Poor Immigrants! Evidence from the Italian Case

Immigrants tend to be poorer than natives because of their precarious situation, previously in the country of origin and their unstable situation in the host country. Specific methods to measure the poverty of immigrants have not been suggested. 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 80’s has been the Carbonaro, based on the 1981-1983 consumption data. 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". In this study we intend to question the use of the Carbonaro equivalence scale to estimate the poverty level among immigrants. 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". The poverty level of some sub-populations is under- or over-estimated according to the scale adopted. 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