational motivation in the migrant family. Consequently, the following assumption can be made: If interactions of parents, both with the child and with school agents, are characterized by high educational interest and school involvement, the probability of a favourable positioning in the educational system increases when controlling for achievement test scores. This article investigates types of exchange that can enhance children’s achievements and favour teachers’ recommendation for the transition to the secondary school level; in Germany, this early transition is quite decisive for child’s entire educational carrier. Furthermore, this article looks at differences between migrant groups in Germany and asks whether these ‘soft’ factors account for varying positioning of the respective groups in the educational system.
The analysis are conducted using longitudinal data from the project Immigrants’ Children in the German and Israeli Educational Systems (n=3014). The groups of interest are Ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union and the offspring of immigrants from Turkey compared to natives who attend grade four in the German educational system, which is right before the transition to the secondary school system. The dependent variables are competence levels and teachers’ recommendation; explaining variables are quality and quantity of parents’ contact with school agents and their involvement in the child’s school issues.

In many analyses of social inequality in health, different dimensions of social stratification have been used more or less interchangeably as measures of the individual’s general social standing. This procedure, however, has been questioned in previous studies, most of them comparing education, class and/or income. In the present article, the importance of education and income as well as two aspects of occupation – class and status – are examined. The results are based on register data and refer to all Swedish employees in the age range 35-59 years. There are clear gradients in total death risk for all socioeconomic factors except for income from work among women. The size of the independent effects of education, class, status and income differ between men and women. For both sexes, there are clear net associations between education and mortality. Class and income show independent effects on mortality only for men and status shows an independent effect only for women. While different stratification dimensions – education, social class, income, status – all can be used to show a “social gradient” with mortality, each of them seems to have a specific effect in addition to the general effect related to the stratification of society for either men or women.

The theoretical model of The Distinction is a basic reference in the sociology of lifestyles (Bourdieu, 1979). This model is fundamentally structured by two concepts, structural homology and habitus. Habitus are cultural structures that exist in people’s bodies and minds and shape a wide variety of their behaviours, beliefs and thoughts. Structural homology is the assumption that social class structure is linked to the structure of aesthetic preferences through a one-to-one correspondence, an isomorphic relation. People’s tastes are seen as channelled by their position within the class structure, which is defined by their volume of capital and its “composition” and are organised in line with a “highbrow/lowbrow” opposition. Here, we will focus on the structural homology aspect and limit ourselves to analysing to what extent it is possible to univocally relate kinds of activities the French do with their social positions. We shall empirically examine the principles of organisation of the activities, just as they were described throughout a survey on cultural and sports practices of the French, and then evaluate to what extent a structural homology between practices and social positions is still observable.

This article provides an analysis of employment and occupational attainment of recent immigrants to Spain. We use data from the Spanish labour force surveys for the years between 2002 and 2007 and compare the probability of being active versus inactive and that of being employed versus unemployed among immigrants and native-born Spaniards, using logistic regression models. The paper then moves on to investigate the quality of the occupation achieved by means of multinomial logistic regression models. We find evidence that immigrants are not at a disadvantage in comparison to native-born Spaniards regarding the risk of unemployment. This is true even after controlling for differences in socio-demographic characteristics between immigrants and Spaniards and, in particular, after accounting for the duration of time spent in the labour market. On the other hand, a strong and persistent disadvantage even after controlling for socio-demographic characteristics is confirmed for immigrants as far as their access to skilled occupations is concerned. Furthermore, this disadvantage does not disappear as time spent in the host country increases. Our findings, thus, go against the assimilation hypothesis that predicts that immigrant’s occupational attainment should progressively converge to that of natives.

This study contributes to earlier studies aimed at the question of whether the welfare state
crowds out social capital or not by examining to what extent the welfare state affects the
value of social capital. This article investigates the effects of three sources of social capital
on occupational prestige and tests whether these effects are moderated by welfare state
effort in terms of social spending. Multi-level analyses based on European Social Survey
(ESS) 2002/03 and International Monetary Fund (IMF) data, including 39,299 people from
24 European countries, provides evidence that welfare state effort decreases the value
of social capital.

This article attempts to answer the question to what extent recent reforms aimed at flexibilizing the German labour market affected immigrants and how this explains the (in)stability of their employment paths. Based on the 1996–1999 and 2001–2004 German micro-census panels, we focus not only on transitions from employment to unemployment and vice versa, but also on the type of employment, either open-ended or fixed-term. Dynamic random effects models explore the effects of the employment status in the preceding year on the employment status in the subsequent one for various groups of immigrants. Results confirm the more precarious nature of immigrant employment with a more frequent mobility in and out of unemployment, a more pronounced incidence of fixed-term employment and a higher instability of open-ended jobs.

The children of mixed couples – defined here as the persons whose parents were born in different countries, one of them being France, and had a different nationality at birth one from each other – were culturally integrated in France, if we suppose that they were schooled in a French school. But, this “cultural integration” does not have for direct consequence their "structural integration " , that is their success at school. It is true that mixed children are from families of social categories superior to those of the mononational families of their group of origin. But, the analysis of the survey "Histoires de vie. Construction des identités " (INED, INSEE, 2003) tends to show that mixed children do not attend university in the same numbers as individuals who were born in France and whose parents were born in the same foreign country, ceteris paribus. So, if we control for two variables, the age of the investigated and the social category of the father of this one, we notice that descendants of immigrants are more successful than people having two French parents, Foreigners and Mixed individuals, which is significant. The question is then how to explain this phenomenon. A first hypothesis would be that mixed couple parents invest less in their child’s schooling than foreign parents. Previous research indeed have shown that, ceteris paribus, the descendants of immigrants are more successful in their studies than French people, which can be explained by the immigrant family’s hope that they might gain social ascent through their child’s success at school . A second hypothesis would be that some Mixed, the Half-bloods, are victims of discrimination because of their mixed parentage . The third hypothesis would be that some mixed couples are “cacogamous” , marginalized because of their mixed union with regard to their communities of origin. Their children would thus make fewer bonds within their communities than the descendants of immigrants .

It has been suggested that new interventions, as the time goes by, may
initially increase socioeconomic inequalities to decrease afterwards, the so called
inverse equity hypothesis. The dynamics of trends in inequalities is not well
understood yet. Our objective was to describe and explore trends in
socioeconomic gaps in oral health in Brazil and Sweden. This study is a time trend
analysis of cross-sectional studies designed to assess the prevalence of oral
health and other population characteristics. In Sweden we have data available for
the years 1968, 1974, 1981, 1991 and 2000. In Brazil data was available for 1986
and 2002. Trends in complete or partial edentulism are shown, as well as trends
in no missing/good teeth. There was on average an annual decline in absolute
disparities of 0.5% (95% CI= 0.1-0.8) in Brazil and 0.7% (95% CI= 0.5-0.9) in
Sweden. Results concerning no missing teeth (Brazil) / teeth in good conditions
(Sweden) were mixed. In Brazil the absolute and relative disparities in the
prevalence of no missing teeth has increased, while in Sweden there was a
statistically non significant decrease in disparities in the prevalence of those with
teeth in good conditions. At least, since 1991 in Sweden and 2002 in Brazil, we
found that, in the age group of 35-44, there are no significant socioeconomic
disparities in edentulism either in absolute or relative terms. However, lower
socioeconomic groups have not reached the same level of oral health as richer
groups. This dynamics may suggest that, when major improvements in edentulism
started in the lower economic groups, the majority of people in the richer groups
had already improved their oral health and reached good oral health first.

We ask how the advantages and disadvantages of ‘second-generation’ immigrants’ educational careers in Sweden are produced, making a theoretical distinction between mechanisms connected with school performance on one hand, and educational choice on the other. Using a new data-set, covering six full cohorts of Swedish-born 9th-graders in 1998-2003 (n=563,087), with matched school-Census information, we show that the grades of children to immigrants generally lie 0.2–0.4 standard deviations below children of natives. In addition, they more often have incomplete grades in core subjects, which force a sizeable proportion – 10-20 percent among the ‘new’ (mostly non-European) second generation – into non-meritorious tracks or lead them to leave school. Given grades, pupils of immigrant origin make much more heterogeneous choices at upper secondary education. While many do not enrol in upper secondary education, among those who do the propensity is high that they choose academic studies before vocational, while the ‘old’ (chiefly Nordic) are similar to the majority group in their equal preference for vocational and academic tracks. All in all, relatively poor academic performance and high-aspiring choices combine to make second generation immigrants a polarized group.

This paper compiles the results of international compartive research on well-being and the correlation between well-being and social inequality. It is a draft version of an entry for the Handbook “European Societies” edited by Immerfall and Therborn. Some of the more important findings are: European countries differ widley in their living conditions. Dimensions of social inequality are important for peoples subjective evaluation of their living conditions. Materialistic dimensions of social inequality seem to be of smaller importance in richer countries.

The study of integration processes, specifically focusing on the educational field, has reached a
crucial stage with the emergence of the second generation. Also in a recent immigration country as
Italy, knowledge of the strategic importance of schools facing immigration and the shaping of Italy
as a multiethnic society has been gained. In this paper, I will present the main findings of
qualitative research (5 focus group with teachers and 30 in depth interviews with migrant pupils,
16-24 years old) held in Turin (Italy) on the integration of migrant youth and both their education
and job possibilities. Turin is characterized by a high rate of migrant pupils at school, by a huge
number of measures promoting their school enrolment and supporting their school attendance and a
lack of policies for their integration in the labour market.
The goals of the research were two: 1) to outline the current schooling situation of migrant students;
2) to identify, using some indicators, the best practices for solving key issues emerging in the
national (and international debate) on migrant school – and subsequent labour market – integration:
lack of language proficiency, differences in school curricula, difficulties in school-parent
relationships, teaching of languages of origin.
The main findings of the research regard 1) the design specific sub policies (sub practices) aimed at
the different immigrant groups; 2) care to better support foreign families and promote the
potentially crucial role they play in furthering their children’s education; 3) discrimination in access
to the labour market.